ELEMENTS OF SCOTTISH FOLKLORE IN VICTORIAN FANTASY LITERATURE: A STUDY
ProEtica- Revistă Culturală
ISSN 2734-8954
ISSN-L 2734-8954
11.03.2022
ELEMENTS OF SCOTTISH FOLKLORE IN VICTORIAN FANTASY LITERATURE: A STUDY
ANCA ȘMULEAC
ȘCOALA GIMNAZIALĂ "DR. GHEORGHE TITEˮ SᾸPẬNȚA
When considering the influence of Scottish folklore as reverberated by MacDonald's work, the fact that the writer was a great storyteller, eager to depict his Scottish rural landscapes, while taking advantage of the oral folk culture is not a novelty but it provides a clearer image. According to Jason M. Harris, legends and fairy tales as narratives forms of folklore served as source of inspiration for British fantasy writers, too, since "folklore is alive - not dead - in texts of the literary fantastic where traditional beliefs and motifs compete for narrative authority with normative and elite standards" (viii).
Harris claims that they borrowed, adapted, or reinforced symbols, folk motifs, beliefs, superstitions, folk-tales themes and characters, human or animal, in reaction to the influence of "metaphysical and moral discourse of both realism and the gothic" (1). Moreover, his conclusive statement denotes that what was once regarded as an unsuitable genre to be approached by literate people now had became canonical in the public sphere:
"Nineteenth-century literary representations of fairy tales, folk legends, and superstitions are the culmination of attitudes towards the supernatural in general and folklore in particular. While post-Enlightenment philosophers and scientists claimed to have the power to banish superstition, the attraction of folk metaphysics - the rules, behaviors, powers, tendencies, and borders of the spiritual world implied by popular beliefs - persisted in both rural and urban contexts. (5)
And such a conclusion is fully appropriate to provide validation for the remark of Colin Manlove in The Fantasy Literature of England, when proclaiming fairy tales as the most influential literary writings of the Victorian fantasies.
Considering that the generic definition of folk legends given by folklorists describes stories with characters, ordinary people or of heroic typology, who run across miraculous creatures, witness or undergo uncanny phenomena (Harris, Folklore and the Fantastic in 19th-century British Fiction 4), it may be concluded that MacDonald's fantasies make use of folk tale characteristics. The Princess and the Goblin unveils the story of princess Irene and her friend, Curdie, the miner boy, who get to meet supernatural characters as the old lady from the tower or ugly creatures known as the goblins of the subterranean, and as a result they go on adventurous situations in order to save their lives and reach the finish line of their journey and spiritual transformation.
While mythology involves supernatural creatures, beastly animals or giant evil monsters, MacDonald's choice for goblins in his Princess books might have been regarded by some quite peculiar. Representative for the Western European folklore, according to Joseph Sherman's Storytelling: An Encyclopedia of Mythology and Folklore, the goblins are described as really ugly creatures, generally as small as farie dwarfs:
"odd, grotesque fairy creatures that are capable of mischievous and even outright evil behavior. (...) Some goblins can change their shape, taking on animal, though not human, form. In addition to playing dark pranks, goblins have some other abilities. (...) They are said to be able to create nightmares to trouble humans, or to steal away human children and sometimes women. The children are sometimes replaced with goblin babies or changelings." ("Goblins")
However, the Scottish writer went beyond folklore-inspired prototype as he was indirectly pointing at contemporary social and cultural conflicts. Christine Chettle, looking for similes and fairy tale elements in the Princess stories and Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, notices that, in addition to a merger of symbols, motifs of oral tradition and psychological insights, "both MacDonald and Rosetti reflect on the transformations of communities in conflict in ways that propel debate on contemporary issues" (122), thus encouraging to look further for contemporary corespondent in the social phenomenon of moral degradation.
Animals with their special representations in fantasies are also the result of folk tales influence, but in Victorian fantasies they bear a more complex meaning as implied by Dieter Petzold because the British viewpoint of animals in the Victorian age cannot be described "without using the word alienation" (5). Apparently, city people were overwhelmed by a sense of estrangement from nature and its animals, maybe having the feeling that they lost their origin and the connection with mother nature and God, all these under the impact of industrialization. Similarly, the animals of the goblins in The Princess and the Goblin betray a state of degeneration and have the same horrid looks as their masters. This proves that they, too, bear the stamps of brutalization, given by their communion with the goblins in the underground world.
In conclusion, the generic examples provided above emphasize the fact that most of the fairy tales motifs, mythopoeic forms, and folklore elements are used by George MacDonald to provide fantasy plots. All these, according to Jason M. Harris, actually reveal "a heroic pattern of confrontation between devotion to spiritual ideals and desire for material gain" (77) as experienced by most of his contemporaries. Moreover, the writer's choice for the tragic ending of the goblins and their extermination as a nation betrays his disbelief and pessimism about the bright promise of modern times for a better brave new world. And the result turned out to be truly provoking because, as Marina Warner clearly states, in his desire to adapt the fantasy discourse to his own vision, though under the impact of his time, George MacDonald managed to deliver "a crossover form of quite exceptional fertility" (81), and thus he succeeded to stir the imagination of children and adults alike.
References
Chettle, Christine. "Imagining Reformed Communities: Discussing Social Myths in George MacDonald's Princess Novels and Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market'." Rethinking George MacDonald: Contexts and Contemporaries, edited by Christopher MacLachlan, et al., Glasgow: ASLS, 2013, pp. 121-139, www.muse.jhu.edu/book/29064. Accessed 11 June 2021
Harris, Jason Marc. Folklore and the Fantastic in 19th-century British Fiction. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.
Manlove, Colin. The Fantasy Literature of England. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.
MacDonald, George. The Princess and the Goblin. New York: Book of Wonder, 1986, www.archive.org/details/princessgoblin000macd. Accessed 2 February, 2021.
Petzold, Dieter. "Beasts and Monsters in MacDonald's Fantasy Stories." North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 1995, pp. 4-21, www.digitalcommons.snc.edu/ northwind/vol14/iss1/1. Accessed 15 June 2021.
Reis, Richard. George MacDonald. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1972, www.archive.org/details/georgemacdonald0119reis. Accessed 5 February 2021.
Sherman, Joseph, editor. Storytelling: An Encyclopedia of Mythology and Folklore. Armonk, NY: Sharpe Reference 2008, www.academia.edu/35406644/An_Encyclopedia_of_Mythology _and_Folklore_pdf. Accessed 2 June 2021.
Warner, Marina. Fairy Tale: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018.