Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul by John Philip Newell

Author:John Philip Newell [Philip Newell, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-06-14T12:00:00+00:00

In time MacDonald was also accused of heresy. He too was defrocked, in his case from the ministry of the Congregational Church in England. During this critical time in MacDonald’s life he sought sanctuary with Scott, even residing for some months in the Scott household. This is when he began to write, transposing Scott’s spiritual vision into literary works of the imagination, one of the most famous of which is his fairy tale The Princess and the Goblin.

The Princess and the Goblin is the story of a young princess named Irene. Her father was king of a great country comprised of many mountains and valleys. She resided in a castle on the side of one of the mountains, halfway between its summit and the valley below. There she lived at peace, in harmony with both the villagers and the creatures and plants of the mountains.

But within the mountain there were hollow places, huge caverns and subterranean rivers. Living in these dark hidden chambers were strange creatures called goblins. Legend had it that at one stage they had lived above ground as human beings, but they had become selfish and unnatural, choosing instead to live away from the sun below ground in the dark and damp.

The goblins were not merely ugly; they were grotesque, “sub-natural,” writes MacDonald. They had two evil projects underway. The first was the burrowing of a tunnel into the foundations of the castle to kidnap the princess. The second was the plan to divert the mountain’s mightiest subterranean river into the shafts of the king’s copper mines to drown the workers and to sabotage the kingdom’s source of revenue.

The princess and her household knew nothing of these plans. But around the time of their inception Irene discovered in the castle a curious old winding staircase covered in layers of dust. She followed it up and up into the tower until she came to a turret room at the very top. There she found a beautiful old woman sitting at a spinning wheel. Her face was smooth with the beauty of youth, but her eyes glistened with the wisdom of the ages. She said to Irene, “Come in, my dear. You are welcome here.”

In her beautiful dome-shaped turret room, the old woman explained to Irene that she was her great-great-grandmother, although MacDonald adds that she was in fact the beautiful mother of all grandmothers, and that the thread she was spinning was a golden thread that was woven through all things. Sometimes the thread could be glimpsed glistening in the moonlight, but usually it could not be seen with the human eye, only felt. If ever Irene was in danger, said the woman, she was simply to feel for the thread with her finger and follow wherever it led. It might take her through strange and frightening places, but in the end it would lead her safely back to the grandmother.

Some months later Irene was awakened in the night by the sound of rumbling deep in the foundations of the castle.

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