Review of Phantastes (1858)
George MacDonald (writer).
Read in 2026.
21-year-old Anodos leaves the real world for a time, lost in Fairy Land.
A little well of the clearest water filled a mossy hollow in one corner. I drank, and felt as if I knew what the elixir of life must be; then threw myself on a mossy mound that lay like a couch along the inner end. Here I lay in a delicious reverie for some time; during which all lovely forms, and colours, and sounds seemed to use my brain as a common hall, where they could come and go, unbidden and unexcused.
Phantastes is just barely worth reading for the historical reason that it is, in important ways, the first fantasy novel. It contains some poetry and owes a lot to the preceding generation of British and German Romantic poets, but MacDonald also uses the stale allegorical apophenia of earlier poetry. His contribution to literary history is to add just a little bit of worldbuilding to the mix. His Spenserian Sir Percivale describes Fairy Land in terms of oppositions, moving from the merely dramatic to the explicitly gendered:
If there are great splendours, there are corresponding horrors; heights and depths; beautiful women and awful fiends; noble men and weaklings.
This is unfortunately an accurate description of the book as a whole. Its worldbuilding is truly rudimentary, organized entirely around humankind:
They who believe in the influences of the stars over the fates of men, are, in feeling at least, nearer the truth than they who regard the heavenly bodies as related to them merely by a common obedience to an external law. All that man sees has to do with man.
As a result, the literary idea of a secondary world with a persistent ecology, obedient “to an external law”, is so weak in this novel that you can barely perceive it, but you can perceive it. By way of illustrating why this germ of an invention matters to me, on the other side of the world in the late 1850s, Wilhelm Bleek was just getting started studying African languages with imprisoned “Bushmen” near Cape Town. His African informers would fall victim to genocide, but Bleek’s successor, Lucy Lloyd, would continue to compile the Bleek and Lloyd Archive of ǀxam and ǃkun texts. They describe a shared mythology so powerful in its grip on the human imagination that it has aided later scholars in the interpretation of cave paintings ten thousand years older. This is an astonishing persistence in a network of oral cultures so loose that the perpetrators of its destruction never knew it existed.
In my mind, Phantastes marks the point of inflection in literary history when the original fantasy worldbuilding, which was oral and central, was doomed. It took another 70 years of transition before literate fantasy worldbuilding would truly begin to flower in popular culture, but this successor would always be more fragmentary.
References here: Fantasy with and without consistency, The Night Land (1912), “The Hyborian Age” (1936), A Wizard of Earthsea (1968).