King of the Golden River

"King of the Golden River predates Phantastes . It’s a shorter book – you could argue it’s a novella – but it was a breakthrough for modern fantasy. This was the only piece of pure fiction Ruskin wrote. He tells many tales within his other writing, but he was challenged by a young girl to write this. It’s the traditional fairytale setup of two evil brothers and a young, good brother. They live in a very fertile valley, and the two older brothers insult a traveller who turns out to be one of the four winds. Dire consequences ensue, and there is environmental degradation as a result. The long and the short of it is, without giving too much away, the two older brothers go off to try to solve the problem, and both end up failing; and the younger brother succeeds – but how and why he succeeds is the crux of the story. Here are a lot of the typical fairytale tropes: the evil brothers, the good brother, and the fact that greed and a lack of care for others results in dire straits. It is the younger brother, the put-upon brother who is not self-centred and ego driven and greedy, who succeeds. But what’s really important, and makes King of the Golden River part of the history of fantasy, is that this is a written tale, not a collected tale. This was an era of collecting fables and fantasies – the Grimm brothers, Joseph Jacobs, Andrew Lang – people are collecting tales again, but that this is a written tale moves it into fantasy. It’s interesting today to see people like Naomi Novik or Shannon Hale who are pulling back in that intentional engagement with what we would think of as fairy tales. “John Ruskin’s King of the Golden River was a breakthrough for modern fantasy” We again see in this story some of the themes that we’ve talked about: the concern about modernisation and the loss of knowing who you are… but Ruskin is a writer who actually shapes all of our other writers; what he’s doing and what he’s writing shapes each of them. Ruskin is a passionate scientist and a passionate environmentalist, and passionate about art; he’s very involved in Medieval Revivalism; he was a very close friend of MacDonald’s. He’s friends with most of the others as well. For Ruskin as an early environmentalist, the natural environment is more valuable than gold in this story. At the beginning, the character doesn’t have the wisdom to see how important nature is – he wants gold rather than a healthy landscape – and the journey is a discovery that actually the most valuable thing is a beautiful, green, healthy, fertile land that we can engage with – both through healthy farming as well as leaving some land natural. And for the man who wrote ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century,’ this is really key. Winds and water are so important to the story, and Ruskin is very concerned about how even the winds are being impacted by the industrial pollution."