I hope that for those who haven’t read the book the music will encourage you to do so, and for those who have read it the music will help you to see some of the beauty I see in Phantastes. Partly because music and Anodos’ gift of song figure largely throughout the book providing ample opportunity to weave music with the story, and partly because there is just so much magic, beauty, and otherworldliness in the story, making it a deep fountain from which to draw inspiration. In his early life Macdonald was strongly influenced by both Calvinism and the Congregational Church. His father was a farmer and the family was part of the MacDonalds of Glen Coe, direct descendants of one of the clan that suffered in the Glen Coe Massacre of 1692. This story, as I’ve come to see after spending so much time with it, works particularly well as source material for a concept album. George MacDonald was born on Decemat Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. It wasn't too long after that I decided Phantastes was the book I needed to put to music. When I read Phantastes the first time, I was so enchanted by the Beech tree that I found myself writing her song to Anodos. Reading MacDonald gets me high on beauty like nothing else.įor a number of years I've been wanting to produce a concept album that's based on a book for a variety of different reasons foremost I think that context and story make music significantly more meaningful and beautiful. Welcome back to The Literary Life Podcast and the beginning of our series on George MacDonald’s Phantastes. for the critic who has not walked in the forest of Phantastes or made the. I believe it was reading The Great Divorce that brought me to Phantastes I remember thinking to myself 'I like Lewis, and Lewis seems to really like this fellow George MacDonald, so I'll have to check out MacDonald sometime.' When I did end up picking up Phantastes, I had a similar experience to that of Lewis: a baptism of my imagination, and after finishing it I proceeded to devour all of his fairy tales that I could get my hands on. It is called The Princess and the Goblin, and is by George MacDonald.

'Any serious reader of Phantastes will find this edition to deepen his or her understanding and enjoyment of MacDonald’s fantasy masterpiece, and MacDonald scholars will find it an invaluable resource.I discovered MacDonald because of Lewis. This fine, comprehensive edition provides an accessible and illuminating introduction to this profound work.'Ĭolin Manlove, Author of Scotland’s Forgotten Treasure: The Visionary Novels of George MacDonald

'A good critical edition of George MacDonald’s Phantastes has long been needed, and now we have it.

Knoepflmacher, Author of Ventures in Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity 'By placing Phantastes within older and wider British and Continental literary traditions and by establishing this text’s affinities with the iconography of artists such as William Blake, the editors enrich our sense of George MacDonald’s influential promotion of a supra-reality best discerned by “poetic and childlike” minds.'

George mcdonald phantastes