The Novel That Inspired The Hobbit — and Created a Genre In Its Wake: George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872)
For many readers, the genre of modern fantasy begins with J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 children’s novel, The Hobbit, which famously opens with the sentence: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” (3). According to the author, this sentence seemed to dance out of thin air as he was grading School Certificate papers: “[a candidate] had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it (which is the best thing that can possibly happen to an examiner) and I wrote on it…Names always generated a story in my mind. Eventually I thought I’d better find out what hobbits were like” (Shippey 2).
Though a captivating origin story, it leaves out a second, and much earlier text Tolkien may have scribbled on: George MacDonald’s 1872 children’s classic, The Princess and the Goblin. In Chapter 19, the miner’s son, Curdie, finds himself trapped in a Goblin cave without immediate hope of rescue. To while away the time and puff up his courage, Curdie makes up a song about the Goblins, which begins, “Once there was a goblin/Living in a hole;/Busy he was cobblin’/A shoe without a sole” (142). Is it possible that while trapped in a cave of examination papers, Tolkien recalled this childhood ditty from one of his favorite books, and whimsically substituted a hobbit for a goblin?
MacDonald’s goblins, after all, are more akin to hobbits and dwarves than Tolkien’s own goblins, and their subterranean realm bears a distinct family resemblance to the dwarven kingdom of Khazad-dûm. Even more fascinating is the rest of the song, which puns on the words sole/soul in a Tolkienesque manner: “Where ’tis all a hole, sir,/Never can be holes:/Why should their shoes have soles, sir,/When they’ve got no souls?” (143).
The ditty sounds plucked from Chapter 5 of The Hobbit, where Gollum and Bilbo are engaged in a war of riddles over Bilbo’s soul. Bilbo ultimately defeats Gollum — who could have easily devoured him — with a childish amusement, just as Curdie escapes the goblin’s lair with a similar ruse (as the goblins have an aversion to singing). This is perhaps the most important link between the two works, and the one Tolkien most clearly learned from his fantasy forbearer: that the “child is the father to the man” (to crib Wordsworth), and fantasy is the invisible thread binding them both together.
Like The Hobbit, The Princess and the Goblin is also a “there and back again” adventure story, but with two protagonists to Tolkien’s one: Irene, the young princess, and her friend, the miner’s son, Curdie. Both children live in the mountains over an enormous netherworld of goblins, who doggedly plot revenge on the surface world. Their plan is to kidnap Irene and force her into a marriage with the goblin king’s son, Harelip, or failing that, flood the mining caverns and all the miners with them. Curdie stumbles upon this information when he finds a secret entrance to the goblins’ lair in the depths of the mines. Unfortunately, he soon delves too deep into their kingdom and finds himself cornered by the goblin queen and her formidable granite shoes.
Imprisoned by the goblins’ art, his only chance of rescue is by Irene, whom he previously saved from a goblin encounter along with her stern but distracted nurse, Lottie. Irene has a magic thread given to her by her great-great-grandmother (whom she alone can see), which always finds the way to safety. She uses the thread to penetrate deep into the tunnels and free Curdie, though upon their return, no one believes their story — least of all Lottie, who thinks Curdie a disgraceful ruffian who has no business consorting with his betters.
The goblins’ plan now begins in haste, and they methodically tunnel under the castle into the wine cellar, where they lay siege to the palace searching for Irene. Curdie returns just in time to save her, as well as Lottie, who is almost carried off as a consolation prize. Meanwhile, the miners, informed of the goblins’ intentions, build protective walls in the mines to save them from the impending flood. When it comes, the water is diverted back into the goblins’ lair and into the castle itself (thanks to their recent tunneling), where it floods the wine cellar and much of the lower floors, which are now clotted with drowned goblins. The story ends with Curdie getting his promised kiss from Irene (which Lottie previously refused him), while the narrator hints that the goblins’ “skulls became softer as well as their hearts” rendering them as harmless as the “Scotch Brownies” (235).
From this synopsis we can glean one of the most distinct traits of MacDonald’s goblins: that far from being grotesque, irredeemable ‘orcs,’ the goblins are meant to be recognizably human to the reader. They are clever, wily, mischievous, spiteful, and ultimately, capable of redemption. In other words, they resemble children who are often called “goblins” (or worse) by their disapproving parents.
In this way the story shares a common heritage with Victorian children’s books which tried to terrify children into being good little boys and girls. MacDonald, however, clearly loved children, and hoped to take the terror out of the lesson, offering a much gentler moral to the reader. It is no surprise that the goblins are smaller than human folk, and are considered a “strange race of beings, called by some gnomes, by some kobolds, by some goblins” (2).
In a further pun on their size, the goblins have also shrunk on the evolutionary scale, since “at one time they lived above ground, and were very like other people. But for some reason or other…they had all taken refuge in the subterranean caverns, whence they never came out but at night” (2–3). The goblins have also lost the distinction of toes, and have soft, rounded feet which are their great weakness, while their heads have become almost rock-solid. However, the goblin queen is the missing link between both races, as she alone has toes which she hides in her grotesque footwear. So their fall from grace, while considerable, is not absolute, for even the wickedest child is not beyond hope of redemption.
Though an ordained minister of the Scottish Congregational Church, MacDonald regularly advocated a doctrine of universal salvation and redemption for all, rather than the Calvinism then status quo. For this he was more or less drummed out of his congregation, and became an author as a means of advancing to a much wider pulpit. Surprising, however, was his use of the fairy tale (then as now, virtually synonymous with children’s literature) as a medium for his message. Yet MacDonald did not see his work as juvenile, nor so-called ‘fairy stories’ as a lower form of art. As he explains in his 1893 essay, “The Fantastic Imagination,”
I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether five, or fifty, or seventy-five. A fairy tale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory…A fairytale, like a butterfly or a bee, helps itself on all sides, sips at every wholesome flower, and spoils not one. (Knoepflmacher 7–8)
Far from using fairy tales to impress a rigid, point-by-point lesson to his readers, MacDonald had a far greater intention: to invoke a sense of wonder and the sublime. Like the Romantic poets before him, MacDonald wanted his readers to experience the thrill of childlike wonder, when rainbows were magic beacons to be chased to their source rather than dismissed as optical illusions. As he writes, “The best thing you can do…[is] not to give [a reader] things to think about, but to wake thing up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself” (9).
This is the unique property of so-called fairy tales, which invoke our shared ancestral childhood, both the stories we heard as children and the stories of humanity’s infancy. To hear these stories is to become young again in age and spirit, able to ask new questions and find new answers to the eternal truths.
Fairy tales also challenge the very nature of belief, since the mechanics of the story are beyond belief; a world of fairies and goblins has to be taken on faith, or dismissed outright. Such is the dilemma of our two protagonists in the story, Princess Irene and the miner’s son, Curdie. At the beginning of the story, Irene finds her way up a hidden stairway to a tucked-away room where a woman claiming to be her great-great-grandmother lives, working at a magic spinning-wheel. When Irene protests that she has never seen a light glowing from this room before, and that no one — not even her nurse, Lottie — has seen it, her great-great-grandmother explains, “I will tell you a secret — if that light were to go out you would fancy yourself lying in a bare garret, on a heap of old straw, and would not see one of the pleasant things round about you all the time” (89).
This is her first lesson about the ‘reality’ of childhood: that wonder is in the eye of the beholder. The room exists if she believes it does, and if she knows how (and where) to look. Those who insist on explanations or who know better than to find great-great-grandmothers at spinning wheels in abandoned towers will never find them, and perhaps never truly find themselves. That part of their existence is lost, locked away in rooms inaccessible to those without the key of wide-eyed wonder.
When Irene leaves her great-great-grandmother, her greatest challenge is to believe that it really happened, which is easier said than done in a world that confines make-believe to the nursery. Once she begins to doubt, the light goes out in her great-great-grandmother’s room, and even the stairwell leading to the room mysteriously disappears. What saves Irene is her innocence, which naturally holds doubt at bay, and quickly replaces her “why?” with a “why not?” As her great-great-grandmother tells her, “it is not everybody can see it…It is a gift born with you. And one day I hope everybody will have it” (112).
As MacDonald makes clear in the book, both children possess this natural gift, and are able to convince others to believe as well. Yet having the gift is not enough; is must be practiced and followed, much as Irene has to follow the magic thread through the darkest depths of the dungeons to Curdie’s cell. If she doubted its existence, or turned away to seek a safer path, the thread would disappear, and she would be irrecoverably lost.
Curdie has his own test of faith when Irene, after rescuing him from the goblin tunnels, invites him up to her great-great-grandmother’s room. As a young miner, Curdie has been introduced to the world of men and stands at the threshold of adulthood. For this reason, he sees nothing in the room but straw and cobwebs, and even accuses Irene of making a fool of him. More importantly, when Irene guides his hand to the invisible thread that brought them here, she asks him,
“you feel it yourself — don’t you?”
“I feel nothing at all,” replied Curdie.
“Then what can be the matter with your finger? I feel it perfectly” (165).
In short, he can feel nothing, as he has learned to think his way through everything in life, from the goblin tunnels to his relationship with Irene. Luckily for him, he has his own fairy godmother at home in the form of his mother, who scolds him for calling Irene a liar. Her words strike deep into the adult mind that discounts the perspective of children:
[you don’t believe her] because you do not understand it. If you did, you would probably find it was an explanation, and believe it thoroughly. I don’t blame you for not being able to believe it, but I do blame you for fancying such a child would try to deceive you. Why should she? Depend upon it, she told you all she knew. Until you had found a better way of accounting for it all, you might at least have been more sparing of your judgment. (180)
The statement goes far beyond fairy-tale logic, and hints at the secrets of a child’s psyche. When children speak of monsters under the bed or other seemingly irrational fears, the fear is not contrived or made-up; it is an imaginative expression of their inner reality. Even if Irene had been chasing windmills instead of giants, this belief is solely responsible for leading them safely out of the goblins’ labyrinth. As Irene suggests, “you must believe without seeing,” which underlines the personal rather than empirical nature of faith. It also requires him to believe that a mere girl (and a princess, to boot) is capable of saving the kingdom. That he finally comes to accept this role says much for his own heroism and humility…qualities that will eventually make him a suitable husband and king.
In MacDonald’s eyes, every child is capable of saving the world, be they a princess, miner, or goblin. The sole qualification rests on their inner nobility, which belies their place in the social order. For this reason he never uses Irene’s position as a crutch for her goodness, but constantly has her demonstrate her nobility (or virtue) to the reader. She is respectful to her elders, always keeps her word, and treats even the flowers in her path as equals. In one passage, we see her greeting a primrose that grows on the mountain, “[clapping] her hands with gladness, and unlike some children I know, instead of pulling it, would touch it as tenderly as if it had been a new baby, and having made its acquaintance, would leave it as happy as she found it” (125).
This unconscious humility resembles the child in Wordsworth’s “They Are Seven,” who sees no difference between her living and dead siblings, since they are all “seven” in her eyes (much to the annoyance of the adult narrator, who attempts to teach her otherwise). In the same way, Curdie goes out of his way not to kill goblins with his axe, and instead “[turning] the end which was square and blunt like a hammer, and with that came down a hard blow on the head of the goblin nearest him” (136) Similarly, he even sees the frightful goblin queen as a woman, and one to whom he owes a modicum of chivalry, however much she rejects it. To make sure we get his point, MacDonald later tells us, “So you see there is some ground for supposing that Curdie was not a miner only, but a prince as well. Many such instances have been known in the world’s history” (195).
In the end, one could interpret The Princess and the Goblin as a gentle way of instructing a child in the rudiments of Christian belief. Yet the story contains not a single mention of God — strange for any Victorian tale — nor any overt moral to guide the reader to the proper shore of meaning. Indeed, in “The Fantastic Imagination,” he has a hypothetical reader ask him, “how am I to assure myself that I am not reading my own meaning into [the story], but yours out of it?,” and more pointedly, “Suppose my child asks me what the fairytale means, what am I to say?” (Knoepflmacher 7).
These questions are anathema to MacDonald’s aesthetic (and his theology) which never tells a child what to believe; it simply invites them to start the journey. As he writes, “A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean…while God’s work cannot mean more than he meant, man’s work must mean more than he meant” (Knoepflmacher 7–9). In his mind, a book should leave the reader in wonder, seeing many paths in the woods, yet realizing (à la Robert Frost) that each has been worn about the same. Questions are the answer, yet no answer is the final destination.
It is refreshing to see MacDonald renounce the intentional fallacy by saying that true art must always “mean more than [you] meant,” and should live and grow in the minds of all who read it. A fairy tale is not an allegory, since it is not a map; the symbols of myth and magic are ever-shifting, making sure that the adventure never takes the same path twice. A child can read the book and simply delight in the goblin adventures, while the same child, as an adult, will find consoling wisdom in the great-great-grandmother’s statement that “old age means strength and beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes and strong painless limbs” (118).
What makes the book a true work of art, and perhaps the true great-great-grandmother of the fantasy genre itself, is its ability to thread so many realities into a single, believable world. As Sheila A. Egoff writes in Worlds Within (1988), “From him…later writers learned the art of creating a multi-level fantasy — stories with plots that have their own inner consistency and inevitability without the overt intrusion of an exterior purpose, but which, indeed, also have such a purpose” (61). It is a statement as beautifully illustrative of The Princess and the Goblin as of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings…and Tolkien also pulled no punches about his dislike of allegory in art. Clearly he learned from the master when, in an idle moment, he followed a hobbit into his hole in the ground, and found it populated with MacDonald’s princesses, miners, and goblins.
