The Princess and the Goblin (1872/1991).

Most of of the things we know about in life come from somewhere or other.  It's when it comes to the one shared question that all artists get asked the most often, however, the matter of the origin of fiction starts to get a bit "tricksy".  Every storyteller, at one point or another, finds themselves confronted with one simple issue.  Put in it's most simple form of expression, it goes something like this.  "Where do you get your ideas"?  It's one of those trick questions that has both an easy and a more complex answer.  The simple response is still the truest, any genuine work of Art is the product of the Imagination, and the artist's skill at being able to psychologically tap into it.  It's an ability possessed by a mere lucky few.  That's sort of the great irony of man's creative faculty.  It seems to be a collective trait shared by all minds, and yet the majority of us have never really been able to possess it in any meaningful way.  It's mistake to say any artist (even the really good ones) can claim an ownership to it as well.  Their just the ones who manage to end up in a better professional working relationship with this peculiar mental capability.  Having a knack for the knack, in other words, is a lot like being born with discolored eyes, or synesthesia vision.  It's never a one-off occurrence, yet it's rare enough to be an unaccountable oddity that fascinates and repels by turns.

As for the question of where do all the stories come from, the more complex answer is that if the creative idea is to be a true one, then it all has to start with a clear Inspiration.  In terms of what an actual artistic Inspiration is supposed to be, the answer is that it could sometimes amount to just about anything.  It can be a picture in your head, or a novel word that seems to appear clear out of the blue in your mind.  There are at least two good examples of Inspiration as Image, and as Word.  C.S. Lewis, for instance, claimed that the Land of Narnia all got started by the image of a Faun carrying parcels through the snow.  Tolkien, meanwhile, was busy grading student papers as part of his day job as a glorified English Lit teacher.  Then an opening sentence occurred to him and he jotted it down: "In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit".  Stephen King once likened those moments to a flair sent up from a workshop that the writer has in the basement of their mind.  It's the sort of thing that can happen anywhere and at anytime.  King elaborates on this further in the introductions to one of his books.

"In most cases—three or four out of every five, let’s say—I know where I was when I got the idea for a certain story, what combination of events (usually mundane) set that story off. The genesis of It, for example, was my crossing a wooden bridge, listening to the hollow thump of my bootheels, and thinking of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” In the case of Cujo it was an actual encounter with an ill-tempered Saint Bernard. Pet Sematary arose from my daughter’s grief when her beloved pet cat, Smucky, was run over on the highway near our house.  Sometimes, however, I just can’t remember how I arrived at a particular novel or story. In these cases the seed of the story seems to be an image rather than an idea, a mental snapshot so powerful it eventually calls characters and incidents the way some ultrasonic whistles supposedly call every dog in the neighborhood. These are, to me, at least, the true creative mysteries: stories that have no real antecedents, that come on their own (vii)".  That seems to be about as close to any standard operating procedure as far as the craft of storytelling goes.  The only other instruction manual worth a damn outside of King's own On Writing would have to be Coleridge's Biographia Literaria and Collected Works of Dr. Carl Jung.  I'm pretty sure most of us ran out the kind of time needed to peruse any of that long ago, so the Art of Story remains a total mystery.

There are however moments when it's just possible for the artist to say that they know where at least some of their Inspiration comes from.  Sometimes it stems from the efforts of other authors whose writings they either admire, or else did once upon a time.  They'll be able to recognize some of the ingredients that went into the Cauldron of Story, and what it's origins where.  In the case of the Orcs of Middle Earth, Tolkien was able to do his fans a favor and pinpoint the exact literary starting point for them.  On page 108 of his annotated edition of The Hobbit, Tolkien scholar Douglas Anderson gives us the following bit of backstage trivia about how the servants of Sauron first took shape in Middle Earth.  They started as Goblins, before they achieved their now signature title, and Anderson has this to say about it.  "Tolkien’s goblins resemble those in George Macdonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872), with some notable differences. Macdonald’s goblins have soft and very vulnerable feet. In a letter to Naomi Mitchison of April 25,1954, Tolkien wrote that his goblins “owe, I suppose, a good deal to the goblin tradition...especially as it appears in George Macdonald, except for the soft feet which I never believed in” {Letters No. 144). 

"And whereas Macdonald’s goblins flee at the sound of poetry, Tolkien’s goblins sing poetry of the very same rhythmic and exclamatory sort that Macdonald’s goblins so detested (ibid)".  From there, Anderson provides us with a neat summary starting point for the subject of today's article.  He writes: "George Macdonald (1824-1905) was a clergyman of Scottish descent and a prolific writer of novels and children’s stories, like At the Back of the North Wind (1871), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and its sequel, The Princess and Curdie (1883). His fairy tales, including the well-known “The Golden Key,” were first collected in Dealings with the Fairies (1867). His fantasy novels for adults include Phantastes (1858) and Lilith (1895) (ibid)".  I'm pretty sure that's about as far as most readers have ever been with Macdonald, or his literary efforts.  If you mention him to some of the most dedicated fan circles to devoted to Tolkien's writings, odds are even that a lot of them still won't have a clue who you're talking about.  His name is that obscure.  It's yet another instance of an author's reputation falling through the cracks of time, and in risk of being forgotten altogether.  The good news is that the rescue of obscure reputations of one of the main goals here at The Scriblerus Club.  It's in part with this stated purpose in mind that I wound up looking into one of the few film adaptations of Macdonald's stories.

The Story.   

Discovering a Forgotten Name.

Perhaps the greatest trick of history is it's ability to make people believe that it is a full and complete whole.  That all major persons and events are present and accounted for.  That there are no gaps for important factual information to slip into, or that need careful excavation and filling in.  In other words, the greatest trick of history is to make us believe it was ever finished and settled.  It's one of those natural truisms of life that everyone hears about, and is willing to pay a kind of halfway lip service to.  We'll say, "Yes sit, come to think of it, that's very wise".  Then with that out of the way, we go back to the outmoded form of information we all got from our high school or college texts, while our knowledge of the past continues to expand onward without us, making us strangers to our own lives.  I think the good news in all of this is that no one has to let themselves get left behind.  It might just be possible to gain some measure of mastery over the historical record, not by any form of conquest, but rather through a proper ability to learn and understand from it.  In the realm of the Arts, this amounts to making sure that a lot of talented names never get left behind.  George MacDonald is an interesting example of a writer whose reputation is always on the cusp of oblivion without falling off the edge.

He's one of those name whose reputation always exists among a handful readers that are almost too small to be known as a coterie.  I'd almost have to say he's a pure example of an antiquarian's pet.  One of the most obscure specimens you can find.  To hear this small handful of admirers tell it, what we've got on our hands is a forgotten pioneer, one of the best in the business.  He is purported to be so influential as to have helped invent some of the modern formats of the Fantasy genre that are still in use today.  It's a hell of claim to make for someone who most of us have never even heard of.  So who is this man George MacDonald, and what, if anything, is there about him that can tell us whether he's any kind of unsung talent?  The best introductions I can find for the complete novice reader (which is pretty much all of us, for the most part) comes from just two sources.  Both of them are as obscure as the writer under discussion here, and in many ways, discovering each of them was a matter of pure luck.  I stumbled upon one of them by pure accident, and the other I ran across in the pages of a book on Victorian Fantasy.  One of them is an introduction from the late, great Pulp editor Lin Carter, it's contained in the pages of a reissue of MacDonald's final published work, Lilith, it featured as part of the classic Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series imprint.  The goal of the line was to bring back into print some of the best names in the SF/Fantasy genre that were deserving of being remembered for posterity.

Among the bylines that shared a shelf space in this line of publications was Lord Dunsany, Hope Mirrlees, James Branch Cabell, L. Sprague De Camp, Fletcher Pratt, Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson, Poul Anderson, H.P. Lovecraft, and Arthur Machen.  Some of those name you might still recognize, the rest you sort of have no choice except to just scratch your head and wonder at.  For those curious enough to ask if the others listed are any good, my own answer is that I'd have to say, yeah, they're worth checking out.  In fact, all of them are pretty darn great.  The point is Carter felt that MacDonald was yet another forgotten name with enough quality to his writings as to allow him a space on this once much sought after collection.  The fact that nobody even remembers the Ballantine imprint anymore must say something about the nature of fame.  Meanwhile, the only other full-length scholar's study of the Scottish writer that I've been able to find is an old, overlooked 1987 biography by William Raeper.  These two will have to serve as the starting point for getting to know the artist better.

Here is how Carter first introduced his readers to the name of George MacDonald way back when.  It all starts with the description of a dwelling.  "It was a large rather ugly house, set back a little from the shore of the Thames, at Hammersmith.  And it was one of the most famous homes in England - "Kelmscott House" - where the brilliant, eccentric, richly talented William Morris lived.  He was to be remembered for many things: his translations of Norse sagas, his impact on Victorian art and decoration, his poetry, and his novels.  And among these were books like The Wood Beyond the World and The Well at the World's End - books of quests and strange adventures in imaginary medieval worlds of magic and mystery.  Books that were to found the school of modern adult fantasy and influence such later writers as Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, C.S. Lewis, Fletcher Pratt and J.R.R. Tolkien.  But the huge, ugly old house had another claim to fame.  Years before William Morris lived there it had another name - "The Retreat."  In those days, around 1872, a retired Scots minister, his wife, and their eleven children lived in the big house.  The minister's name was George MacDonald and it was in this house that he wrote two children's books that were to make his name ever-young: At the Back of the North Wind, and The Princess and the Goblin.

"He was an extraordinary man.  Born the son of a farmer in Aberdeenshire in 1824, he took degrees in chemistry and natural philosophy at the university and became a Congregationalist minister at a surprisingly successful one.  Then, when he was only twenty-six, he retired to devote the rest of his long life to literature.  He was enormously successful at that, too.  His first book, a long poem called Within and Without, was an immediate success and won the admiration of Tennyson and Lady Byron.  He went on to write dozens of other books - some popular novels of Scots peasant life, eight fairy tale books for children, (and, sic) two of the most brilliant adult novels ever written...He became celebrated, famous, popular.  His close friends included the greatest literary figures of his time, Ruskin, Tennyson, Lewis Carroll.  He was a world traveler, equally at home in cosmopolitan London or exotic Algiers, who topped his career with a tremendously successful lecture tour of America.  Happily married, he raised a huge family, and seems to have had a perfectly delightful and rewarding life.  As Florence Becker Lennon put it, in her biography of his good friend Lewis Carroll: "His life, both artistic and familial, seems to have been uniformly happy and fruitful, and he died at an advanced old age [in 1905, at eighty-one], surrounded by an adoring family (v-vi)". 

The picture painted by Carter is an odd study in contrasts.  On the one hand, it suggest the life of an often sedentary uneventfulness that tends to be the actual, de-facto experience of the writing artist's life.  Any excitement to be had in the actual act of creative composition is so hermetic within the confines of the author's mind, that it puts to rest any illusions of glamour to be had in the craft of storytelling.  If you were to witness MacDonald in the process of creating even his best works, all you'd get for your troubles is the sight of a normal man of about average height, bent over a writing desk and jotting whole passages, dialogues, and plot turns on bits of paper.  He would most often be surrounded by a pile of pages on one side of the desk that on a good day it might begin to accumulate in height as the story took hold.  Meanwhile, possibly surrounding the author on all sides would be scattered bits of paper containing discarded drafts of scenes and events.  Stephen King once likened writing to jobs like those of a plumber or a brick-layer.  In the end, it's always about telling a good story.  However, even that task still counts as having to get on with the days work (if you like) and nothing else.  The contrast comes from when we turn to examine the results of Macdonald's efforts at scribbling away at work.

Somehow it ends up being regarded as having such a quality as to allow the writer permission to mingle with the brightest lights of English Letters during the reign of Queen Victoria.  An author like Tennyson, for example, was considered the Poet Laureate of his age.  The closest equivalent I can think of from today would be if, after winning his Nobel Prize, Bob Dylan had decided to celebrate with the likes of Jim Henson.  That's the kind of prestige MacDonald was able to enjoy for himself in his own day.  Perhaps the greatest tell of how well he was regarded during his life is to note Carter's highlight of the fact that he was lifelong friends with the creator of Alice in Wonderland.  "Lewis Carroll lent it to his friend MacDonald, begging his opinion, and MacDonald read it aloud to his children.  Their instant love for the story - his son Greville said it was so good there should be sixty thousand more volumes of it! - may have been a deciding factor in persuading Carroll, the shy, gawky, Oxford don to have it published (vii)".  This account has proven to be true enough to the facts.  It's a good measuring point for not just how well regarded, but also influential MacDonald was at the time, even if he's forgotten now.

He was regarded as enough of a literary authority to the point that Carroll was willing to defer judgment on what was to be his major breakout success.  A look at the history of the publication dates can also help shed some light on why Dodgson might think someone like MacDonald was the right person to judge the merits of Wonderland.  That novel was published in 1864.  Just six years earlier, MacDonald beat Carroll to the finish line with the debut of Phantastes (it's pronounced as just Fantasies, the T is silent, and I don't know what it's there for).  It seems to have been what put Macdonald's name on the map.  It might even have lead to Carroll wanting to strike up a friendship with the Scottish author, because he regarded the book as an exemplary demonstration of what the Fantasy genre could become in the modern era.  Indeed, there is a certain amount of overlap between the two works based on one or two similarities of plots and devices.  Each text tells of a journey into a fantastical realm, and both feature a protagonist whose adventures in the other realm amount to a quest for self-knowledge.  It's all enough to posit that MacDonald's Fantasy might be an overlooked inspiration for Alice's own adventures.

If this is the case, then it's not out of bounds to claim that we are dealing with someone with a legitimate claim to being at least some kind of trendsetter within the field of Popular Fantasy.  If that's so, then it makes the ultimate outcome of MacDonald's reputation all the more ironic.  So far as I can tell, the state of his artistic notoriety remains pretty much as it was outlined by William Reaper in the opening pages of his biographical study.  "To say that George MacDonald is an unjustly neglected writer has become almost a cliche.  Nevertheless it is surprising how slow critics have been to document his life and assess his work.  Up until about fifteen years ago critical work on MacDonald was poor and slight, and, though he is now beginning to receive more attention, there has, till now, been only one major biography of him - George MacDonald and His Wife by his son, Greville MacDonald, published in 1924 and two critical works - the idiosyncratic The Golden Key by Robert Lee Wolff (Yale 1961) and George MacDonald by Richard Reis (New York 1972).

"The man who was the friend of John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll, who produced such startling fantasy works and fairy tales during his lifetime, and who perhaps only now in the late twentieth century can be read with any required degree of understanding, deserves more.  While MacDonald's contribution to fantasy literature and children's writing has been taken for granted, critics have tended to look at his work through the prism of what has come after, rather than what had gone before.  At the same time, Macdonald was, in his own day, a novelist of some distinction...and these areas of his work have remained almost entirely untouched.  If in the nineteenth century he was seen as an author of uplifting tales and a prophet, now he can be viewed as an explorer of the unconscious, a visionary ahead of his time whose imaginative power has kept many of his books on the shelves since they were first published (11)".  Raeper closes out his introduction by claiming that "MacDonald's story is a moving one, and his ideas are compelling (12)".  It's impossible to try and encompass the entire life, work, and even (on occasion) the complete thought of an artist in the span of a single review post.  The best I can do now is to take a closer examination of The Princess and the Goblin and see if Raeper is correct.

Conclusion: A Welcome Surprise.   

A basic synopsis of MacDonald's plot makes it sound stereotypical enough.  Once upon a time there was a Princess named Irene, who lived in a castle of a remote mountain province with her father the King.  Their realm was surprisingly better off than one might expect.  This was because Irene's father took a genuine interest in the welfare of his subjects, and was willing to do everything he could to make sure the domains were taken good care of.  The one downside to this setup was that it meant affairs of state were always cropping up every now and then.  Which meant the King would often have to make journeys to the various provinces of the kingdom to help make sure nothing was amiss.  The King was good at his job, and well loved by his subject, and so was his daughter.  The downside was that affairs of state always had a way of leaving Irene alone to her own devices.  The Princess was no spoiled brat, by any means.  Her father had brought her up well in learning what it meant to have sympathy with the common welfare of others.  It's just that when you grow up alone surrounded on all sides by the same castle walls, and more or less friendless, then even you're true home can start to look an awful like a gilded cage.  It doesn't help things here that MacDonald is willing to invoke the old Disney trope of at least one dead parent per protagonist household.  Irene's mother had died giving her daughter life.

And so there she was.  Well loved, loving in turn, knowing her duties to her people, and still all by herself on more than just an obvious level.  The problem with such a state of affairs is that if you let it go on long enough, then a state weary restlessness begins to set in.  It might also described as a form of cabin fever.  Whatever you want to call it, the problem with boredom is it won't go away unless you find some kind of excitement to fill the void.  So Irene had taken to exploring where she could among the castle grounds, in search of anything that would help drive away the loneliness.  That's how she discovers a hidden chamber high in a tower no one seems to have known about or have access to.  It's there the Princess discovers a kind lady waiting for her.  There's something curious about this woman.  There's an unmistakable quality of the elder about her.  She even tells Irene that she's her Great Grandmother.  Yet she doesn't look old.  Her hair may be the color of silver, and yet her face belongs to that of a young beauty.  Grandmother knows a great deal about the Princess, and tells her that she has been looking out for her ever since she was an infant.  She also tells Irene that she'll be in her tower whenever she is needed the most.  She also tells the Princess to be on her guard against danger.

This warning is proven true when our young heroine is wandering around outside the next day, and receives the nasty shock of being attacked by a living, breathing, goblin.  To her own surprise, it is a peasant boy who comes to her rescue.  He chases the monster away by, of all things, singing a song.  The boy introduces himself as a the son of one of the miner's, who work in the mountains overlooking the kingdom.  To Irene's surprise, she learns that the miners know and share a great deal of folklore about the goblins who dwell in the hills.  The boy, who introduces himself as Curdie, tells the Princess all about how to defend herself from the wicked little creatures.  At the same time, the Princess and the peasant wind up sparking the kind of friendship that might grow into more than just that later down the line.  Not long after, Irene runs into her Grandmother again, and the old woman gives her a special gift.  It's a ring which Grandmother claims is attached to a special thread.  If Irene or her friends ever get lost, the thread attached to this ring will grant her the ability to find her way back to safety.  It's this same invisible thread which guides the Princess into the heart of the Goblin Kingdom, where she discovers that they have taken Curdie as a captive.  Nor is this the only problem she has to deal with.

The Princess and Curdie both discover that the goblins are planning the mount an assault on her father's castle, and from there, they plan to take over the entire kingdom.  The rest of the story becomes a race against time as Irene and her friend struggle to thwart the plans of the Goblin Prince, and save the realm from a dire peril.  Like I say, it's the kind of synopsis that has a very stereotypical read out on paper.  At least that is how it sounds until you get into the actual pages of the book, and its contents begins to give you a pleasant surprise or two.  One of the first things to jump out at you is how the author handles his words.  The story is told in a style that seems to be precursor to not just one, but several emerging trends that would go on to define the nature of 20th century literature.  Here, for example, is a description of one of the plot's main settings, and the mischievous character who dwell there.  "These mountains were full of hollow places underneath; huge caverns, and winding ways, some with water running through them, and some shining with all colours of the rainbow when a light was taken in. There would not have been much known about them, had there not been mines there, great deep pits, with long galleries and passages running off from them, which had been dug to get at the ore of which the mountains were full. In the course of digging, the miners came upon many of these natural caverns. A few of them had far-off openings out on the side of a mountain, or into a ravine.

"Now in these subterranean caverns lived a strange race of beings, called by some gnomes, by some kobolds, by some goblins. There was a legend current in the country that at one time they lived above ground, and were very like other people. But for some reason or other, concerning which there were different legendary theories, the king had laid what they thought too severe taxes upon them, or had required observances of them they did not like, or had begun to treat them with more severity, in some way or other, and impose stricter laws; and the consequence was that they had all disappeared from the face of the country. According to the legend, however, instead of going to some other country, they had all taken refuge in the subterranean caverns, whence they never came out but at night, and then seldom showed themselves in any numbers, and never to many people at once. It was only in the least frequented and most difficult parts of the mountains that they were said to gather even at night in the open air. Those who had caught sight of any of them said that they had greatly altered in the course of generations; and no wonder, seeing they lived away from the sun, in cold and wet and dark places. 

"They were now, not ordinarily ugly, but either absolutely hideous, or ludicrously grotesque both in face and form. There was no invention, they said, of the most lawless imagination expressed by pen or pencil, that could surpass the extravagance of their appearance. But I suspect those who said so had mistaken some of their animal companions for the goblins themselves—of which more by and by. The goblins themselves were not so far removed from the human as such a description would imply. And as they grew misshapen in body they had grown in knowledge and cleverness, and now were able to do things no mortal could see the possibility of. But as they grew in cunning, they grew in mischief, and their great delight was in every way they could think of to annoy the people who lived in the open-air storey above them. 

"They had enough of affection left for each other to preserve them from being absolutely cruel for cruelty's sake to those that came in their way; but still they so heartily cherished the ancestral grudge against those who occupied their former possessions and especially against the descendants of the king who had caused their expulsion, that they sought every opportunity of tormenting them in ways that were as odd as their inventors; and although dwarfed and misshapen, they had strength equal to their cunning. In the process of time they had got a king and a government of their own, whose chief business, beyond their own simple affairs, was to devise trouble for their neighbours. It will now be pretty evident why the little princess had never seen the sky at night. They were much too afraid of the goblins to let her out of the house then, even in company with ever so many attendants; and they had good reason, as we shall see by and by".  In terms of pure style, author's words contain a number of elements worth pointing out.  It's most notable feature is that it's a strange mixture of the naturalistic and the fantastical.  A lot of it telegraphs how it would sooner or later make its way into the prose of Tolkien.  The taxonomy MacDonald lays out for the goblins would fit in the pages of the Red Book.

At the same time, there is this Perilous note (to use Tolkien's own critical toolbox lexicon) which is fitting and proper for a story about encounters with creatures from a fairy tale realm.  The interesting thing to note, however, is that it's all undergirded by this terse, unadorned, staccato style of mid-Victorian going on early 20th century pulp.  MacDonald seems to have given us a unique snapshot of modern prose undergoing its own natural transition into a more contemporary tone of voice.  He seems to have been one of the writers responsible for shaping that contemporary narrative voice into what we recognize today.  There are even times when it sounds for all the world as if he's anticipating the kind of terse, bare bones expressionism of writers like Cormac McCarthy.  Just remember that I said MacDonald anticipates such a destination, he never quite arrives there under his own steam.  Nor is that necessary for the kind of plot he has to spin for his readers.  It's enough to point out the author's compositional skills as a storyteller to start with.  Beyond questions of style, there is the matter of pacing.  The current Puffin Classics edition reprint of the book numbers out at just 256 pages.  It's the kind of book you can hold in the palm of just one hand.  A pointer that it moves at a brisk clip.

As an example of this lack of wasted space on Macdonald's part, those few passages I cited above were the concluding part of the first chapter.  In the current Puffin edition, that entire segment runs to just three pages total.  So the good news so far as narrative momentum is concerned is that it all moves at a steady and brisk pace.  MacDonald seems to be aware that he's telling a story meant for young charges.  So while the plot does jump from one group of characters to another, all of them are concerned with the main crux of the narrative.  There are no digressions into side quests here.  There's no time wasted on Curdie discovering that he is a long lost heir to some royal lineage, and that his father's sword is part of the key to it all.  That sort of thing can have its place, yet it's not the type of story MacDonald is telling.  The entire focus of his plot remains centered on a single issue.  There's this group of wicked troll like creatures living under our feet and they want to conquer us.  That means we've got to stop them, QED.  End of story.  There's no fuss or muss to be had here.  Just a neat little children's fable that sort of prefigures the plot of Joe Dante's Gremlins, except with prototypes of Middle Earth's orcs at the main antagonist.  Which does make you wonder if the director of that earlier film would be up for adapting this novel?  Speaking of adaptations, how does the animated version of MacDonald's book hold up?

Well in cinematic terms, there's a lot of fun things to discuss on that front.  For one thing, the film's screenwriter Robin Lyons made the wise choice of adhering as close to the source material as possible.  The best part about this choice is how it allows the narrative to maintain all the charm and mystique that went into the book.  This applies to the way the script handles the twin poles that help drive MacDonald's narrative.  Lyons seems to have hit upon the realization that Irene's Grandmother and the the Goblin Prince are the two characters most responsible for inciting all the major action and plot beats of the original novel.  Every major step or choice the two main leads make is in response to either the advice given by the Lady in the Tower, or else by the tactics of the Prince and his family the Goblin King and Queen.  As such, while some might complain that the latter is given a greater sense of prominence in the story than the former, it helps to bear in mind that this is very much in keeping with how the original author handled things.  The novel has a very similar dynamic in the way that the character of Yoda was handled in The Empire Strikes Back.  The Grandmother is meant to stand for this fount of half-remembered wisdom that the Princess and the Miner's Son are both supposed to draw on.

MacDonald imbues this character with a slight hinted elvish quality that might not have been lost on either Tolkien or any of his fans who should choose to pick up the original book and give it a read.  The creator of the One Ring liked to cite the novel as the inspiration for the orcs, yet on closer inspection, I can't help wondering if MacDonald's portrayal of the Grandmother might have been a spur to the way the immortal inhabitants of Lothlorien, Mirkwood, and Rivendell were brought to life.  Even if this is the case, it's still interesting to note all the ways in which Irene's Tower relative is still very much her own separate entity.  For one thing, the book makes clear she's not an elf.  There's never any passage where the reader learns of tell-tale giveaways like pointed ears, for instance.  At the same time, MacDonald is also at pains to make clear that she's never entirely human, either.  She's this strange ethereal being who still somehow manages to exude this welcoming hearth and home manner that is able to draw both characters and audience into the story.  In that regard, I do wonder how possible it is that a later writer like C.S. Lewis might have drawn on this figure to create his own Aslan of Narnia.

The point being that this Great Grandmother of the Tower occupies the same character shelf as the Ruler Beyond the Wardrobe and the Master of Rivendell both do for their own respective texts.  She exists on some kind of continuum between these two extremes.  She exhibits the All-Knowing qualities of Aslan, while her implied nature places her closer to Tolkien's star children.  In this way, it's almost as if she's a combination of the two modes, with none of the uncertain ambiguity that is an oft-missed hallmark of Tolkien's elves.  Here, MacDonald leaves the reader in no doubt about which side of the pendulum she represents.  The trick with a character like this is that it's very easy to lean into the two cozy and whimsical components in her nature, and reduce her to a Victorian cliche full of worn out platitudes.  It's to the writer's credit, therefore, that MacDonald never allows his own sentiments to get in the way of the character.  Instead, Grandmother is allowed to exude this sense of ancient power and mystery combined with a kind and welcoming nature.  She's probably one of the best parts of the entire novel, and it's easy to understand how this sort of character quality can be difficult to capture on film.

The good news is that viewers seem to be in good hands here.  In terms of the best possible impact to leave audiences with, Lyons seems to have settled as close to a Golden Mean as possible.  The film version of Grandmother is neither too ethereal nor homely.  Instead, she's utilized in a dramatic approach that is able to incorporate both aspects of her nature without letting either one have the final say.  This seems to be about as close to a good call as the screenplay was likely to get with this character.  It's a dramatic technique that helps establish her as both here and there at once.  She's allowed to be this solid personality, while also maintaining the crucial aspect of transcendent ambiguity that mark her out in the book.  I can't be certain if this is the only way to portray this figure, yet it seems to have been the one to work best with the resources the filmmakers had to work with.  Is it possible there is still room for improvement in regard to this character?  I think there is a definitive answer to that, yet I'll give it once we're near the end of this review, as what I'll have to sat then can just as well apply to the whole as much as the part.  For now, it's enough to say that Lyons efforts pay off.

At least I came away with the kind of stock responses the screenwriter was hoping to get out of me.  It sort of goes double for when we get to the story's main antagonist, and here is where the fun of the whole experience came from for me.  For one thing, it's where the proto-Dantesque qualities of MacDonald's text comes to the fore.  I mentioned how the story itself sort of looks forward to the Gremlins movie, and that statement rings true enough to the point where there's even a Stripe figure as the main antagonist!  This hold true for the book as well, yet here is where it is just possible for the film to earn its own credit for creativity.  A lot of it comes down to just two words: Rik Mayall.  He play the main villain of the piece, a Goblin princeling with the "endearing" name of Froglip.  It's also in this choice of a name change that the filmmakers showed a greater foresight than MacDonald in at least one respect.  The Victorian fantasist saw fit to name the Prince Hairlip, and never stop to wonder if there would ever come a day when associating either the term, or the condition it describes, as in any way problematic.  Here's where I have to admit I can't tell what the writer was thinking when he tossed in that singular moment of cringe.  MacDonald shows the limits of his own time period here.  It's worth noting because of how progressive he otherwise was for his time period in the Victorian Era.

With a few exceptions like this, everything else I've read from or learned about MacDonald paints the portrait of a humanist whose insights into fields such as child rearing, social, political, economical, and even gender welfare are all anticipations of the best types of outlook to be had in the contemporary era.  I guess it's the best proof possible that even when your heart is in the right place, it's still often the case that nobody's perfect.  If there's one consolation to this, then it comes from the fact and a lot of further reading up on MacDonald marks him out as the kind of guy who would be more than happy to correct such a mistake in a future reprinting of the text, once you'd shown him how knowledge of the condition has advanced since his day.  He was kind of chill like that.  As to the character of the Goblin Prince himself, and the genius choice to cast Mayall in the role, here is a sample from the original book that contains the biggest line of dialogue this figure is given.  If you read the passage with Mayall's voice superimposed upon the words, you kind of begin to understand the logic of the casting choice.

"Yes, father; of course it does. Only it will be nice to make her cry. I'll have the skin taken off between her toes, and tie them up till they grow together. Then her feet will be like other people's, and there will be no occasion for her to wear shoes (176)".  There's a certain quality about a bit of dialogue like that, and the sort of person who might be able to say it.  It's all too easy to imagine someone like Rick or Richie saying something like this.  If you stop and pay attention to the types of characters Mayall was best at bringing to life, you begin to discover this running thread to all of them.  It's a hell of a lot different from the one provided by Irene's Grandmother, and in a way that serves as the perfect counterpoint.  The politest word that might be used to describe the prototypical "Mayall Character" is to say that he's a Cad.  At the same time, it's like that still doesn't do justice to the utter living piles of total crap that Mayall helped immortalize.  I almost want to say it's like a complete mistake to call these figures main leads.  Their more like anti-protagonists, instead.  I'm not sure how much sense that choice of word makes, yet it just seems to fit the typical stage persona that Mayall adopted.  A protagonist is someone you either want to succeed, or at least can feel a bit tragic pity for.  With someone like Richie Richard, you can't bring yourself to feel any of these stock responses, you just want to laugh at him.

It's to the actor's credit that this was always something he was great at.  There's always been a handful of stage artists out there who knew how to embody this larger than life quality to the role of villain in any story they performed in.  It's interesting to discover that not many commentators have made this connection with Mayall.  One possibility for this lack of insight might be the comic's way of imbuing his anti-heroes with perhaps the barest minimum of a sympathy. It's of a very vague, indistinct quality for me, yet I suppose it has to be granted as something that's there.  Even if that's the case I'll always maintain that it's not the same as claiming there's anything noble or heroic about this type.  The closest this figure can ever approach the state where you (almost) want to root for them is if you set them up against antagonists who (through some sort of anti-miracle) are worse than them.  With MacDonald's Goblin Royal Heir, the actor was given nothing less than a golden opportunity.  Whether or not you want to call it the role of a lifetime, there's every indication that this is the type of villain that is more or less tailor-made for the actor.  There's a sense in which Froglip is the ultimate summation of every role Mayall has ever played.  The Goblin Prince is not just a distillation of the Mayall persona, he's also the closest to a complete summation of the type of character the actor spent his life portraying.

When you get right down to it, Froglip is really just an excuse to put aside the mask that the other members of Mayall's rogues gallery hid behind.  You got the sense that there was this measure (however threadbare) of restraint to the main leads of both The Young Ones and Bottom that always kept them from being the complete and total scumbags we all knew them to be at heart.  It is therefore with a perfect sense of comic irony that it is the prim, proper, upstanding, and soulful MacDonald who grants Mayall permission to unleash the rotten Id the lurks beneath all the rest of his cast of losers and lowlifes.  His Goblin Prince is more or less what you get if Richie or Rick decided to just chuck away all their pretensions and be their full inglorious selves.  It's no surprise that each of them would amount to the same, and that they'd turn out to be a villain.  Based on performance alone, it's easy to tell Mayall was having the time of his life in this role.  It's as if his entire career was a slow and steady working towards this sort of performance.  I hope I'm not committing a different kind of blasphemy when I say that in a career full of great performances, this one in particular might just be his finest hour.  It's the chance to see Richie or Rick embrace their full nature and cast aside all their inhibitions.  Looked at through this lens of interpretation, you can tell it's a liberating experience for the character, at least.

Gone are the fumbling, the inherent clumsiness, the social awkwardness, and the seemingly inherent stupidity that underlay it all.  In the place of this ineffectual, vulgar prat, we're now presented with this cunning, lethal, predatory schemer.  Here we have the type of character and performance that would make Tim Curry proud.  Let that act as a marker for the effort that Mayall gives it.  George C. Scott  once said that what he looked for in an actor was the impression of a professional being able to take joy in his or her performance.  It's a criteria that I think Mayall is able to fulfill here to the hilt.  Both the Prince and his actor really are the star performances in the adaptation.  This may also be one area where the movie is able to offer at least one minor yet crucial improvement on the source material.  The Goblin Prince of the novel shows glimmers of this same outsized personality, and yet it's allowed to peek through in fits and snatches, and the reader is left with the sense that so much more could have been made or done with this imaginary individual, seeing how he is the one Goblin that gets more prominence and action to do outside of his mother the Queen.  The impression is there that MacDonald might have seen all the gloriously rotten possibilities you could take with this character, and then the writer knew he had to hold it all back, because there was no way any respectable publisher of children's books in the Victorian Era UK would have allowed it, so the character had to be dialed back a bit.

At least that is one possibility for what was going on behind the scenes in the novel's composition.  If there's any truth to this surmise, then it's a real shame.  Because it means something of a genuine loss for the novel as a whole.  It leaves out a certain level of impact that might have benefited things overall.  It's the sort of creative move that even children's author's today can get away with left and right, but not in a time period where kids where meant to be seen, and not heard.  So that leaves the final literary product straightjacketed to an extent.  This is not the same as calling the book a bad go.  MacDonald has written a very good story here, and it's a good place to start for any readers curious about the roots of not just Middle Earth, but also of the modern Fantasy genre as a whole.  The key thing to bear in mind is that even while I'm enjoying what MacDonald was able to give us, I can also see the hints and glimmers of the better, truer text that the author probably wanted to tell all along, and yet the nature of Victorian censorship meant that he could probably never get the full thing down on paper the way he might have liked to.  I recall reading some words that crime writer and critic G.K. Chesterton once said about MacDonald.  He thought he wasn't just an author, but also a philosopher.

He claimed that all of his true thoughts were set down in his fairy tales more than anywhere else.  If that's true, then the irony is that even in the realm of the fantastic, MacDonald might very well have been at the mercy of the "tastes and morals" of his times.  That means that perhaps even his deepest thoughts and creative ideas might have had to be forever hid under a veil.  It's a less than ideal setup for the true creativity of fiction to have its voice.  However what remains remarkable about it is that the writer was still allowed to churn out a genuine enough work of enchantment for generations of readers.  There was enough in the book, at any rate, to allow screenwriter Robin Lyons and director Jozsef Gemes to mine the story for all of its hidden potential, and then bring as much of it to the fore as possible.  In that sense, they really have to be congratulated for what they were able to pull off here.  The movie would have been nothing without MacDonald's novel, and yet there are at least a handful of moments where they were able to make one or two improvements on the source material.  The first is that they streamlined a few minor bits and pieces of the plot the were more drawn out in the novel.

The film version begins with Irene out on a morning stroll that turns into an exploration that culminates in the memorable sight of a clawed hand erupting from underneath the Earth to try and grab our protagonist.  This is the film's way of introducing us to the Goblins, and of alerting the Princess to their presence under the mountains.  This makes for a nice alternative opener to the one we're given in the book.  The start of the novel is a textbook example of scene setting through exposition.  MacDonald takes the time to lay out the nature of his secondary world for his readers.  This includes a rundown of most of the cast, including Irene, the Goblins, along with a brief history of the book's mountain dwelling adversaries.  All of this is done in a very Tolkien style encyclopedic fashion similar to that found in Lord of the Rings.  In fact, I just realized how the crazy quality of genius is to be found in the work of each writer.  MacDonald appears to have inspired Tolkien in such as way as to make it so that the Scottish writer's fantasy can almost come off as an after-the-fact sequel to the Oxford Professor's "trilogy".  In other words, it's possible to claim that Irene and Curdie are catching up with the latter day remains of the orcs of Middle Earth.  Whatever the case, MacDonald's choice of opening is all a classic example of telling as opposed to showing.  The author guides the reader into the story before it begins.

This may be able to work in a novel for children, however, I think that Gemes and Lyons have found as near perfect a way to translate all this information into an opening scene that manages to grab a hold of the audience's attention, and then makes sure never to really let go till the end.  I'm not at all prepared to say which creative choice is the better one.  The objective answer here is that both of them are most likely to have their narratological place at some point or other in any given story.  I think it's just worth noting how having your main cast find out about the Gremlins Goblins by first running into them, and then having to deduce the meaning of their existence as they go along seems to be an intriguing way to go about the worldbuilding of your fairy story.  It's just one example of all the creative ways the film has of finding the best shorthand methods of getting MacDonald's text across.  Some of these may seem very era centric, such as Irene's way of sledding through the goblin caverns on her way to rescue Curdie.  At other times, these minor changes are fitting, such as the small tweak to the novel's ending.

The book ends on a happy and epic enough note.  At the same time, it's possible to accuse the denouement of having a bit of an anticlimactic quality.  It all revolves around the Goblins trying to drive the humans out of both castle, village, and mountain valley by using an underground stream as a primary method of attack.  Curdie's father and the other miners who work in the mountains are able to divert all of this through the use of a dam which reroutes the flow of the stream back into the heart of the Goblin's kingdom.  It's all very good and to the point, and it wraps things up nicely.  It also comes off as this mere descriptive bit of business with none of the story's main players involved, not even as bystanders.  It's more in the manner of tying the main conflict up in a somewhat disconnected bow.  The movie adaptation clears this problem up by having its three main leads all crucially involved in the action.  Curdie and his father still divert the stream, but not before Mayall's Goblin Prince enters Irene's room and proceeds to try and take her down into the mountain depths as either a hostage, or worse.  When Curdie finds out, he has to go on a quick final mission to rescue the Princess.  This culminates in the main heroes duking it out with the villain among a number of outcropped stones in the midst of an artificial waterfall, with a bunch of jagged stones waiting for the first one to take a tumble over the side.

With all due respect to the author, I'm afraid this is an example of the filmmakers being able to improve on the source material.  Gemes and Lyons were able to do MacDonald the favor of giving his closer some much needed tension and action necessary to carry the audience over to the end in a satisfactory manner.  It just has more of the classic sense of excitement and adventure that most of us associate with the fantasy genre.  Aside from this, what strikes the sharp eyed cinephile viewer is the surprising level of talent in front of the camera (or at least in the recording booth) for this performance.  In addition to Mayall, you've got Joss Ackland as Irene's father, the King; Victor Spinetti as one of the other Goblins; and the late, great Roy Kinnear as one of the other denizens under the mountain.  For those who aren't familiar with these names, Ackland was no stranger to roles in fantasy films, as in 1978 he took was part of the voice cast alongside John Hurt in the animated version of Richard Adams' Watership Down.  Victor Spinetti, meanwhile, is probably most famous among Beatles fans.  He was one of the main supporting cast in the Fab Four's 1964 cinematic debut, A Hard Day's Night.  In an interesting twist, Spinetti would later go on to form at least one other tie-in with MacDonald, when he became the first screen actor to play Mr. Tumnus in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (1979).

Then there's Kinnear, and Claire Bloom as Irene's Elvish Grandmother.  I think the former's legacy is pretty well solid as of this writing.  If anyone knows him, it's as the long-suffering father of Verruca Salt in Mel Stuart's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  I think that counts as enough said, for the moment.  Most of us have a well of fond childhood memories to draw from when it comes to Kinnear.  We all know him.  He's a fan favorite.  He's one of the highlights of the Wilder film, and he had great comedic chemistry with Young Frankenstein to the point that Wilder tapped Kinnear to star alongside him in the parody film Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother.  The point is Kinnear had one of those storied careers that needs a column all his own to talk about.  It's also noteworthy that Mr. Salt also performed with Ackland in the animated version of Watership.  The biggest surprise for me, however, was learning that Claire Bloom was in the MacDonald adaptation.  I think she's one of those names that exist somewhere on the tip of the tongue.  You get the sense that she's famous, it may just be difficult to remember where.  She probably best known among fans of classic Horror, as most of us remember her from her greatest role as Eleanor in Robert Wise's 1963 film of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting.

It's a credit to Bloom's talent as an actress that I had no clue who I was hearing whenever it was time for the Grandmother's scenes.  She disappears so well into the role that most viewers won't even know who it is unless they ever get curious enough to look at the cast list.  As a lifelong Horror fan, there's this fun sense of irony about her being cast for the part of sort of like the Aslan figure of the story.  It rests in the strange yet genuine sense of entertainment that comes from knowing that (in a sense) what you're seeing is that Eleanor has gone from being haunted by phantoms, only to turn right around and let herself become an artistic expression for another sort of Ghost.  I think it's all down to the juxtaposition of Jackson's American Gothic blended with MacDonald's Mythopoeia that I find so appealing.  As for how both the book and it's adaptation stack up, the best I can say in each case is this.  George MacDonald appears to have written a genuinely solid fairy story that contained and pioneered a lot of the Fantasy tropes that we now take for granted.  In that sense, his children's novel stands as a good reminder that good stories never exist in a vacuum.  Even the mighty Tolkien stands on the shoulder's of giants, and MacDonald appears to be one of them.  With the story of the Princess Irene and her battle with the Goblins Under the Mountain, you can see the elements that would go in to Middle Earth.

Beyond all that, however, I'd have to say that MacDonald has written a fine modern fairy tale in his own right.  It contains all the best aspects of the classic mode of Fantasy, and is able to present them in a way that doesn't come off as stale or trite.  It is, in many ways, something like the type of story that Walt Disney might have enjoyed making back in the day.  As for the animated film that we did get, a bit of digging reveals that this was a home production based in Wales, with the animation work being headed by Gemes in Hungary.  There's not much more that I could learn.  What I did, however, leads me to believe that this film was made out of a sense of pride, more than anything else.  It was made by a group of actors, performers, and writers who felt that MacDonald deserved to be recognized as a national treasure, and so did the best they could with this little indie animation offering to help honor his memory.  If this was the goal everybody went in with, then the good news is that I'm able to say they've succeeded in my book.  As a distillation of the source text, Gemes and Lyons are able to accomplish two things.  The first has to do with the way they are able to maintain the core nature, meaning, and atmosphere of the novel.  In this regard, the author himself might have been a helper.

It's a very straightforward fairy tale that MacDonald is weaving for his readers.  It's the type of creative idea whose core essentials are so basic, you might be forgiven for thinking all the author has done is to take some long forgotten folk legend and expanded it to a full-fledged narrative.  So in that sense, it was the very simplicity of the book that works in the adaptors favor.  The second great strength of the movie is that Gemes and Lyons were able to take what works in the original book, and in some cases either streamline, or else help to bring it as close to perfection as possible.  I've already cited some of the ways in which the filmmakers were able to make this happen.  There may still be others that I have missed.  So does it get a recommendation for me?  The answer is a very definite yes; with one qualification.  This has to do with the quality of the animation itself.  It's something I'll have to confess doesn't bother me in the slightest.  However, I've been studying the nature and beliefs of contemporary audiences to know that if a script like this is ever going to get a fair hearing, then for whatever reason, some are going to insist that it be given something like the Pixar treatment.  In other words, lots of viewers will probably come away wanting to see this story animated in the style of films such as Frozen.  In other words, they'll want to see the picture in a frame that is deemed more suitable for current tastes.

Please note that when I use the word "suitable" I am not using it in order to say that the style most audiences today might have in mind counts the same as saying it is "better" than what Gemes and his team of animators have done.  I also didn't say that I thought this state of things was a fair one.  I just note the common rule of "When in Rome", and leave it at that.  For my own part, I happen to think the kind of classic storybook style that Gemes has chosen to portray the secondary world of MacDonald's myth is well suited enough on the whole.  I add the constant caveat that it's perhaps a mistake to claim that it will ever be possible for any story to have anything like a complete and definitive visual style.  Such quests for cinematic perfection are forever doomed to failure by the sheer weight of the passage of time and audience tastes.  You'd be surprised at how many people can't get into a film like Citizen Kane, or It's a Wonderful Life for instance, and those are two efforts that are normally taken to be held in high regard.  To which I reply, "Yes, that seems to be true...for how long"?  So it's with that caveat in mind that whenever I look at any film, whether adapted or original, I never bother with the question of cinematography.  I always focus in on the quality of the writing, first, last and always.

It's a good way to cut through all the kind of stylistic BS that gets tossed your way whenever someone tries to justify this or that choice of shot made by the director.  If I have to say something about the quality of Gemes' artwork, then it does have a certain familiar charm about, from my own personal perspective.  It puts me in mind of the kind of afternoon television specials that you were sometimes lucky enough to catch and unwind to once you got home from a long, grueling day at school.  In a pre-internet, analogue era before the advent of social media and streaming, a lot of the former major TV networks had enough loose change to spare on these neat yet affordable little offerings for the kiddies on occasion.  There was even a brief point during the 70s and 80s when both ABC and CBS would devote an extra amount of airtime space to program blocks meant to showcase these independently made, fun yet affordable cartoons that were often just their own little things, with no attachment to the other franchises that used to define Saturday Morning.  In fact, one of these shows, made by CBS, was devoted entirely to animated adaptations of various Young Adult novels that were popular during those pre-Harry Potter decades.  I can see Gemes' film finding a place among all of those programing blocks.

If it had ever managed to be lucky enough to get an airing on 80s to early 90s network television, then it would have first seen the light of day from the 10 to 11 AM timeslot as part of the CBS Storybreak, hosted by Bob "Captain Kangaroo" Keeshan (ask your parents).  It would have been part of perhaps just one single Saturday Morning one-off.  The kind of production that's meant to be used as filler in the otherwise open air time between The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin and the start of the 12 O'clock News.  That would have been it's first "roadshow" performance.  From there, it might make it's way onto cable, and become part of a diet staple of re-airings on the Disney Channel before vanishing off the face of the Earth, until along comes the internet to give it a second form of digital shelf life.  There's a sense in which this has kind of been what's happened to the MacDonald adaptation.  None of it strikes me as fair.  It's also the fate of any story that doesn't capture the public imagination like Frozen.  The adoration that's spent on that reworking of Hans Christian Anderson, or the popular acclaim of a Mask of the Phantasm will probably forever be out of reach of Gemes' efforts.  That's a shame because he, Lyons, Bloom, and Mayall have all worked together to create a very cozy wonderful little gem.  

I can see how there's room for a new adaptation, one done in the "best" style (for however long that lasts).  The kind of picture with all the qualities of the Pixar films at their best.  Even if it's a gradual eventuality that George MacDonald's Princess and the Goblin will one day find its way onto (I was about to say movie screens, but maybe we should be looking more toward streaming services in the future) I hope it doesn't come at the expense of what the artists behind this fun little 90s era Welsh/Hungarian adaptation have managed to pull off.  It's a wonderful little gem that displays the kind of Fantasy storytelling where the key element lies in the excitement of the adventures to be had, rather than the current crop of grim-dark, super serious knock-offs that denote the signs of a genre in a state of stagnation and wheel-spinning.  The more time goes on, it seems that books and films like this exist for a very specific reason.  It's to remind of us of the hidden riches and forgotten modes of telling stories that are still out there, either waiting to be discovered or recovered, and to let us know that there's still plenty of life and pleasure to be had in the Tales of Once Upon a Time.