"in My End Is My Beginning": The Fin-Negans Motif in George Macdonald's at the Back of the North Wind (Essay) (Critical Essay‪)‬

The friendliness of death is something of a leitmotif in MacDonald's work: "friendly, lovely death [is] the midwife of heaven" (Paul Faber 180) or "only more life" (Golden Key 32), and in our end is our beginning since "we shall be carried up to God himself" (Annals 410). Understandably, the comfort book At the Back of the North Wind is informed with the same confident faith: as North Wind tells Diamond, "it will be all right in the end. [We] will get home somehow" (43). However willing one may be to take MacDonald's word for it, it is even more thrilling to realize that this fin-negans motif is also secretly present beneath the surface, and actually built into the very structure of the book. The first step towards an understanding of that structure is the discovery of North Wind's lunar identity. (1) With it, a number of references become visible, most importantly Apuleius's Transformations, where the lunar goddess Isis plays a major role, and the Greek death myths evoking the post-mortem journey of the soul in which the Moon also plays a crucial part. (2) At the Back of the North Wind is all at once a modern Metamorphoseon Liber relating the initiation of a Lucius-Diamond under the aegis of an Isis-North Wind, and a modern death myth. There is no contradiction there since the initiation process simply anticipates the final destiny of the soul. The near-homonymy of the Greek verbs [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (to die/to be initiated) was perceived by the Ancients as evidence of the identity of the two experiences (Plutarch, De facie 943b).