Scotland’s Forgotten Treasure: The Visionary Romances of George Mac-Donald by Colin Manlove (review)

Colin Manlove frames Scotland’s Forgotten Treasure by identifying “desire” as a central theme of George MacDonald’s fairy tales and fantasy (xiv, 159), especially in the three romances that focus this study: Phantastes (1858), “The Golden Key” (1867), and Lilith (1895). MacDonald’s greatest desire was for God and heaven, fueling his approach to fairy tales, “with their own drive towards happy endings, as pictures of his own desire” (161). Manlove claims MacDonald as a “prime exponent” of Scottish fantasy and its connection with the land, “legendary creatures,” a solitary and interior focus, and a protracted sense of longing (x–xi). He also asserts that MacDonald deserves acknowledgment as a great Scottish writer (166). Manlove could, but does not, analyze MacDonald alongside other Scottish authors: “[Robert] Burns, [Walter] Scott, [James] Hogg, [Thomas] Carlyle, [Robert Lewis] Stevenson, [Andrew] Lang, ‘Fiona Macleod,’ [J. M.] Barrie, David Lindsay, Neil Gunn and George Mackay Brown” (x). As written, the book centers much more on the “visionary romances” of the subtitle than on Scottish literature.

For fairy-tale scholars, the first three chapters on MacDonald’s life, theology, and literary predecessors provide rich insights into his distinctive views. The next three chapters discuss each of the three romances and see them as a meandering, attentive progression of MacDonald’s thought on God, love, possibility, and human destiny. The opening chapters portray a unique understanding of Christian faith and life that informs MacDonald’s vision of fairy tales’ purpose and potential. A fruitful conceptualization emerges that involves the Scottish fantasy traits of isolation, rationality and the unconscious, nature, and longing, and the English trait of journeying through a secondary world (x–xi). Descended from clan MacDonald of Glencoe, MacDonald studied at Aberdeen University and Highbury Theological College but was removed from his first church assignment because of his “liberal and heterodox theological views” (1). Manlove admits that his prolonged study reveals that MacDonald’s “faith is the constant ground of everything he does, and the root of almost every pleasure he takes in life” (6). That heterodox faith involves MacDonald’s conviction that “the sole truth of the world [becomes] God and love”; thus it follows that his fairy tales and fantasy writing cherish the mortal world while anticipating another, better one (6).

Chapter 2 relates MacDonald’s fairy tales with his theological and literary vision. This explores the imagination and the nature of God. MacDonald understands God as a creator of an ongoing universe whose material form expresses God’s thoughts, including human beings, which stem from God’s imagination and also participate in creation through their own imaginations (10). Thus, for MacDonald, the fairy tale is God’s “idiom” because it affords insight into the natural world and the imagination in symbolic terms, “seen as by a child, full of magic, or like a dream, a collection of seemingly random events” (11). MacDonald’s fairy stories at times resemble those collected by the Grimms, such as “The Giant’s Heart,” yet his other popular stories like “The Light Princess” and “The Golden Key” innovate with structure, texture, and mood. What MacDonald’s traditional and inventive stories share is “their source in the imagination,” which for MacDonald connects with creation, with artistry, and ultimately with God (13).

Chapter 3 contextualizes MacDonald’s work with a variety of writers, especially those religiously and fantastically inclined. MacDonald fits in a literary tradition involved with the imagination and world building. Manlove observes that pre-Enlightenment thought and belief support the production of imaginary worlds, as in Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and the Grail legends. When Renaissance and Enlightenment rationality paralleled, or usurped, supernatural thought, Manlove asserts that “Christianity was the one exception to the general rule on excluding the supernatural from literature,” citing the work of seventeenth-century poets John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan (31). John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) resonates with MacDonald because it is a journey...