Phantastes

On the morning of his twenty-first birthday, a young man named Anodos finds a tiny fairy woman in his late father's desk, and the next morning his bedroom dissolves into Fairy Land. So begins George MacDonald's Phantastes (1858), one of the founding works of modern fantasy and the book that, more than any other, made the fairy tale a serious form for grown men and women.

What follows is not a quest but a wandering. Anodos passes through an enchanted forest guarded by the kindly Beech and threatened by the evil Ash; sings a beautiful woman out of a block of marble, only to lose her; acquires a dark shadow that drains the wonder from everything it touches; lives inside the books of a great fairy palace; and is brought at last, through failure and suffering, to a sacrifice, a death, and a strange and shining peace — before waking again in the ordinary world, transformed.

Built as a dream-vision rather than a plotted novel, Phantastes works by symbol and atmosphere — the shadow that is the self to be outgrown, the marble lady that is desire pursued and never possessed, the willing death that is the laying-down of the ego — and breaks again and again into passages of pure lyric beauty, studded with embedded tales and songs.

Baffling to its first reviewers and quietly treasured ever since, it became one of the most influential books in the history of fantasy. C. S. Lewis said reading it “baptized” his imagination and called MacDonald his master; J. R. R. Tolkien honoured him among the makers of the fairy-story. To read Phantastes is to stand at the source.