Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women

Although the knight is never named, his appearance in rusty armor identifies him with Sir Percival, a character from the Arthurian legend that forms a specifically English and Welsh mythology. In his first appearance, Anodos’s unnamed knight rides a red horse, and his armor is covered in rust. His carriage is noble, but his face is clouded with inward grief. This is the same description given of Sir Percival in the book Anodos reads in the cottage between the four oak trees.

In Arthurian legend, Sir Percival is one of the knights engaged in the quest for the Holy Grail. To that end, he had to be “pure,” which involved both honor and chastity. Sir Percival was considered the most innocent of the knights, even to the point of occasional “simplemindedness”—to put it in fairytale terms—or uncouthness, as he was too innocent to understand the rules of society. Sir Percival’s encounters with the enchantress and the Alder woman are near misses in which his purity is threatened.

In the first instance, with the demon lady, he preserves his purity by stabbing himself in the thigh. The thigh wound mirrors the wound in the leg, thigh, or groin of the Fisher King, the king assigned to guard the Grail Sir Percival is seeking. By stabbing himself in his leg, Sir Percival punishes himself for his failure of virtue and reaffirms his devotion to his quest. Later, with the Alder woman, he shows he hasn’t learned the lesson yet. Eventually, Sir Percival is the only knight pure enough to take the Grail.

Because Anodos’s knight is not explicitly named, he is free to play a more flexible role than if he were the legendary figure. For example, the incident of Sir Percival and the Alder woman does not appear in the Arthurian cycle. The unnamed knight’s personality and temperament differ from the folkloric knight. He is less foolish and boorish than the Arthurian Sir Percival, but in the final scene, Anodos sees that the unnamed knight is so innocent (like Sir Percival) that he may be deceived by his own belief in the goodness of others.

For Anodos, the unnamed knight represents the ideal of manhood to which the young man aspires. At first, their relationship is paternal; the Knight gives Anodos advice, which Anodos promptly ignores. The knight guesses that Anodos has probably ignored him and fallen into the Ash tree’s trap, so he chops down the tree to which the Ash spirit is bound. This is the act of a father who is patient with a boy’s folly and understands that young men need time to try their spurs. Anodos lost his father as a very young man, and the knight is one of several father/mentor figures who appear in Anodos’s journey.

The knight also represents an older version of Anodos. He has already made the mistakes Anodos makes now. The knight, rather than Anodos, wins the Marble Lady, representing enlightenment and union with the divine. This is also a parable for Sir Percival’s winning of the Grail through purity. The winning is a matter of the knight finally making himself man enough for Enlightenment to bestow herself on him.

When Anodos begs to be his servant, the knight sets an example of the friendship between two men in which one can be subordinate to another without losing intimacy. Here, the knight represents the relationship MacDonald envisions between man and Christ, one of trust and confidence in which man can be a servant yet equal.

The Ash Spirit is the antagonist of the first part of the story until the unnamed knight cuts down his tree. Anodos first sees the spirit in the shadow of a giant hand with knobby joints passing across the window blind. Later, Anodos looks directly at the spirit and sees the outline of a figure that is almost transparent in its center and darkening and becoming more solid at the edges. Its face is corpselike and vampiric, and its eyes are lit with voracious greed.

If the goal of Anodos’s quest is to find the Marble Lady representing enlightenment, then the Ash is the pursuing terror of benightment. The most dreadful thing in MacDonald’s universe is eternal separation from the divine. The Ash doesn’t have the cunning or manipulativeness of a Christian personification of evil. His menace is in blind groping and pursuit.

The Ash seems to have no personal animus toward Anodos. Ash hates all the humans living in Fairy Land. He pursues Anodos mainly because Anodos has no protection from the other trees. The woman and her daughter in the first cottage are protected by the four oaks at the corners of their house, and Anodos is temporarily protected by the Beech woman and the belt of leaves she gives to him. He becomes vulnerable to Ash again when the treacherous, hollow Alder woman tears up his belt.

The author’s description of the Ash spirit is exquisitely detailed, unlike anything that would have previously been familiar to the reader. One of MacDonald’s contributions to the fantasy genre was the level of immersive detail that draws the reader deep into his imagined world.

The theme of sentient trees strongly influenced J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Lewis’s Narnia books featured sentient tree spirits, and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy featured sentient trees in the form of the ents of Fangorn and the less active trees of the Old Forest near the Shire. In particular, readers have remarked on the similarity between the Ash spirit and Tolkien’s Old Man Willow. The images of the Ash, especially his groping shadow hand, also closely resemble some of Tolkien’s descriptions of Sauron.

The Marble Lady is an object rather than an actor in the story. As the ideal of beauty, the Lady represents the divine presence, which is synonymous with Enlightenment. At first, Anodos is driven to her out of an instinctive hunger without comprehension. The lady flees him every time he tries to lay hold of her by force.

Anodos eventually overhears the Lady speaking to the knight. She proclaims her love for Anodos as the one who awakened her and freed her from her imprisonment, but that love is for a “stripling,” a boy too young for her. She bestows herself instead on the knight. By passing through his own tests and trials, he has achieved enlightenment. He is man enough for her while Anodos is still a “stripling.”

Anodos has matured enough to recognize that Sir Percival is worthy of the lady while Anodos himself is not yet. He continues to love her but no longer pursues her with the same impetuosity that led him to force his attentions on her.

As she appears in Phantastes, the Alder woman takes the form of a huldra, a figure from Scandinavian folklore. The huldra is a forest spirit who lures men into the forest and seduces them. If they can satisfy her prodigious sexual appetite, she will let them go. If not, she will kill them. In folklore, huldras always have tails, representing a bestial nature, but their most distinctive feature is that their backs are hollow, like an old log or tree.

The huldra represents a false and superficial beauty (truth). The Alder woman is an ally of the Ash spirit—the threat of eternal separation from the divine. Anodos makes himself vulnerable to her superficial beauty and blandishments when he tries to summon the Marble Lady. By trying to force the Marble Lady (enlightenment) to come to him, Anodos finds a false creed like the one in which MacDonald was raised. MacDonald believed that the “wise” read the scriptures and bent them to their own desires. Because they didn’t pursue truth from within, they would never achieve union with the divine.

Anodos describes Cosmo’s story as almost a universal story of the nature of love and loss and the inability of two people to know one another’s true selves. Hence, the name Cosmo/Cosmos/Universe. His surname, Von Wehrstahl, means “of the steel arms”, and he is depicted as a highly skilled swordsman.

If the female is to be interpreted as wisdom or enlightenment, then Cosmo is forever trying to reach the enlightenment that he longs for. He changes his environment, trying to court her, to make a home for her without ever being in her presence. His ambition is to free her, which he does, finally achieving enlightenment in her arms and dying—as he needs nothing more.

Cosmo is poor but proud and aloof from his peers, though well-liked by them. As a Christian theologian, MacDonald was familiar with the Beatitude from the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:3-4). Cosmo is poor but not poor in spirit, as he takes pride in his condition. His pride is a manifestation of the foolishness he must yet shed.

To be poor in spirit is also to be poor in unity with the divine. Thus, Cosmo is isolated both from his peers through pride and from the divine through lack of enlightenment. Like Cosmo, Anodos has acted pridefully, trying to seize the Marble Lady by force and failing to heed the wisdom and good advice offered to him along the way.

Cosmo’s room is decorated with symbols of death—the skeleton, the sword, the bat, and assorted weapons scattered about. Symbolically, MacDonald associates swords and weapons with honor and chivalry, but Cosmo’s craft goes to waste. He turns it to no purpose. His preoccupation with death is distasteful to his lady, and he turns morbidity into a virtue by teaching swordsmanship to his peers, including Steinwald, who becomes almost as skilled as Cosmo and wounds him fatally before Cosmo kills him and breaks the mirror.

The maiden represents a girl whose heart Anodos broke shortly before coming to Fairy Land. He feels shame at betraying her trust, courting her love then leaving her. Her Fairy Land counterpart seems to Anodos like a child, although she is a young woman. She is initially shy, hesitant, begging him to be careful of her globe (heart). At first, Anodos is cautious, then greedy and careless. What makes the maiden remarkable is that she doesn’t focus on the injury done to her by Anodos. For her, heartbreak is just a part of growing up. Her sorrow gives her strength and insight, and she is able to use it to love and understand other people, setting them free of their own prisons. She shows that our own pain gives us sympathy for the pain of others.