George MacDonald: Grandfather of Middle Earth?

Fantasy literature wasn’t even “a thing” until George MacDonald came along.

One of my favorite “browsing books” is C.S. Lewis’ Anthology: 365 Readings of George MacDonald writings.

I’ve also long believed that the fiction of George MacDonald is worthy.

Alas, I’ve never been able to “get into” his fiction.

A small collection of his books sit on my shelf: Phantases, Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin. The only thing of his I’ve read: “The Golden Key” short story, which is probably his most famous short story but still, just a short story.

A lot of it is no doubt the prose. It’s simply from a different era.

But part of it might be that MacDonald wrote like a 19th-century version of a psychedelic trip.

Indeed, that’s how it seemed to contemporary readers.

Timothy Larsen flushes all this out in this splendid essay: Why George MacDonald Matters.

“To this day, readers often find Phantastes to be a deeply strange novel. Nevertheless, we are steadied and orientated by all the fantasy literature that has grown out of it like realist novels suddenly animated by magic. We have Tolkien, but Tolkien only had…