I discovered George MacDonald after a long time reading C.S. Lewis' quotes about his master! In my childhood I was always in love with Carroll and Alice's adventures. Already with a full library, I stopped and realized that there was something in common among many of the authors that enchanted me, such as Mark Twain and Tolkien. I purchased a copy of Phantastes and I need to use the same expression as Lewis, my imagination has been baptized! 

I marveled at the settings described in Phantastes, the brilliant idea of ​​a fairy and desk. Phantastes made me want to go beyond being a mere fantasy reader! After reading all of George's short stories and novels translated into Portuguese, I started studying GM in detail. His theology, which I am enchanted by, made me understand a humble man, thirsty for divine grace and the love of Christ!

Many of my thoughts, such as common life and Christianity, I owe to George MacDonald, as well as my baptized imagination. Today, I dedicate myself to studying and heavily reading our master's other works!

An Essay on George MacDonald 

David César, 2023 - Brazil

The forerunner of all good fantasy from the time of Elijah to the present day, until today, was the ordinary welcome in the rational mind and human imagination. Burrows covered in ivy, dusty books, griffins flying over the sky, riots in a mead round and others from many and infinite fantastic sceneries, were brought to society in the most eager and pure way of communicating. Telling stories. 

   George MacDonald was born on December 10, 1824 in a botany thorp to the east as opposed to the great Scottish highlands. Son of farmers of Glencoe and direct descendant from one of the families of the MacDonald clan who died in the massacre of Glencoe in 1692. Their family environment was always literate by tradition and in addition to the diverse contributions of his parents to his studies literary works of the time, its creation was closely linked to the fantastic pioneering of nineteen century. One of George's uncles was an expert on Celtic culture, including redactor of the Gaelic Highland Dictionary and together with his grandfather, they started the propagation of fairy tales and supported the publication of “Ossian”, one of the avant-garde poems of Romanticism.

   The home education of George MacDonald was essential to his understanding of human imagination and faith as a consequence of the Christ’s Love. The theology in which MacDonald developed during his Christian way was purely poetic and ordinary compared to the Calvinist factors that it was created. The application of Christianity and universal love in its theological logic form the character of a writer thirsty for divine grace, the spring of his Fantasy. 

   In the biography of George by his son Greville MacDonald (George MacDonald and His Wife), is a complex tome of essential information about the writer's life, his works and his influence. The Scotsman always had a handle on the pen, however, his academic career began in the field of sciences, where he was also a good tutor. Your career is to be compared with from his catechumen Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland and other poems from Nonsense Literature, since Carroll was mathematician and George graduated in Chemistry and Physics at the University of Aberdeen, both were teachers in Victorian England and clearly drank from the fountain of fairy imagination and medieval literature. In addition to their similarity in the metaphysical field, the two met in sculpture classes and became fast friends. Carroll visited the MacDonald house frequently, joking and reading stories to the Scotsman's children. George MacDonald supported Lewis Carroll to publish Alice guided him in the fantastic and intellectual field.  

   George MacDonald's Faerie fantastic amber is based on his first novel, Phantastes. The classic narrative of the hero's journey presented in the book through the young Anodos grouped with the Platonic ideal and the debut to the land of fairies. In Classical Literature, since the publication of John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress", one of the first allegorical fictions suspended in Fantasy and Christian ideals, fantasies like those of George MacDonald have not been seen. His Scottish and English novels with rural anchorages or his essays on Unspoken Sermons and The Hope of the Gospel do not portray a different or limited MacDonald, his Celtic poetic narration is in all of them, but mainly in his fairy tales and their fantasies. 

   Nowadays known as the grandfather of Modern Fantasy, George MacDonald is known for several of his own quotes in the books of C.S. Lewis, G.K Chesterton and J.R.R. Tolkien. To create The Lord of the Rings and Middle-earth, it was necessary to read George MacDonald by Professor Tolkien and Lewis also for The Chronicles of Narnia, Perelandra and most of his creations. C.S. Lewis savored the theology of his "master" MacDonald, pronounced him as "[...] George was as hospitable as only the poor can be”. The same admitted that if we consider Literature as one of the Arts, George would not be privileged, since his raw writing is said to be vague to the English if it is not translated, as his Scottish dialect is present in many of his works. Professor Tolkien has already claimed that MacDonald was always a reference but that he would have complicated writing. 

   Phantastes, Lilith, Robert Falconer, The Princess and the Goblin, are examples of great works echoed by the literary class from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day from someone who drank from the fountain of Novalis, Goethe, Thoreau and Edmund Spenser. Among his apprentices is G.K. Chesterton, Mark Twain, J.R.R. Tolkien, William Morris, C.S. Lewis, Andrew Lang and Elizabeth Yates. His brilliant mind was in a factory of boring mythological airs with touches of ordinary magic linked by the Scandinavian Celtic lineage and intricacies of Christian culture such as Jewish mythology and angelic coherence by imagination. George MacDonald began an eternal cycle of lovers of Fantasy Literature as a departure from human reality, he sought and taught many to seek understanding of the only truth through gobelins, fairies, dwarves and elves.