Introduction

There are books we read once and set aside, and there are books that quietly take up residence inside us, shaping the way we imagine courage, goodness, and the unseen world long after we have closed their covers. The Princess and the Goblin belongs unmistakably to the second kind. First published in 1872, this slender, luminous tale has outlived nearly all the children’s fiction of its era, and it continues to enchant new generations precisely because it speaks to something that does not age: the longing to believe that the world is larger and more wondrous than it appears, that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary bravery, and that there is a thread of love running invisibly through all things, waiting to be trusted.

George MacDonald, the Scottish minister, poet, and storyteller who created this book, was a man who understood children not as miniature adults to be instructed, but as imaginative beings to be honored. He did not write down to his readers, nor did he flatter them with empty entertainment. Instead, he offered them stories that took their inner lives seriously—stories in which fear was real, danger was genuine, and goodness cost something. The result is a fairy tale that has the simplicity of a nursery rhyme and the depth of a parable, a story a child can follow with delight and an adult can ponder for a lifetime. This edition presents that timeless tale in a fresh, modern translation, carefully adapted so that today’s reader can move through MacDonald’s enchanted world without stumbling over the dated turns of phrase and Victorian sentence rhythms that can sometimes obscure the brightness of the original. The aim throughout has been to preserve the spirit, the warmth, and the moral seriousness of MacDonald’s voice while making the prose feel as immediate and inviting as it must have felt to the children who first heard it read aloud by candlelight.

Before you begin, it is worth pausing to consider what kind of book you are holding, and why it has earned the devotion of readers as different as the curious child reading under the covers and the grown novelist seeking to understand the roots of modern fantasy. For The Princess and the Goblin is no mere quaint relic. It is one of the foundational works of the entire fantasy tradition, a story whose influence runs like an underground river beneath the great imaginative literature of the twentieth century. To read it well is to read it both as the charming adventure it is on its surface and as the rich, resonant fable it reveals itself to be on closer acquaintance.

George MacDonald was born in 1824 in Huntly, a small town in the northeast of Scotland, into a family of farmers and weavers whose Calvinist faith shaped the air he breathed as a boy. From the start his life was marked by both hardship and a deep, abiding sense of the sacred. He lost his mother early, struggled through poverty, and battled ill health for much of his life, including the tuberculosis that would eventually take several of his own beloved children. Yet from this soil of loss and difficulty grew a man of remarkable tenderness and an almost startling generosity of spirit. He came to reject the harsher elements of the theology he had inherited—the notion of a wrathful, arbitrary God consigning souls to endless punishment—and embraced instead a vision of divine love so wide and patient that it scandalized some of his more rigid contemporaries. When his views cost him his pulpit as a young minister, he turned to writing, and in doing so discovered that he could preach to far more people through stories than he ever could from behind a lectern.

What makes MacDonald so unusual, and so important, is the conviction that ran through everything he wrote: that the imagination is not a frivolous escape from reality but a faculty for perceiving deeper truths. He believed that fairy tales, far from being childish nonsense, could carry meanings too large and too living to be captured in plain argument. “The best thing you can do for your fellow,” he once wrote, “is to wake things up that are in him; or to make him think things for himself.” He did not want to hand his readers tidy lessons; he wanted to stir something awake in them, to set their minds and hearts in motion toward goodness, beauty, and faith. This is why his stories never feel like sermons in disguise, even when they are unmistakably about the deepest things. He trusted the story to do its own work.

It is impossible to overstate the influence MacDonald had on the writers who came after him. C. S. Lewis famously said that he had never written a book in which he did not quote from MacDonald, and he described picking up MacDonald’s Phantastes as a young man as the moment that “baptized” his imagination, beginning the long process that would lead him to faith and, eventually, to the creation of Narnia. J. R. R. Tolkien knew and admired his work; the goblins of this very book are among the literary ancestors of the goblins and orcs who would later populate Middle-earth. G. K. Chesterton called The Princess and the Goblin a book that “made a difference to my whole existence,” praising it for capturing the truth that the real fight of life takes place inside the home and the heart, and that the things which threaten us most often hide in the cellars and dark places just beneath our daily lives. W. H. Auden, Madeleine L’Engle, and countless others have acknowledged the debt. When you read this book, in other words, you are not reading a curiosity from a forgotten corner of literary history. You are reading one of the wellsprings from which an entire genre flowed.

But MacDonald would have been the first to insist that none of this matters unless the story itself delights you. And it will. He had a particular genius for the texture of childhood—the way a great house feels enormous and full of secrets to a small person, the way a kind face can banish terror, the way the line between the magical and the ordinary is so thin for a child that it is hardly worth drawing. He remembered, as few adults manage to, exactly what it felt like to be young and uncertain and brave in spite of being afraid. That remembered truthfulness is everywhere in these pages, and it is the reason the story still feels alive.

Without giving away the turns of the tale that await you, it is worth saying a little about the landscape in which this story unfolds, because MacDonald’s settings are never merely backdrops. They are part of the meaning. At the heart of the book is a great rambling house set high on the side of a mountain—a house with countless rooms, winding staircases, and passages that seem to go on forever, the kind of place where exploration is both an invitation and a risk. Above the house rise the slopes and peaks; below it, and within the mountain itself, lies another realm entirely, a world of dim caverns and subterranean tunnels inhabited by creatures who long ago withdrew from the light of day.

MacDonald draws these two worlds—the bright, airy world above and the cramped, shadowy world below—with wonderful clarity, and part of the pleasure of the book lies simply in moving between them. There is the comfort of warm firelight and the company of those who love us, and there is the genuine thrill of darkness, of cold passages and listening silences and the dread of what might be coming through the dark. MacDonald understood that children are not made braver by being protected from fear, but by being shown that fear can be faced and overcome. His underground world is genuinely frightening—he does not pretend otherwise—and yet the story never abandons its young readers to despair. There is always, somewhere, a light to be found, a thread to be followed, a hand to take hold of.

The mountain setting also carries an old and resonant symbolism. Heights have always stood for aspiration, for the things we reach toward, for clarity and hope; depths have always represented danger, the unknown, the primal forces that lurk beneath the polished surface of our lives. By placing his story across these two zones, MacDonald gives his simple adventure a quiet mythic grandeur. We feel, without being told, that the journey up and down the mountain is also a journey of the soul.

And then there is the matter of the staircase—or rather, of a certain staircase that leads, against all expectation, not down into the dark but up into rooms that should not exist, rooms full of moonlight and mystery. I will say no more about what is found there, only that it is among the most beautiful inventions in all of children’s literature, and that MacDonald handles it with a delicacy and restraint that lesser writers could never have managed. He does not over-explain. He lets the wonder be wondrous. When you encounter it, you will understand why generations of readers have carried the memory of it with them into adulthood.

The creatures who dwell beneath the mountain deserve a word as well, for MacDonald’s goblins are among his most original creations. They are not the cute, comical goblins of later children’s stories, nor are they figures of pure malice. They are something stranger and more interesting—a people with their own history, their own grievances, their own peculiar customs and weaknesses, who once lived above ground and were driven below long ago. MacDonald gives them a society, a king and queen, schemes and ambitions. This refusal to make his villains simply monstrous, this insistence on understanding even the dark powers as creatures with their own logic, is one of the marks of his moral imagination, and it gives the story a depth and seriousness that elevate it far above the ordinary tale of good and evil. The goblins are dangerous, yes, and you will tremble for the characters when the goblins are near. But MacDonald never lets you forget that they were not always so, and that the line between the dwellers above and the dwellers below was not drawn by nature but by old choices and old wrongs.

Courage, Faith, and the Thread We Cannot See

If there is a single golden thread—and the image is deliberate—running through this book, it is the question of trust. Again and again, MacDonald’s young heroine is asked to believe in something she cannot prove, to follow a guidance she cannot fully see, to walk forward in the dark on the strength of a promise. This is, of course, an image of faith, and MacDonald meant it to be. But it is faith of a particular and beautiful kind, very different from blind obedience or fearful submission. It is the faith of a child who trusts because she has been loved, who follows because she has learned that the one who guides her has never failed her, who finds that her courage grows not from certainty but from relationship.

This is why the book never feels preachy, even though it is profoundly concerned with the deepest things. MacDonald does not lecture us about virtue; he shows us a child discovering, through real danger and real choices, what it means to be brave, to be truthful, to keep a promise even when keeping it is hard, to believe in goodness even when the evidence of the senses points the other way. He understood that the great virtues are not abstractions to be memorized but living realities to be practiced, and he dramatizes them with such gentleness and such honesty that we absorb them almost without noticing.

There is also a remarkable companion to the princess in this tale—a young miner’s boy, a child of the working people who labor in the depths near where the goblins dwell. Through him MacDonald introduces a different but equally important kind of courage: the steady, practical, unglamorous bravery of ordinary people doing their work and protecting those they love. The friendship between these two children, born across the gulf of class that so rigidly divided Victorian society, is one of the quiet glories of the book. MacDonald, who never forgot the poverty of his own beginnings and who saw in working people a dignity that his society too often denied them, gives this boy a nobility of soul every bit as real as the princess’s royal blood. The story insists, without ever saying so directly, that true nobility is a matter of character rather than birth—a radical and lovely idea, then as now.