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Phantastes at 150!
October 28th 2008 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of George MacDonald’s landmark fantasy novel, Phantastes.
One afternoon in March 1916, the seventeen-year-old CS Lewis picked up a copy of Phantastes from a railway station bookstall. As he read the book that night he felt as though everything had changed, as though he had ‘crossed a great frontier’; as though his imagination had been ‘baptised’. For the rest of his life Lewis remained under the spell of this great Victorian novelist. Lewis was not alone in drawing inspiration from MacDonald. Others as diverse as Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, JRR Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton and W.H. Auden have also recorded their debt to him.
Now, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of its publication in 1858 Paternoster has produced the first ever annotated edition of the novel. Described by MacDonald as ‘a faerie romance for men and women’, Phantastes tells the tale of Anodos, a young man who one morning wakes up to find himself in the dreamlike world of faerie. Through this landscape he must travel, facing malevolent tree-spirits and fighting giants, dogged all the time by his shadow-self and eventually reaching a climactic act of valour, self-sacrifice and redemption. On his journey he is inspired by a mysterious white lady, befriended by knights, and given strength by the ‘old woman with the young eyes’.
Phantastes is a tale about selfishness and self-sacrifice, pride and humility, about the friendship and fear. Above all it is a novel about death – good death – death which is really the start of life.
Posted: October 17th, 2008
Author: Lee
Categories: CS Lewis, General Interest, JRR Tolkien
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