The Princess and the Goblin

The Princess and the Goblin is a fantasy novel for children by George MacDonald, first published in 1872. MacDonald, who lived from 1824 to 1905, was the Scottish minister, novelist, and fantasy writer whose various fairy tale and fantasy works for children and adults established him as one of the principal founders of the modern English language fantasy tradition.

The novel is set in a mountain kingdom where the underground caverns are inhabited by a race of goblins who have developed a deep grievance against the human inhabitants of the surface world. The young Princess Irene, who lives in a country house at the foot of the mountain with her nurse and her father the king, encounters the goblin threat when the goblin king’s plan to kidnap her becomes part of the central plot. She is helped by a young miner boy named Curdie, who has substantial knowledge of the goblin underground, and by her own mysterious great great grandmother whose tower at the top of the country house contains substantial magical resources of various kinds.

MacDonald’s particular contribution to the fantasy tradition was the combination of straightforward children’s adventure plot with serious religious and philosophical material running underneath. The grandmother figure in the tower is recognisably a divine figure of some kind, with the various encounters between her and Irene functioning as a kind of religious or spiritual instruction for the child. The goblins are not simply enemies but represent the various forms of fallen or warped consciousness that have lost contact with the higher reality the grandmother represents.

MacDonald’s fantasy work substantially influenced later writers in the tradition, particularly C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien, both of whom acknowledged substantial debts to MacDonald’s example. C S Lewis read MacDonald in his teens and wrote that his work had given him a particular kind of imaginative experience that he could find nowhere else, and the Narnia books show various direct debts to MacDonald’s narrative methods.

The novel runs about two hundred pages and is suitable for children of about eight upward to read for themselves and for younger children to be read aloud to. It pairs naturally with its sequel The Princess and Curdie, with At the Back of the North Wind, and with MacDonald’s adult fantasy novels Phantastes and Lilith.