I’ve been lately enjoying George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. Many of the ideas in those books echo the thoughts in one of MacDonald’s other fantasy books, Phantastes. MacDonald’s characters are often on a journey of some sort which prompts all sorts of surprises and discoveries. There is nearly always some sort of tension between faith and unbelief, virtue and temptation, courage and fear, and MacDonald never fails to give me deep, life-changing prompts for my own journey. I’ll highlight just a few of these to keep this post from being a novel of its own.

The first example is that of unbelief, that progressive losing of the childlike mindset that sees wonder and potential and possibility all around.

Curdie is a miner boy whose stealthy spying on the goblins in The Princess and the Goblin uncovers a plot to kidnap the princess. But in the beginning of the sequel, The Princess and Curdie, he is losing his grip on true reality: