At the Back of the North Wind is one of the masterpieces of George MacDonald's fantasy literature. It is a must-read to children because of its spiritual depth and wonderfully imaginative story. It teaches children timeless Christian principles to shape and engrave in their minds the goodness of God and love of our infinite heavenly Father.
Wikipedia summarizes the story as follows: “The book tells the story of a young boy named Diamond. He is a very sweet little boy who makes joy everywhere he goes. He fights despair and gloom and brings peace to his family. One night, as he is trying to sleep, Diamond repeatedly plugs up a hole in the loft (also his bedroom) wall to stop the wind from blowing in. However, he soon finds out that this is stopping the North Wind from seeing through her window. Diamond befriends her, and North Wind lets him fly with her, taking him on several adventures. Though the North Wind does good deeds and helps people, she also does seemingly terrible things. On one of her assignments, she must sink a ship. Yet everything she does that seems bad leads to something good. The North Wind seems to be a representation of Pain and Death working according to God's will for something good.”
I read it out loud to my children last year (when they were seven and eight years old), using a free online edition. I read one chapter every morning as my kids were eating breakfast. I also read sometimes one chapter at night as I tucked my kids into bed because my kids think it is so fun to stay up later than their bedtime for me to read to them. My daughters also sing the song from the movie Frozen 2, “All is Found” that describes the North Wind.
My favorite quote and highlight from the book is shown below, and notable comments about At the Back of the North Wind from Madeleine L’Engle, C.S. Lewis, and others follow.
“And this misery was the voice of the great Love that had made him and his wife and the baby and Diamond, speaking in his heart, and telling him to be good. For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds. On Mount Sinai, it was thunder; in the cabman’s heart it was misery; in the soul of St. John it was perfect blessedness.”
“A child who has been denied imaginative literature is likely to have far more difficulty in understanding cellular biology or post Newtonian physics than the child whose imagination has already been stretched by reading fantasy and science fiction. ”
“ Pure ‘Northernness’ engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity…and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago…. ”
“Northwind—points to the breath of God and dynamic movement of the Spirit to orient the compass of our lives to true North. North is the first of the four Cardinal points of the circle to which all others are related. Symbolically, northernness is an orientation in life, a quality of character in literature, an image and metaphor in mythology and poetry, and one of the quadrants of the wheel of life. For C.S. Lewis and the Inklings, the way to God lies to the North, embedded in images and stories pointing to the “region of the summer stars” (to quote Charles Williams’ poem). ”
“Yet I know that good is coming to me—that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it. What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good. And so, FAREWELL.”
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And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”
Dan MacDonald, editor of this website’s Raiders of the Lost Editions blog, recommends this vintage yet affordable edition for its wonderful illustrations by Jesse Wilcox Smith:
To view many of Smith’s illustrations, and some other delightful ones from an edition of this same wonderful novel illustrated by Maria Kirk, see At the Back of the North Wind: Contrasting Illustrations by Jessie Wilcox Smith and Maria L. Kirk.
An adaption that might be more suitable for younger children is described here.