{"id":7268,"date":"2022-12-14T17:15:39","date_gmt":"2022-12-14T17:15:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=7268"},"modified":"2022-12-14T17:15:41","modified_gmt":"2022-12-14T17:15:41","slug":"at-the-back-of-the-north-wind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2022\/12\/14\/at-the-back-of-the-north-wind\/","title":{"rendered":"At the Back of the North Wind"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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A World Worth Returning To<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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George MacDonald\u2019s At the Back of the North Wind<\/em> can bear many a long, slow, careful re-reading.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Tessa Carman
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When I first read George MacDonald\u2019s At the Back of the North Wind <\/em>around age ten, I was starting to enter a stage of self-awareness. I knew I could read fast, and I was used to adults petting me for my adeptness. (Alas, I was also probably beginning to care about grades at school.)<\/p>

So when my uncle, who had previously lent me a copy of The Light Princess<\/em>, lent me North Wind,<\/em> the timing was none too soon. I devoured it, of course, thoroughly entranced. To my shame, however, when he asked, I told him how quickly I had read it. I foolishly expected him of all people\u2014a nonconformist farmer and a reader of Tolkien and Charles Williams\u2014to flatter me.<\/p>

I don\u2019t recall exactly what he said, but it was a gentle version of, Who cares how quickly you read it? Did you enjoy the story? <\/em>I was appropriately ashamed.<\/p>

In the years since, and especially after becoming a teacher and mother, I think of books more like meals: It\u2019s not about shoveling nutrients in your mouth, but rather about how well you dine. A repast can appear in all manner of forms: a Thanksgiving feast \u00e0 la Babette; scavenged hazelnuts and wild strawberries from a meadow; frozen pizza on a tablecloth with candles and fresh sprigs of herbs; a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich after a long hike with friends; green beans with a side of tomato soup from Trader Joe\u2019s.<\/p>

So, too, with books: the assigned book from class you muse over with a pencil in one hand and an apple in the other, the serendipitous find at the library or the used bookstore, the book placed in your hands by your parents or grandfather or aunt, the inscribed greenback of poetry from a friend, the long and winding tale you fell asleep to as your dad read to you at night or when you were sick.<\/p>

Where there is attention, there is love. Where there is love, there can be a feast.<\/p>

One way my uncle loved me and my cousins was by giving us well-chosen stories for our delectation. We then had to return the book, so that the next person could savor it.<\/p>

In high school\u2014when I was old enough to start reading fairy tales again\u2014I reread At the Back of the North Wind<\/em> from a large lusty blue tome illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith. Though I had first read it at an age when I was starting to think I knew something, I was still struck, enchanted, by the story\u2014especially North Wind herself, so wild and terrible, beautiful and enigmatic, and yet good. I might actually have first understood that something can be \u201cgood and terrible\u201d through North Wind, rather than through a visit to Narnia.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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North Wind will take different and sometimes terrifying shapes in order to do her work.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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MacDonald\u2019s stories are full of wise woman characters, who are both beautiful and of a great age: there\u2019s the great old princess in The Princess and the Goblin <\/em>and The Princess and Curdie<\/em>, and the Grandmother of The Golden Key<\/em>. But North Wind is a wilder being, less human than the others\u2014she is wind, after all. And she is a servant, as Gandalf is a servant of the Secret Fire, the Flame Imperishable. (When she is telling Diamond of the country at her back, she notes East Wind\u2019s claim that her work\u2014from sinking ships to sweeping sky-cobwebs to rescuing sleepy bees from tulips\u2014\u201cis all managed by a baby.\u201d One cannot help but think of the child who is the Old Man of the Fire, the \u201coldest man of all,\u201d whom Mossy and Tangle meet in The Golden Key.<\/em>)<\/p>

She has her work to do; she does not pretend to understand all that she is a part of. As majestic, and as powerful as she is, she knows she is yet a creature.<\/p>

Perhaps it is the friendship between the archon-like North Wind and Diamond the coachman\u2019s son\u2014a little boy with little to recommend him other than simple goodness; he is no great warrior, lost king, or Chosen One\u2014that partly makes us keep coming back to this tale. After all, Greville MacDonald believed that North Wind<\/em> was his father\u2019s \u201cbest seller\u201d because of its \u201ctwo-world consciousness\u201d: it delves into depths of reality with a guileless lucidity. North Wind explains mysteries to Diamond in such a way that the mystery is neither betrayed nor distorted; the child responds in wonder, without worrying yet about naming the deep joy that is awakening in him. Greville explains in his biography George MacDonald and His Wife<\/em>:<\/p>

A child no more grasps intellectually its exalted symbolism than he reflects upon Form\u2019s relation to its indwelling Idea when he runs to his mother with a primrose because of its beauty. Yet in both cases a lasting impression of the story\u2019s and the flower\u2019s place in the Divine Economy remains, consciously or not. One need not ask what the rose means if its sweetness pierces the veil and gives taste of the joy that \u201cwill never pass into nothingness.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>

The narrator tells us that Diamond is \u201ca true child in\u2026 that he was given to metaphysics,\u201d and he asks profound questions. For instance, when he first meets North Wind, he is willing to go with her, trusting that \u201cwhat\u2019s beautiful can\u2019t be bad. You\u2019re not bad, North Wind?\u201d<\/p>

She amends this thought: \u201cNo; I\u2019m not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they are beautiful.\u201d<\/p>

Indeed, North Wind will take different and sometimes terrifying shapes in order to do her work. Her presence makes Diamond\u2019s story a more-than-ordinary tale, a tale touched with Faerie. And yet, notes Greville, for MacDonald a symbol was \u201cfar more than an arbitrary outward and visible sign of an abstract conception; its high virtue lay in a common substance with the idea presented.\u201d<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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I remember fondly the particular volume my uncle lent me, with a picture of a boy reading under a tree on its cover.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Such an observation rhymes with G.K. Chesterton\u2019s insight into MacDonald\u2019s fairy tales and \u201cordinary\u201d tales: \u201cThe difference is that the ordinary moral fairy tale is an allegory of real life. Dr. MacDonald\u2019s tales of real life are allegories, or disguised versions, of his fairy tales.\u201d For MacDonald, Chesterton writes, \u201cThe fairy-tale was the inside of the ordinary story and not the outside\u2026. His allegoric tales of gnomes and griffins do not lower a veil, but rend it.\u201d<\/p>

Mark Twain wrote to MacDonald in 1882 that he would send him Life on the Mississippi<\/em> when published, and that he would \u201ctake the Back of the North Wind in return, for our children\u2019s sake; they have read and re-read their own copy so many times that it looks as if it had been through the wars.\u201d<\/p>

I remember fondly the particular volume my uncle lent me, with a picture of a boy reading under a tree on its cover. When I found the same edition at a used bookstore, I snatched it up. How well I recalled the illustrations, the font, the heft of its pages.<\/p>

Now I\u2019ve begun to read North Wind<\/em> to my own children, who are six and four. I wasn\u2019t sure they were ready for North Wind<\/em>, though we\u2019ve read The Princess and the Goblin <\/em>together. I could not but acquiesce when they asked for it. And so together we entered Diamond\u2019s hayloft.<\/p>

In the years to come, I hope the binding falls apart after so many readings that we will have to get another copy, whose crisp new pages a new child will take up, and read, and enter through the rent veil to that not-so-far country.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Tessa Carman<\/strong> writes from Mount Rainier, Maryland.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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At the Back of the North Wind<\/strong> was first published serially in a children’s magazine called <\/em>Good Words for the Young in 1868 before being published in book form in 1871.<\/em>
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George MacDonald\u2019s At the Back of the North Wind can bear many a long, slow, careful 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