(urth) George MacDonald and Peace -Phantastes?
David Stockhoff
dstockhoff at verizon.net
Sun Jan 5 18:32:42 PST 2014
Phantastes seems to fit Sorcerer's House in some ways too.
On 1/5/2014 8:44 PM, Marc Aramini wrote:
> I think you are right from the synopsis I just glanced at, ghost of
> the librarian as a raven, life, death, salvation, sleeping until the
> end of the world, finding true life in death ... Sounds about right.
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Jan 5, 2014, at 6:33 PM, "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <danldo at gmail.com
> <mailto:danldo at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>> I would think that the most obvious MacDonald conneciton would be
>> with LILITH.
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 11:09 AM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com
>> <mailto:marcaramini at yahoo.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Well, as we all know, Peace references Lang's Green Fairy Book,
>> Ludwig's biography of Napoleon, some of the fictional literature
>> mentioned in Lovecraft like the Cultes des Goules, the
>> Necronomicon, and Marvells of Science (Ambrose Bierce is involved
>> there, too). There is an additional mention of the tales of
>> George MacDonald near Lang's book, and even though I am thorough,
>> I wasn't about to read the collected works of MacDonald before
>> finishing my Peace write up. So the decision was to look over
>> the more famous work and see if anything resonated.
>>
>> Maybe Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women does just a
>> bit - it begins on the hero's 21st birthday when his room becomes
>> a natural wood and he crosses into Fairy Land, and he is warned
>> that the Ash Tree and the Alder Tree spirits seek to destroy him,
>> spirits which can leave their trees. Interestingly enough, the
>> Ash tree is in the Olive tree family, and the Alder Tree is
>> related to the elm. He finds a statue by Pygmalion which flees
>> from him, and eventually, he dies in fairy land to wake back up
>> into the real world, thinking that he had been there 21 years
>> when it was only 21 days. While birthdays, deaths, and living
>> statues are not necessarily anything unusual in fantasy, I felt
>> that perhaps there was some, at the very least, riffing on some
>> of these themes, what with the two trees in front of Mr. Tilly's
>> house, a man becoming a living statue, though these are not
>> precise linkages.
>>
>> The Princess and the Goblin didn't seem to fit too well
>> thematically, save for the old "who will the princess marry?"
>> connection - but that could be about half of all pre 20th century
>> literature.
>>
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>>
>>
>> --
>> Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
>
>
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