Tales Before Tolkien Read Online Free PDF Page B

many thousands of glittering forms; in the air white clouds and lights were wavering; and all lamented and bewailed that they must travel forth so far, far away, and leave their beloved dwelling. The noise of the rudder and the water creaked and gurgled between-whiles, and then suddenly there would be silence. Many a time the boat landed, and went back, and was again laden; many heavy casks, too, they took along with them, which multitudes of horrid-looking little fellows carried and rolled; whether they were devils or goblins, Heaven only knows. Then came, in waving brightness, a stately freight; it seemed an old man, mounted on a small white horse, and all were crowding round him. I saw nothing of the horse but its head; for the rest of it was covered with costly glittering cloths and trappings: on his brow the old man had a crown, so bright that, as he came across, I thought the sun was rising there, and the redness of the dawn glimmering in my eyes. Thus it went on all night; I at last fell asleep in the tumult, half in joy, half in terror. In the morning all was still; but the river is, as it were, run off, and I know not how I am to steer my boat in it now.”
    The same year there came a blight; the woods died away, the springs ran dry; and the scene, which had once been the joy of every traveller, was in autumn standing waste, naked and bald; scarcely showing here and there, in the sea of sand, a spot or two where grass, with a dingy greenness, still grew up. The fruit-trees all withered, the vines faded away, and the aspect of the place became so melancholy, that the Count, with his people, next year left the castle, which in time decayed and fell to ruins.
    Elfrida gazed on her rose day and night with deep longing, and thought of her kind playmate; and as it drooped and withered, so did she also hang her head; and before the spring the little maiden had herself faded away. Mary often stood upon the spot before the hut, and wept for the happiness that had departed. She wasted herself away like her child, and in a few years she too was gone. Old Martin, with his son-in-law, returned to the quarter where he had lived before.

The Golden Key
    by George MacDonald
    In “On Fairy-stories” Tolkien wrote that fairy tales might “be made a vehicle of Mystery. This at least is what George MacDonald attempted, achieving stories of power and beauty when he succeeded, as in ‘The Golden Key’ (which he called a fairy tale); and even when he partly failed, as in
Lilith
(which he called a romance).” Tolkien also knew well MacDonald’s children’s books
The Princess and the Goblin
and
The Princess and Curdie,
both of which influenced Tolkien’s depiction of goblins in
The Hobbit.
    In 1964, Tolkien was asked to contribute a preface to an illustrated edition of “The Golden Key.” As Tolkien reread the story, his opinion of MacDonald changed dramatically, and he found the story “ill-written, incoherent, and bad, in spite of a few memorable passages.” Tolkien began the preface, but it quickly took on a life of its own, becoming a story whose protagonist, like the boy in “The Golden Key,” lived near the borders of Faerie. Tolkien called his new story
Smith of Wootton Major;
it was published as a small book in 1967. Tolkien never went back to the preface, and to an interviewer in 1965 he said, “I now find that I can’t stand George MacDonald’s books at any price at all.” To another friend he called MacDonald an “old grandmother” who preached instead of writing. This judgment seems unduly harsh, and a fairer assessment of MacDonald would recognize both his strengths as a writer (e.g., imagination and atmosphere) and his weaknesses (e.g., the tendency toward didacticism).
    â€œThe Golden Key” was first published in MacDonald’s volume
Dealing with the Fairies
(1867).
    There was a boy who used to sit in the twilight and listen to his