The Shepherd's Castle

By -
The Shepherd's Castle, by George MacDonald

You may well know of George MacDonald, a Scottish minister who wrote a lot of books and was a great inspiration to C. S. Lewis.  He wrote some children's fairy tales that are real classics, such as At the Back of the North Wind and The Princess and Curdie, and he wrote a couple of fantasy novels, Lilith and Phantastes, that are very strange indeed and must-reads for those interested in pre-Tolkien fantasy literature.  MacDonald also wrote a stack of realistic, romantic novels that have practically disappeared, except for the most well-known, Sir Gibbie.  (I have an old copy that had disappeared, but I just found it again!) 

Well, interesting things come across the donation table, and one was a copy of one of these romantic novels, The Shepherd's Castle, in a 1983 reprint from Bethany House; they published four of these stories.  This one is a companion to Sir Gibbie.  Now that we have all that background...

Donal is a young man from a shepherding background who has been fortunate in obtaining an education, and he's looking for a job.  He becomes a tutor to a little boy, younger son of an earl; a lady cousin, Arctura, owns the estate, but she has always let her uncle run it.  The castle holds secrets!  Ghostly music plays when the wind blows, there's a legend of a lost room, and the earl has a serious drug habit.  Using the power of common sense, Donal, Arctura, and little Davie explore the roofs and find the source of the music.  It's up to Donal to figure out the rest of the mystery and protect Arctura from an increasingly unbalanced and angry earl...

I enjoyed this story a lot; it was really fun, although it comes with an unnecessarily tragic ending.  It's much as though a Three Investigators book were written by a very religious Victorian.  MacDonald must have been an enemy of old-school Scottish Presbyterianism; Donal, an ideal young Scot, teaches Christianity in a very different fashion that raises a lot of hackles.

So, a fun read that put me in the mood to stay in Scotland, literarily speaking.  Maybe it's time to start that Boswell.

Comments

  1. LoryDecember 27, 2018 at 2:43 PM

    Sounds interesting - I wonder what kind of influence MacDonald had on later writers in the same vein, that we now don't perceive because his own books have disappeared. Or maybe they are just all drawing from the same well.

    His religion was definitely unconventional - we was kicked out of his church (was it Presbyterian or Congregational?) for not believing in eternal damnation or something like that. So he was an independent preacher -- and writer obviously. Thus the need to support his family with works like this one.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownJanuary 3, 2019 at 9:19 AM

    This sounds like a fascinating story and such a pretty cover!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more