Chapter 6 ‘I should so like to be myself’: The Stolen Child
Andrew Lang, perhaps second only to Robert Louis Stevenson as the most rec- ognisable Scottish Victorian children’s author, provides a fascinating foil to MacDonald. Robert Crawford has delineated a kind of literary patrimony by asserting that MacDonald’s ‘fondness for fairies in books like Dealings with the Fairies (1867) would be continued in Scottish writing by the man of letters and anthropologist Andrew Lang’.1 Yet, although there is evidence for Lang’s knowl- edge of Phantastes and his admiration of MacDonald’s Scots poetry, the rela- tion between their literary fairy tales is less clear.2 Both authors, it is true, de- lighted in the literary fairy tale as an art form, appreciating it for its relation to serious study of folklore and enjoying it as amusing stories to write for chil- dren. Certainly, as Crawford suggests, a parity of theme and subject seems evi- dent when comparing their works. It is worth considering whether, in the development of Scottish literature in the nineteenth century, and Scottish children’s literature in particular, Lang indeed continued MacDonald’s literary project, or rather employed similar motifs and genres for different ends. It would be tempting to argue that in the second half of the nineteenth-century MacDonald continued the Romantic impetus of Hogg while Lang upheld the Enlightenment sensibilities of Scott. But this reading, stated as such, would be reductive.3 It is more accurate to say that both MacDonald and Lang entered into the same tradition of literature as Scott and Hogg, finding in the people and places of Scottish folklore a rich material for new, self-consciously literary works.
1 Robert Crawford, Scotland’s Books: A History of Scottish Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 482. 2 Andrew Lang, ‘Introduction: Literary Fairy Tales’, in Little Johannes, by Frederik van Eeden, trans. by Clara Bell (London: William Heinemann, 1895), xiv; Lang notes that ‘the abundant mysticism does not spoil’ Phantastes, and deems it ‘a book of poetic adventure perhaps unfa- miliar to children’—possibly a tacit rebuttal of the subtitle’s claim that the book is for grown- ups. Lang’s reference to MacDonald on viii, referring to how he ‘allegorises the nursery narra- tive’ is ambiguous; it could refer either to Phantastes or MacDonald’s literary fairy tales. This essay is included in the first volume of the new critical edition of Lang’s selected prose. Cf. John Patrick Pazdziora, ‘How the Fairies were not Invited to Court’, in Re-thinking George MacDonald: Contexts and Contemporaries, edited by Christopher MacLachlan, Ginger Stelle, and John Patrick Pazdziora (Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2013), pp. 254ff, for discussion of the relationship between MacDonald’s and Lang’s use of the French conte form. 3 Even if for no other reason than that Lang was himself from Ettrick. Cf. Roger Lancelyn Green, Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography (Leicester: Edmund Ward, 1946), p. 12.
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Curiously, both Lang and MacDonald wrote stories based on the ballads of ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ and ‘Tam Lin’: MacDonald’s short story ‘The Fairy Fleet’ (1866) and Lang’s children’s novel The Gold of Fairnilee (1888). In one sense, it is unsurprising that both authors would turn to these ballads. For any writer with serious interest in Scottish folktales at the time, the ballads would have had a sense of unavoidability. They had not only historical connections to the oral ballad tradition but also distinct literary connections of which MacDonald and Lang would have been well aware. No less a figure than Robert Burns had collected and edited a version of ‘Tam Lin’. Scott had written about both ‘Tam Lin’ and ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ at some length in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Bor- der, incorporating some of his own most articulate theories of Scottish folklore transmission in his ‘Introduction to the Tale of Tamlane’ and portraying Thom- as Rhymer as an exemplar of the Scottish gentleman-poet.4 Hogg, as noted ear- lier, had claimed that his poems ‘Kilmeny’ and ‘The Witch of Fife’ belonged to the same ballad tradition. Lang is forthright about his debt to Scott. In his introduction to My Own Fairy Book (1895), Lang writes: ‘As to the story called The Gold of Fairnilee, such adventures were extremely common in Scotland long ago, as may be read in the works of Sir Walter Scott and of the learned in general. Indeed, Fairnilee is the very place where the fairy queen appointed to meet her lover, Thomas the Rhymer’.5 MacDonald is somewhat cagier about his sources. In the frame story for ‘The Fairy Fleet’, the narrator—a visionary figure named James Bayley, who is telling the story to a family of early-adolescent sisters—says, ‘It is not so easy to tell a fairy tale off-hand’, but adds that he has ‘had pieces of one floating about in my head the last day or two’.6 This reference alone does not constitute a clear textual allusion to the line in Scott’s poetic sequel to ‘Thomas the Rhym- er’ that ‘fragments’ of Thomas Rhymer’s poetry ‘[f]loat down the tide of years’ for the enrichment of later poets.7 Read in light of Hogg’s influence on Mac- Donald, however, the verbal echo is at least intriguing. In their respective stories, both MacDonald and Lang seem to be not only retelling folktales but confronting their own identities as Scottish authors. Comparing these works helps provide a clear insight into the disparate ways two apparently similar authors approached the same folkloric treatment of fairy abduction and rescue, underscoring the stranger and darker imagery of MacDonald’s texts. Whereas Lang’s emphasis falls on cultural preservation and
4 For which see Scott, Minstrelsy, iv, 54ff. 5 Lang, My Own Fairy Book, xiii-xiv. Further citations given in the text. 6 George MacDonald, ‘The Fairy Fleet.—An English Mährchen’, The Argosy, April 1866, p. 417. 7 Scott, Minstrelsy, iv, 161–162.