Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women

"Phantastes is often considered the first fantasy novel in English literature. This is the first novel by MacDonald, so he didn’t start his career in a typical genre. As a young man, MacDonald was already very concerned about the impact of the Industrial Revolution and the loss of story. His primary mentor and teacher was A. J. Scott: the big thrust in Scott’s teaching was that we need to find our stories again – and MacDonald took on that mantle. In fact, MacDonald himself became a literature teacher. He was one of the first literature teachers of women in tertiary education, and for forty years he was giving lectures on British literature, because he was trying to help re-story the British populace. And you see that in this text: this is a story about stories. Often people are quick to say that Phantastes is shaped by German Romanticism, or even Romanticism generally – and it is. But that’s just a tiny bit, one tiny thread. If you pay attention to the text, you’ll see that MacDonald is quoting from Jacobean drama, he’s quoting from Shakespeare, he’s quoting from the classics, he’s quoting from German texts and French texts and American texts… all different genres of literature. That ties back into the one of the important parts of the early shaping of fantasy: fantasy is in its very essence, I think, stories made of stories and stories shaped by stories. And for MacDonald this is really key. In this particular tale, MacDonald starts the story with a twenty-one year old called Anodos – which means ‘without a way’, or, ‘a way up.’ He’s on the cusp of adulthood, and he’s just about to take on the responsibility of his whole estate – so, responsibility for the land and for his orphaned sisters. He’s just finished university. And from the outset, we discover that he doesn’t know his own family story. He’s chastised for that right at the beginning by a faerie, who is his ancestress. He doesn’t know the facts of his own history, or fairy stories and literature. He’s zoomed through some books, but not paid much attention to them, so that even his little sister knows fairytales better than he does. But he has been caught up in this fervour for medievalism that is happening as MacDonald was writing this story – the idea that every sufficiently privileged young man should be a gentleman, chivalric, a knight. At the time MacDonald was writing, medievalism had become so popular so quickly that people were selling Excalibur stoves and Galahad soap. MacDonald was saying: Don’t cheapen our stories. Get to know them. Anodos enters fairyland saying, ‘I’m going to be a knight. I’m going to kill a dragon, I’m going to save a maiden. Great. This is my inheritance.’ And he very quickly discovers that actually he needs to be rescued again and again, because he hasn’t paid attention to the stories. Who is he rescued by? He’s rescued by women – old women, young women – and he’s rescued by people who do not have the education or status that he thinks is required to be a gentleman. He quickly learns that actually, being a knight is not about this imperialistic notion of what it means to be English and gentlemanly and chivalric; but rather the true definition, the true Old English word cnight (which has Germanic roots), means ‘one who serves.’ He has to learn to serve others, to learn from others, and that’s how one becomes a true knight. MacDonald’s really intentional with the title. It’s not just Phantastes – it’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance For Men and Women . So again, this story is not merely an expression of the modern genre of Romanticism, it’s a faerie romance: MacDonald’s pulling us back right from the very beginning: remember the old tales, the medieval tales, the ancient tales that have shaped us. And it’s for ‘men and women’. (MacDonald raised some very feisty daughters, and was a suffragist from the beginning.) Anodos has to learn to listen to the stories, to know the stories well, to learn from others and to serve others. And this is the ‘first novel’ of modern fantasy. Yes! That’s what’s so I find so fascinating with the Medieval Revival. All these medievalists were also out teaching in the working men’s colleges and the women’s colleges; they were working in social housing and labour laws. Those are the same people, which is so interesting! I’m very excited and humbled to be a part of this project. I wrote the introduction and the biography at the end. Steven Hesselman, the artist, spent seven years working on the art. What is incredible that Hesselman has used the entire original text, with the exception of ‘he said’ and ‘she said’. I’m really excited about the medium of a graphic novel that doesn’t reduce the text, but actually serves the text – and how Hesselman’s choice to do this has made a Victorian fairytale accessible to people of all ages again, in an era where we’re not used to reading that language. I know of seven year olds, nine year olds, twenty year olds, seventy year olds who zoom through this – and some of them have said to me, ‘I think I could now read the real version.’ And I say, ‘You have read the real version! The pictures just helped you hear the text better!’ The Golden Key is a very important tale in itself. Many key people in the history of fantasy – like Tolkien and Lewis and Chesterton – point to it as being a signature tale for them. Maurice Sendak, the writer and illustrator of Where the Wild Things Are , illustrated The Golden Key (and several other of MacDonald’s works). We see in it some of the same themes that we’ve already talked about as being intrinsic to fantasy – identity and self-knowledge, but especially the inheritance of story. This is a tale of two characters that take the same journey, but are parted during that journey. MacDonald is weaving in influences from all sorts of other stories, perhaps most notably John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress . In A Pilgrim’s Progress , the male has the harder journey and the female has the easier journey; in The Golden Key, MacDonald flips that on its head. Some people say it’s not fair – the female has the harder journey, the boy has it so easy. But the reason that the boy has it so easy is that he has the stories. That is part of what gives him access to the golden key. Tangle, the girl, does not have that advantage; we’re told very clearly that she doesn’t have roots, she’s abandoned. Both of them don’t have present parents, but the boy is fed with stories by his caring aunt, while the girl is left without rooting stories That shapes their journey. But also they’re met right at the beginning by Mother Nature, essentially: the grandmother with the green hair. We see how nature, the environment, is also part of the journey, and something that they both need to engage with – to be cleansed by, renewed by, and learn wisdom from. Sometimes people don’t pick up on this fact that she is a Mother Nature character, and how important it is that she is the one who guides them on to the other elements that eventually reunite them, so that they can ascend together."