George MacDonalds The Princess and the Goblin :: MacDonald Princess Goblin Essays

George MacDonalds The Princess and the GoblinIn his novel The Princess and the Goblin, George MacDonald has cleverly crafted an secret ordering populated by a distorted and ludicrously grotesque race. inside the body of his tale, he reveals that these people are descended from humans, and did in fact, once upon a time, live upon the surface themselves. Only eons of living separated from fresh convey and sunlight reserve caused them to evolve into the misshapen animate beings we meet in this recital (MacDonald, 2-4). MacDonald calls the beings brownies, and while they certainly whitethorn fit that definition from a nineteenth century point of view, they are far more akin to the dwarves that we save come to know from classic stories like Tolkiens Lord of the Rings and universal games like Dungeons & Dragons, as well as countless movies, cartoons and video games. Still, it is befool that MacDonald had a considerable knowledge of folklore and mythology and that he drew upon tha t background to help oneself evoke and manifest a convincing culture of underground dwellers, or little folk.There seems to be little agreement, at least in a modern world of mass communication, of what exactly a goblin is. The origin of the word appears to come from the medieval French town of Evreux, which claims to have been haunted by a demon named Gobelinus (who may or may not have been, at one point, an actual living person). From in that respect the term evolved to refer to any small spirit or creature who (unlike modern interpretations of the word) may be either good or bad, only if is almost certainly mischievous (Wiseley). Dwarves, on the other hand, are excessively small creatures, but the popular connotation is one of a loosely amiable and hard-working being who lives underground building mines. MacDonalds creations fall somewhere in between these descriptions, but they probably lay closer to the latter.Scandinavia and Germany are the master(a) homes to the legends that inspired both MacDonald and many other writers both before and since. The Scandinavians rundle of the country that the dwarves hailed from, calling it Svartalfheim. This land of dark elves was described as a dark, cold realm of caverns, sounding convincingly like the twisting, black underground tunnels which Curdie is forced to blindly explore. An alternative to this hidden land was Nifleheim, a land of the dead that could also easily pass for MacDonalds subterranean labyrinth (Mott).