The Complete Fairy Tales

1. Undine: 1811 romance by the German writer Friedrich, Baron de la Motte Fouqué.

4. not to teach zoology: see the opening chapter of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) with its similar attack on materialist definitions of a horse.

6. ‘broken music’: a phrase used by the jester Dagonet in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1872 “The Last Tournament” in Idylls of the King.

1. some three…some seven…some as many as twelve: the king’s choice of these traditional numbers suggests that he is better “acquainted” with standard fairy-tale conventions than with the production of actual babies.

2. forgotten: an allusion to the christening episode in Perrault’s “The Sleeping Beauty of the Woods,” which MacDonald more directly travesties in the opening of “Little Daylight.”

3. Makemnoit: the name betokens an antidote to forgetfulness (“make ‘em know it”); it also may inscribe the Scottish “Mac” of the author’s surname.

4. poor relations: the manuscript of an earlier version at the Houghton Library contains a heavy-handed string of sarcastic justifications of the purported wisdom of ignoring needy relatives; like Thackeray in Vanity Fair, MacDonald tried to make light of his own experience of poverty.

5. modes…in history…revenges: in the Houghton manuscript, Makemnoit rejects the “clownish revenges” devised by offended fairies in traditional fairy tales.

6. was done: having found his story-telling “somewhat nervous work,” the narrator of Adela Cathcart now allows his listeners to respond (see the Introduction, p. xv, above).

7. his money: from the 1744 nursery rhyme, “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” lines 10-11.

9. ex-asperated herself: to “aspirate” is to add an “H” prefix to a vowel; in Adela Cathcart, the clergyman now interrupts: “I must protest. Mr. Smith, you bury us under an avalanche of puns, and, I must say, not very good ones. Now, the story, though humorous, is not of the kind to admit of such fanciful embellishment. It reminds one rather of a burlesque at a theatre,—the lowest thing, from a literary point of view to be found.” Mr. Smith accepts the criticism, “for I feared he was right”; he contritely informs his readers that, though “still bad enough,” the punning in the printed version of the story is “not nearly so bad” as it originally was.

10. Not knowing…disgust…away: the princess is free of the revulsion shown by her counterpart in “The Frog Prince” by the brothers Grimm.

11. morbidezza, perhaps: MacDonald may here be confusing the term used by Italian painters for a representation of softness or delicacy with “morbidity,” a term for sickliness or gloominess.

12. I do not happen to know: in Adela Cathcart, a young doctor has just challenged the narrator’s faulty “physics”: “If she had no gravity, no amount of muscular propulsion could have given her any momentum. And again, if she had no gravity, she must have inevitably ascended beyond the regions of the atmosphere.” MacDonald originally tried to resolve this scientific conundrum in his manuscript by maintaining that Makemnoit must have left the princess with “the degree of gravity possessed by the element in which she existed at any given time.”

13. by name Hum-Drum, and Kopy-Keck: given the “materialist” and “spiritualist” affiliations of the two madmen, their names may suggest the absurd misapplication of the philosophical positions held, respectively, by Hume and Kant.

14. her infirmity: another pun: the princess’s bodily (and mental) weakness, after all, stems from her literal lack of fixity in terra firma.

15. Mercury: associated with the light-footed Greek god, as well as with quicksilver.

17. sensorium: a synonym for “brain” as a center for sense-impressions, used playfully by writers such as Sterne and Scott.

18. I wish…sometimes: MacDonald’s irreverence towards fairy-tale conventions is also levelled at the sexual double standards that operated in actual Victorian life.

19. to show that she was a lady: the princess lacks the elaborate swimming apparel with which Victorian ladies concealed their bodies; the subsequent swimming scenes bothered prudish contemporaries such as John Ruskin.

21. “can’t fall”: the princess is unaware of her remark’s theological connotations.

22. All night…with the princess: in Adela Cathcart, the prudish Mrs. Cathcart denounces the arousal of the two swimmers as being “very improper”; but Adela reminds her aunt that a greater sexual license is permissible in Fairyland: “We must not judge people in fairy-tales by precisely the same conventionalities we have.” John Ruskin protested that MacDonald had assigned all of Ruskin’s own objections to Adela’s aunt.

23. to knit and mutter awful words: Makemnoit now assumes the role of one of the Fates, the spinners or knitters later known as fays or fairies.

24. dried seaweed: instead of the expandable and collapsible snake, the early manuscript featured a strange piece of “machinery” with “some sort of a handle” for Makemnoit to turn.

27. a glass of wine and a biscuit: the prince’s willingness to sacrifice himself is becoming Christ-like.

29. wise woman: as Makemnoit’s foil, the nurse assumes the role of good fairy that MacDonald assigns to wise older women in stories such as “The Carasoyn,” “The Golden Key,” and, of course, “The Wise Woman.”

30. So…gravity: Before deciding to end with this paragraph, MacDonald experimented with the multiple mock-moralizings that Perrault often used at the conclusion of his fairy tales; in Adela Cathcart, three possibilities are offered in response to Mrs. Cathcart’s puzzlement:

“What is the moral of it?” drawled Mrs. Cathcart, with the first syllable of moral very long and very gentle.

“That you need not be afraid of ill-natured aunts, though they are witches,” said Adela.

“No, my dear; that’s not it,” I said. “It is that you need not mind forgetting your poor relations. No harm will come of it in the end.”

“I think the moral is,” said the doctor, “that no girl is worth anything till she has cried a little.”

Adela gave him a quick glance, and then cast her eyes down.

Whereas the first two responses (the second of which also appears at the end of the Houghton manuscript) are deliberately “light,” the doctor (who is in love with Adela) prefers to stress the graver meaning promoted in the tale’s second half. But the mixture of levity and gravity proves difficult for some of Mr. Smith’s other listeners; as one of them admits: “I was so pleased with the earnest parts of it, that the fun jarred upon me a little, I confess.”

1. Rinkelmann: although a “rink” was once associated both with noble warriors and the turf in which they fought, old Ralph’s age and worries makes him more of a “wrinkle-man”; comic sketches…tragic poems: see note 12, below.

2. So he was just the man…elective: Adela Cathcart interrupts here to protest this return to the fairy-tale mode, only to be told that the story will not have “much to do” with fairies “anyhow”; the opening of the tale seems just as contradictory: if fun-loving fairies want a human ruler who is good at jesting, why should their king (chosen by unusually “sensible electors”) be repeatedly reproved for his levity by the grave “shadows” who also became his subjects?

3. certain creatures who shall be nameless: ghosts; their relation to shadows will be developed in the course of the tale.

4. pictures of Puritans by Cavaliers: as Carlyle had noted in his biography of Cromwell, seventeenth-century royalists produced caricatures that exaggerated the dark-hued sobriety of their political rivals.

5. John-o’-Groat’s house: the northernmost point in Great Britain, the former site of an eight-sided house built by Jan Groot on the coast of Caithness in Scotland.

6. He could not account…eyes: Adela Cathcart wants the narrator to explain what troubles Ralph about these faces, but the narrator only says, “I am not sure,” and makes “haste to go on again.”

8. The diamond…and his lips quivered: Adela again asks, “what does that mean?,” only to get the same evasive answer (“‘How can I tell?’ I answered”); the next two sentences were added in 1867 to replace this exchange.

9. private secretary: in Adela Cathcart, the sentence continues: “and that is how I come to know all about his adventures.”

11. delirium tremens: a mental and physical disorder caused by alcoholic excess.

12. …splendid success: in Adela Cathcart, the narrator pretends to be quoting a drama critic for a journal called the “Punny Palpitator,” causing Adela to protest: “Now don’t you try, uncle, to make any fun; for you know you can’t. It’s always a failure…. You can only make people cry; you can’t make them laugh.” Still, Adela may be wrong: although the narrator now switches to more tearful accounts, their melodramatic bathos suggests that, like Ralph Rinkelmann, he should have stuck with comedy.

13. …kiss and sob: Adela detects that her uncle has “stolen” the story about the boy and his mother from a Sunday sermon heard by the group in the previous chapter of Adela Cathcart; the narrator acknowledges his “theft.”

14. snap-dragon: a Christmas game in which raisins are snatched out of a bowl of burning brandy.

15. a wise prince: a tribute to Prince Albert, who had died on December 14, 1861.

16. mother of her people: Queen Victoria, who rewarded MacDonald with a Civil List Pension in 1877.

18. And…not a Shadow: the story ends here in Adela Cathcart; Adela wants to know who the “other shadows, mysteries in the midst of mystery,” might be; Mr. Smith ventures: “my dear, as the child said, shadows were the ghosts of the body, so I say these were the shadows of the mind.” But Adela remains unconvinced:

“I must think. I don’t know. I can’t trust you. I do believe, uncle, you write whatever comes into your head; and then when any one asks you the meaning of this or that, you hunt round till you find a meaning just about the same size as the thing itself, and stick it on. Don’t you, now?”

“Perhaps yes, and perhaps no, and perhaps both,” I answered.

1. There was once…common people: in Adela Cathcart, Mr. Smith tempts his child-listeners with several fairy-tale subjects (“the princess with the blue foot,” “a giant who was all skin”); but he gets them to agree to the one tale he has already written: “Shall I tell you about the wicked giant that grew little children in his garden instead of radishes, and then carried them about in his waist-pocket, and ate one as often as he remembered he had got some?” The children interrupt this story even more frequently than the adult listeners of “The Light Princess” and “The Shadows” had done.

2. Tricksee-Wee: “little Trickster”; Buffy-Bob: probably called so because his hair is buff-colored, but also, apparently, because he buffets or hits.

3. crept through it: this and later echoes of the Underground text that Lewis Carroll had shown to the MacDonalds are hardly accidental.

4. huge face…thimble: a giant thimble is also featured in Gulliver’s Travels, bk. 2, ch. 2.

6. “Run away…minutes”: folk-tales (such as “Jack and the Beanstalk”) often feature ogresses who are kinder than their husbands.

7. Thunderthump: a domestication of Thor, the Norse god whose “thunder” and “black clouds” Carlyle had magnified into cosmic anger in “The Hero as Divinity.”

8. radishes, whether forked or not: in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II, Act 3, scene 2, lines 289-90, Falstaff describes a naked man as “a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved”; the term was satirically used by Thomas Carlyle in his Sartor Resartus to strip away human pomp and pretension. When the children in Adela Cathcart, bothered by the analogy between children and radishes, point out that “little children don’t grow in gardens,” Mr. Smith claims that the notion was the giant’s rather than his own: “No doubt he did plant the children; but he always pulled them up and ate them before they had a chance of increasing.”

9. “The great she-eagle…has claws”: when a little boy challenges this incongruity in Adela Cathcart, Mr. Smith mounts the defense that MacDonald retains in the next paragraph.

11. Jubilate: any hymn to joy; in Anglican services, a canticle based on psalm 100 (“make a joyful noise unto the Lord”).

12. …sorry for him, after all: Tricksey-Wee’s sentimentality is promptly challenged by one “little wisehead” in Mr. Smith’s audience; the story is pronounced to be “horrid,” useful at best to make others “scream,” and an older girl who professes to be unafraid of male giants only makes Mr. Smith “feel very small” and rueful: “I did not like to think I had failed with children.” One “darling little blue-eyed girl,” however, improves his spirits when she whispers: “It was a very nice story. If I was a man, I would kill all the wicked people in the world. But I am only a little girl, you know: so I can only be good.” Although there is no indication that she has penetrated the story’s intended meaning any more than the others, Mr. Smith, as sentimental as Tricksey-Wee, gratefully privileges female heroism: “The darling did not know how much more one good woman can do to kill evil than all the swords of the world in the hands of righteous heroes.”

1. whose name was Peaseblossom, after her great-great-grandmother: one of Titania’s fairies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

3. Alice: unlike her disoriented namesake in Wonderland, this Alice will soon be joined by a reliable travel-companion in her underground voyages.

4. she found she was no bigger than the fairy: the reduction in size is less frustrating for this Alice than it was for Lewis Carroll’s heroine.

5. quite dry…delightfully wet: she is spared all the discomforts that Carroll’s Alice experiences in the pool of tears.

6. Down and down she went: cf. Alice in Wonderland, ch. 1: “Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end?”

7. huge hedgehog: a hedgehog also causes some difficulties at the croquetgame in Wonderland.

8. had not quite faded: the passage of time turns out to have been as much of an illusion as the physical distances Alice and Richard had to traverse.

1. in the twilight: like “Cross Purposes,” the tale immediately places its characters within a liminal setting: the temporal threshold between day and night mirrors the spatial “borders of Fairyland” in which the houses of the protagonists are situated.

3. creature: intentionally vague, since more than mere fairies will act as magical agents in this story.

4. spring: the source from which either of a rainbow’s two arches emerges from the ground; as an emblem of God’s “everlasting covenant” with “every living creature” (Genesis, 9:16), the rainbow serves as the “spring” for a new relation between earth and heaven in Judaeo-Christian typology.

5. For…a winding stair: the rising “forms” appear to be moving towards the higher Platonic or Christian realm later called “the country from which the shadows fall.”

7. the story of Silverhair: another name for “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”

8. many other beings there: in a story that steadily stresses the evolution of lower into higher forms of being, the “mischievous” fairies unwittingly serve the beneficent design of superior agents.

9. in human shape: the fish (a sign of the early Christian church) acquires a form better suited to its role of good angel.

11. aëranth: MacDonald’s coinage for a species of his own invention: the creature is still “air”-borne and still on an “errand.”

12. steep rock…a petrified ship: further suggestions that the Old Man of the Sea may be associated with Simon the fisherman, who adopted the name of “rock” upon becoming the apostle Peter.

14. could not tell: “I think I must be indebted to Novalis for these geometrical figures” (MacDonald’s footnote); a reference to Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg [1772-1801], who believed in the recovery of a mystical union that would allow humans to communicate directly with a world of plants, animals, and other harmonious forms.

16. no holes in the water: as bearer of the golden key, Mossy is an “elect”: his instant rejuvenation, his ability to bypass the Old Men of the Earth and Fire, and his Christ-like ability to walk on water make his pilgrimage far less arduous than Tangle’s.

1. Not all round it: in Perrault’s “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” an impenetrable forest, “with interlacing brambles and thorns,” surrounds the royal palace; Mr. Raymond’s seemingly excessive attention to his own tale’s woodsy setting supports the contention, made by the narrator of At the Back of the North Wind, that this genteel story-teller may be overly self-conscious about textual precedents. Like “The Light Princess,” a story which it in many ways resembles, “Little Daylight” shifts from the levity of literary parody to the gravity of a parable about redemption. By having the narrator wonder “how much of Mr. Raymond’s story the smaller children understood,” MacDonald once again appears to question whether his delight in tonal mixtures can ever bring him the transgenerational audience he covets.

2. taking vengeance upon them: like Makemnoit in “The Light Princess,” this malcontent is modelled after the wicked fairy in “Sleeping Beauty.”

3. a hundred years: the direct allusion to “Sleeping Beauty” introduces the playful speculations that follow and sets up the comical handling of the christening scene about to unfold.

5. poorest, sickliest child you might come upon in the streets of a great city: the analogy is especially meaningful in At the Back of the North Wind, since the sick Nanny, who attentively listens to this story, is exactly such a dispossessed street-child; she will painfully remember the association between the waning moon and her own condition in “Nanny’s Dream.”

6. change…came on: the wording suggests a link between lunar and menstrual cycles.

7. a nymph: a quasi-divine creature such as a hamadryad or the Nereid identified with the Light Princess by another infatuated prince; also a name, however, for a stage in the development of the still unformed butterfly.

8. prints of her feet: see John Keats, Lamia, I:131, where the pursuit of an invisible nymph also yields nothing but “printless verdure.”

9. he caught sight of himself…door to the kitchen: reminded, upon seeing his reflection, that he is disguised as a peasant, the prince humbly uses the servant’s entrance instead of the front door.

10. sun coming: In At the Back of the North Wind, Mr. Raymond, pleased with the reception of his story, vows “to search his brain for another”; but a more somber reality intrudes when he informs Diamond that the hospital will soon be discharging the still weak and jobless Nanny.

1. not fit to be moved: from the children’s hospital at which Mr. Raymond told her the story of “Little Daylight” (see notes 5 and 10 for that story).

2. to the back of the north wind: during his own illness earlier in the novel, the boy was transported by North Wind to a limbo he reached after walking through her cold body.

3. already done the best I could for Diamond’s dream: although reprinted here after this selection, Diamond’s dream preceded both “Little Daylight” and “Nanny’s Dream” in the novel; given MacDonald’s far greater idealization of his immaculate boy-dreamer, the narrator’s profession that he does not want to give Diamond an “advantage” over Nanny is hardly credible.

4. North Wind herself: see note 2, above; Diamond and the narrator who becomes his biographer are the only characters to believe in the existence of the magical North Wind.

5. God’s baby: retarded or mentally ill children were sometimes thought to be in closer touch with the numinous world; still, the epithet is not necessarily the compliment Diamond takes it to be.

6. little girl-angels: Diamond interprets Nanny’s story as a complement to his own dream, in which there are only boy-angels.

8. ‘…sound of bees?’: unknown to a child raised in the muddy slums of Victorian London.

1. I can only sing nonsense: Diamond remembers songs he claims to have heard during his stay in the region at the back of the North Wind; the words he chants seem pure “nonsense to those” adults who cannot “understand” their import, but immensely delight his baby brother “who got all the good in the world out of it.” For MacDonald, “nonsense” can intuit spiritual meanings stifled by habit and common sense.

2. to have told them: more ineffable than Nanny’s, Diamond’s dream cannot be told by himself; instead, it requires the narrator’s mediation.

3. Down and down: see note 6 for “Cross Purposes” and note 13 for “The Golden Key.”

1. The Carasoyn: MacDonald published the first six chapters of this Scottish folk-tale under the title of “The Fairy Fleet” as early as 1864, the year of Adela Cathcart, in an obscure journal called The Argosy; he added the much darker second half for the version published in his 1871 Works of Fancy and Imagination.

2. Colin: the name (Cailein, in the Scottish Highlands) is derived from that of the medieval missionary and civilizer, Saint Columba.

4. Hey Cockolorum Jig: “coggle-joggle,” a dance that mimics the unsteady balance of a cockleshell.

6. distaff and spindle: the tools used for spinning flax or wool into threads were associated with spinners of tales such as Mother Goose or Mother Bunch, old women assumed to possess magical powers and hence associated with the ancient Fates.

7. white tops: this source of “wool” is later identified as “cotton-grass.”

11. Changeling: the name given to children left behind in exchange for those abducted by fairies is here given to the abducted child herself.

12. wee trotting burnies: the brooks are smaller and slower than their English counterparts.

14. Kelpie’s Pool: in Scottish folklore, a kelpy is a water-sprite who can drown unwary humans.

16. nightmare; pookie: a spirit who suffocated sleepers by sitting on their chests; the mischievous sprite also called Puck and Robin Goodfellow.

17. Boneless…glue: a joke (glue is made out of bones) as well as a warning to Colin not to be spineless in his next and most difficult test.

1. Vandyke collars: broad lace or linen collars made fashionable by the portraits of the Flemish painter Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641).

2. spoiling what I steal: remembering the “clashing” rain described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in “An Ode to Rain,” the narrator decides to quote lines 15 and 16 of that 1802 poem, thereby delaying even further a sentence that will take more than 400 words merely to inform us that “something happened” during a rainfall!

3. old poet; “…therein did appeare”: Edmund Spenser (1552–1599); MacDonald here enlists the tribute to Una—another wise woman—in The Faerie Queene, 1.12:22, lines 6–9.

4. a poor little white rabbit: Rosamond’s cruelty exceeds that of Carroll’s Alice when she dropped the shrieking White Rabbit on broken glass.

6. rose-gardens of Damascus: the fragrant damask rose supposedly originated in the Syrian capital.

7. Agnes: from the Greek word for “pure” and the Latin word for “lamb,” the name seems to fit a shepherd’s daughter—until we discover otherwise.

8. called Prince: the role played by a self-sacrificing king’s son in “The Light Princess” has now been assigned to a biting sheepdog!

9. Will-o’-the-wisp: the gaseous light seen at night in swamps was deemed to be treacherous.

10. leaning over the boat and staring at the death she had made: unlike the Light Princess, Rosamond never considers jumping into the water to rescue her drowned male companion.

11. Peggy: the name of a miniature Pegasus, as the next paragraph makes clear.

12. narcissus: a fit choice, given Rosamond’s newfound ability to grow beyond the excessive self-love that, in Greek myth, provoked Nemesis to turn the arrogant Narcissus into a flower; the deepening color also is a mark of his maturation.

1. Watho: “waith,” a term for illegal hunting, is derived from an old Teuton word, “waitho,” but the name may have been chosen for its African sound (see note 7, below).

4. caused wailful violins: Leonardo da Vinci reputedly relied on sad music to induce a similar mood of “sweet sorrow” in the sitter for his “Mona Lisa.”

6. Nycteris: the name means “night creature,” but may also mean “night unrest,” since “Eris” was the Greek goddess of discord.

7. gnus: the allusion to this ox-like antelope, and, later, to leopards and lions, suggests that MacDonald is setting this exotic story in some African region.

8. Fargu: like Falca, probably a made-up name, chosen for its non-European ring.

EXPLANATORY NOTES