Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women

Pulling himself together, Anodos stumbles out into the dawn and goes on his way. Fairy Land seems drab and meaningless. He concludes that someone must have cut down the tree that anchored the Ash spirit. Anodos concludes it was probably the unnamed knight arriving in time to cut down the tree and save Anodos.

Anodos walks until he comes to a farmhouse, where he is met by a matronly woman and her small daughter. The woman calls him a “poor boy” and invites him in for food and motherly comfort. Anodos is nettled to be called a boy, but he feels as small and foolish as a boy and bursts into tears. The woman comforts and mothers him until he spills his whole story. She assures him that he is safe for the night, and it is no wonder Ash and Alder were able to fool a child like him. The farmwife explains the Alder woman’s nature is that of a vain woman who cultivates a superficial beauty and craves the validation of every man she meets. It makes her very attractive, but it destroys her from within. She will eventually crumble away to nothing. This is what the farmwife learned from a wise man who met the Alder woman and fared no better than Anodos for all his wisdom.

The woman tells him not to repeat his story to her husband because her husband can’t see the Fairies and won’t believe him. The farmer soon enters—a laughing man, kind and jovial. He remarks that the pigs need to be fed and fattened, adding that gluttony isn’t against the commandments for pigs. His entrance seems to rob the room of its magic, and Anodos wonders if all his adventures weren’t the result of a “diseased imagination.” When he looks at the farmwife’s little daughter reading in the corner, the magic of Fairy Land is restored.

Their son soon enters, and Anodos observes that the son believes no more than his father in Fairy Land, but his disbelief is sneering and contemptuous. The father advises Anodos to be careful if he travels east. There is a house where the children say an ogre lives (he adds that it is nonsense, of course).

Anodos wakes in the morning and looks out at the prosaic farmyard, and he doesn’t believe in Fairy Land. When the farmer and his son have gone out, however, Anodos confesses his doubts to the farmwife and her daughter. They take him to a window looking out over Fairy Land, and as soon as he sees it, Anodos’s belief and longing flood back.

The farmwife sends her sullen son to lead Anodos to the path that will take him around the ogre’s house without coming too close.

The farmwife’s son, whether through malice or mistake, leads Anodos to the path that goes right past the ogre’s house. Anodos spies a hut built with one end against a cypress tree. Anodos ignores his misgivings and looks through the half-open door. He sees a lamp burning and a woman bending over a book. Anodos is irresistibly compelled to enter.

When he does, the woman begins to read aloud from the book. The gist of the text is that darkness is the true nature of reality, and humans are a passing flame. Anodos explores the cottage—though it seems hardly worthy of being called a cottage. He spies a door in a corner and feels compelled to open it. The woman warns him that he had better not, but that only makes Anodos more intent on doing so. Opening the door, he sees a couple of brooms, a hatchet, and an empty space, which he soon recognizes is  a night sky. A dark figure rushes toward him, then appears to pass through him and away, but when he turns around, he doesn’t see the shadow.

The woman tells him his own shadow has found him; everyone has a shadow (which he probably calls by another name in his own world) that ranges up and down looking for them. Anodos’s shadow has found him because he has met the Ash spirit. She then lifts her head, and Anodos sees her long white teeth. He realizes he has strayed into the house of the ogre. He leaves the house with his shadow on his heels.

Anodos wanders Fairy Land for some time, continually plagued by his shadow. Whenever he lies down, the shadow lies down nearby and scorches the grass and flowers where it lies. It radiates gloom like a black sun and robs the landscape of its joy, even darkening the sun.

In his wanderings, Anodos encounters again the unnamed knight. This time, the knight’s armor is less rusty. The rust has been beaten away in his battles since they last met. He seems less downcast. Anodos realizes that the knight has gone some way toward redeeming himself after his own encounter with the Alder woman. The knight never entered the house of the Ogress and thus never opened the closet and been found by his shadow.

They travel together, and Anodos comes to love the knight for his nobility. Anodos is near the point of confessing his encounter with the ogress and asking for advice or at least comfort from the knight, but the shadow wraps itself around the knight, and Anodos no longer trusts him. They part soon after that. Anodos begins to become rather vain about his shadow. He prides himself on the clarity and practicality of his view of “reality” in the guise of the mundane world.

One morning, he encounters a maiden in the wood. She is a young woman, but Anodos can’t help seeing her as a child for her innocence. She carries a crystal globe, which she greatly treasures. He reaches to touch it, and she draws back but finally allows him to touch it very gently. It makes a sweet sound. When they have walked together for a few days, his shadow falls over the girl, and his desire to touch the globe grows so great, he can’t resist it and takes hold of it. It shatters and the maiden flees.

Next, Anodos comes to a village in which the people seem just like villagers in the mundane world. They tend to avoid him, and whenever he comes too close, they appear distorted like the reflection in a spoon. Anodos finds himself attracted to a pretty girl. After some flirting, she provokes him to kiss her. As he approaches, her face becomes “hideous,” her mouth stretched wide enough for half a dozen to kiss her at once.

Moving on, Anodos passes through a bleak and arid region peopled by goblin-fairies who offer him gold and jewels, pretending to honor him while sneering behind his back. He follows a stream in the desert until it brings him to a backwater of the river where a boat awaits him.

The river carries him through an increasingly beautiful country to a palace. Exploring the palace, he finds a room with his name on the door: Sir Anodos. Entering, he finds it identical to his room at home. He is served food and wine by invisible hands. When he goes to bed, he half-hopes and half-fears he will wake in his room back in the mundane world.