Phantastes: a Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858) by George MacDonald is an extended fairy tale in which Anodos, a youth just coming of age, enters a hauntingly beautiful fairy wood. Ever pursuing his ideal of beauty, he meets many of the inhabitants of the enchanted world, overcoming obstacles as he learns what it means to become not just a man but a good man, eventually achieving union with the divine.

George MacDonald (1824-1905) was a Scottish minister who wrote fiction and poetry. He is credited as the precursor of what shortly became modern fantasy literature. He associated with such illustrious contemporaries as Lewis Carroll, John Ruskin, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope. His influence inspired a new generation of writers as diverse as W. H. Auden, Madeleine L’Engle, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Edith Nesbit, and G. K. Chesterton, several of whom describe his work as having transformed their lives.

Plot Summary

On his 21st birthday, the protagonist, Anodos, receives the key to the old secretary desk he inherited from his late father. Opening the desk, he releases a tiny fairy woman who tells him he will find his way to Fairy Land on the morrow. Waking the next morning, he finds his room transforming itself into a Fairy Land. Setting out to explore, he encounters a young woman who warns him not to trust the Ash and Alder trees.

Going on, he finds a cottage between four great oak trees where the mother of the girl he just met lives. The woman tells Anodos about Fairy Land and shows him the wicked Ash tree whose spirit wants to snuff out all goodness and beauty. While at the woman’s cottage, Anodos picks up a book and reads a passage about the Arthurian knight, Sir Percival, whose armor is rusted.

Anodos leaves the cottage and pauses to watch the antics of the little flower fairy children until Ash finds him. Anodos flees and is almost caught until he falls into the arms of a Beech tree woman who protects him through the night. In the morning, Anodos continues his journey. In a cave, he finds a marble statue of a beautiful woman. Inspired by her beauty, he spontaneously sings a song that wakes her, but she flees from him into the woods. He encounters an unnamed night in rusted armor who wants him to steer clear of the Alder woman, a dangerous seductress and ally of the Ash spirit.

Anodos pursues the Marble Lady and thinks he has found her, but the entrancing woman he finds is the wicked Alder woman, who is nothing but a hollow shell. She lulls him to sleep with stories and betrays him to the Ash spirit. Anodos flees again and is almost caught, but he is saved.

In a cottage, Anodos finds another woman and her little daughter. The woman’s husband is an agnostic, and his cheerful pragmatism almost overcomes Anodos’s belief in Fairy Land, but the little girl restores his belief.

Next, he comes to a cottage occupied by an ogress disguised as a woman, who warns him not to open a certain closet door, which Anodos promptly does. Inside, he encounters his own shadow, which follows him on his journey, smothering the magic of Fairy Land wherever it falls. During his wanderings, he meets a maiden in the wood. She carries a crystal globe that she greatly treasures. Anodos has an overwhelming urge to hold it and takes it. However, it trembles and then shatters, and the maiden flees, heartbroken.

At the next stage of his journey, Anodos enters a palace containing many rooms, one of which is labeled as his own. In the library, he reads a story: The protagonist, Cosmo, falls in love with a Princess he sees in a mirror and sets out to try to free her, which he does at the point of his own death.

Anodos discovers the Marble Lady as a statue once again on a pedestal but shrouded by Anodos’s shadow, and he sings her into existence. When she reappears, however, she is still made of marble. Instead of continuing to sing, Anodos loses patience and tries to take hold of her. She comes to life and flees him. He follows her to a great pit in the earth and, descending, enters the underworld, where he learns that the lady is never destined to be his. She belongs to a greater and better man than he. Defiantly, Anodos declares that if a better man exists, he should have the lady.

Anodos emerges from the underworld onto a bleak seashore. Throwing himself into the ocean, he is born up and carried to a low island on which lives an ancient woman in a cottage containing four doors. Anodos passes through them one by one. The first shows him a scene from childhood in which he feels guilty for the death of his brother. The second shows him the knight married to the Marble Lady, and he overhears the lady saying she loves Anodos as the boy who sang her to life, but her true love is for the knight. The third door shows him a girl whose heart he broke and reveals that the knight and the lady are his ancestors. He never remembers what is behind the fourth door except that the old lady had to save him at great cost.

The old lady sends Anodos out, commanding him to do something worthwhile. Anodos meets two brothers who ask him to be their third brother and help them fight three giants terrorizing the kingdom. They teach Anodos the craft of armory, and he sings songs to give them courage and fortitude. The brothers are surprised by the giants and die in battle, leaving only Anodos.

Anodos is knighted by the old king and is so exceedingly vain in his new armor that he almost imagines he defeated all three giants single-handedly. He meets a strange knight with his face and armor identical to his. He feels he should fight this knight but lacks the courage, so the knight imprisons him in a tower for several weeks. Anodos hears a voice singing to him to come out of the tower, and he opens the door, wondering why he didn’t just do that in the beginning. The singer is the girl whose musical globe he broke. She had grieved over losing her pretty toy, but without it, she learned to sing herself, and now her songs are a blessing to others.

By freeing himself from the tower, Anodos, at last, leaves his shadow behind. He takes off the gaudy armor—which has become dull from neglect. Leaving the tower behind, he again crosses the path of the unnamed knight. He begs to be the knight’s squire, and when he is accepted, he serves the knight gladly, loving him for his tenderness more than his glory. Anodos and the knight come across a ceremony conducted by a death cult. The knight is deceived by his own virtue and innocence to think some great good is being done, but Anodos realizes there is something evil in the ceremony. He sees a young man and woman being sacrificed. Pulling the idol from its pedestal, he kills the monstrous beast beneath it and is killed in his turn by the cultists.

Anodos is buried, and in the bosom of the nurturing earth, he becomes one with all nature, embracing all mankind, then with a wrench as if he were dying, he wakes in his own mundane world. His two sisters tell him he has been gone 21 days, which seemed to him more like 21 years. He now faces his future and the duties of manhood, sometimes wondering if Fairy Land were real or a dream and how its lessons will play out for the rest of his life.