the princess and the goblin illustrations

Granted sometimes like in George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, the goblins are actually physically ugly to represent their bad behavior, but I mean they are goblins, right?! This calls to mind a scene from C.S.

It is an ugliness that exudes from inside, that taints their being, that mars the way we think of them. However, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen many descriptions of the physical ugliness of let’s say mean sisters in fairy tales. That what could happen is if one thinks on what is True, they’ll become a person who is true if they think on Beauty, they’ll become beautiful and if they think on the Good, then they will become the man or women that they are meant to become.Ĭurious to read this and see how it fits in with my propositions in this post…Īnd what of the mean, evil, ugly characters? In the same way that we’ve reduced the term beautiful to attractive, we’ve reduced ugly to physically unattractive. Thus, with this in mind, MacDonald and others in his line of thought (ie Lewis and Tolkien), are not concerned with superficial beauty they believed in ideals of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful and that bringing these things into your life and focusing on them could actually make a difference in your life. He surely would have been very aware of this passage from scripture, in Paul’s letter to the Philippians, that says:

George MacDonald, as a Christian, would have most likely been well versed in Christian thoughts on beauty.

So although the media and even illustrators choose to portray the “beautiful princess” as the perfectly shaped and attractive girl, I do not think that these authors were working at such a shallow and surface level. And it is not a surface beauty, it is a radiance that comes out, it is a joy, it is something intangible and almost imperceptible but we know it’s there.

Instead acting good, being virtuous, actually having morals, makes a person beautiful. Perhaps what the authors of fairy tales or Victorian writers like George MacDonald are asking us to think about is not the fact that virtues make a person “beautiful” in the way we think of beauty. However beauty, like the word love, is a loaded word. Is this a modern day version of MacDonald’s “princess” theory?įirst, for modern readers, what it comes down to is the fact that in our world we have reduced beauty to someone who is physically attractive, someone that looks like a model or actress.

The princess and the goblin illustrations