The Way Between The Worlds: a dip into George Macdonald
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ย. 2024
- In this episode we explore what it might mean to say that a book is a portal between two worlds.
Speaking of portals, you could, if you wish, magically send me a coffee down this one!
www.buymeacoff...
Lord of the Rings was like this for me - existing in two worlds. I read them during a long car trip when very young, and all the places we saw are now associated to me with scenes like the Barrow Downs, Weathertop and the Misty Mountains. Two worlds indeed.
Books, paintings, mirrors…are all…doorsteps…to another World…certainly for the mind…sometimes also for the soul…and…very rarely….for all that we are!
I've never seen nor heard the phrase "the imagination stirred" and been moved by it as I was in listening to you tonight. An old familiar expression, newness breathed into it.
I will go dig out my copy of Lilith and read again! Inspired to let my heart hear some true words. ❤❤❤
So very inspirational and enchanting!! I love MacDonald's works and need to re-read them all! 💖
Great moment, "Suddenly found myself in a moment of inadvertence I became president of the George Macdonald Society..."
Love George MacDonald
One of my prized possessions is my copy of Diary of an Old Soul
Books have made nests, piles, and now carpet throughout our house - and now I must make room for the many I've heard you mention. Downloaded Augustine's Confessions on my phone - to save floor space in the house! Lilith to come to warm my winter (in New Zealand).
This is a tangent, but perhaps what I'm about to write will find its way to someone who would be happy to know it.
The portrait-card of J. R. R. Tolkien that Malcolm had in one of his books was familiar to me, since Benedikt Benedikz (1932-2009) sent me one. We corresponded during Ben's final months. Ben knew Tolkien and had an article published in the 209th issue Amon Hen (Jan. 2009), a magazine from the Tolkien Society.
tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Amon_Hen_209#:~:text=Amon%20Hen%20209%20is%20the%20two-hundred-and-ninth%20issue%20of,also%20includes%20two%20quotes%20attributed%20to%20Tolkien%20.
In, it, Ben disclosed that Jean Sibelius was a favorite composer of Tolkien's. The Finnish composer is well worth listening to in his own right and as likely to appeal to people who enjoy Tolkien. If you are new to Sibelius, try the tone poems or symphonic fantasies called En Saga, Pohjola's Daughter, and Tapiola, and the 5th and 6th symphonies.
The photo of Tolkien was taken by Pamela Chandler around 1961.
that's fascinating! I'm not sure how I acquired that card!
Tolkien loved Sibelius? Well, well - I never knew that! I love him all the more, now! Perhaps hardly surprising (with hindsight!) considering that he loved Finnish and the Kalevala but still a surprise to me. Thanks for the info.
liked the vid Malcom
I regret to say I have never read Macdonald but would like to remedy that. Would you have any suggestions on where to start and how to best enter into his world of writing?
I'd start with the golden Key or the Princess and the Goblin
@@MalcolmGuitespell Great. Thank you.
The Light Princess
As delightful a 15 minutes as can be found anywhere on the internet. Thank you!
At the beginning of the video, as you take a book from the shelf, we see lying on the top several other books including a volume in the old Everyman's Library. Can you tell us which it was?
C. S. Lewis remembered the Everyman's Library and similar series in his autobiography, : "Every man of my age [he was born in 1898] has had in his youth one blessing for which our juniors may well envy him: we grew up in a world of cheap and abundant books. Your Everyman was then a bare shilling." Writing as a teenager to his friend Arthur Greeves, Lewis said he "wonder[ed] how people would laugh if they could hear us smaking [sic] our lips over our 7d's and Everymans just as others gloat over rare folios and an Editio Princeps? But after all, we are surely right to get all the pleasure we can, and even in the cheapest books there is a difference between coarse and nice get up."
Joseph Malaby Dent (publisher) and Ernest Rhys (editor) launched the series in 1906. Rhys remembered Dent thus: "He had in him a strange mixture -- book lover, artist, mystic, craftsman, small tradesman and rosy promiser. ...Often in the course of one hour he would make a complete quick change from one role to another. In these mercurial moods he often became so wrought up that, in order to bring himself back to normal, he would clutch with two hands the front of his desk as if he were afraid of suddenly being whirled away into limbo." Rhys added that Dent's aspiration for the series was "based on his early memories of a time [in the Victorian period] when it was precious hard to find the money to buy the book he wanted to read, and on his sympathy for the man who could not afford to go beyond the Democratic Shilling."
I say that's some kind of hero.
It is 'Unto This Last' essays by John Ruskin
@@MalcolmGuitespell Thanks! C. S. Lewis read his Ruskin. There's a letter from him to Joan Bennett (1937; printed in the second volume of Collected Letters) in which he lists books he read while convalescing from the flu for a "grand week" -- I suppose "grand" because he had a good excuse to read to please himself. Ruskin's Modern Painters Vol. 3 is one of the books he read. Curiously, this volume of Ruskin's is quoted in a book that meant a lot to Lewis, Otto's Idea of the Holy.
But since Malcolm's podcast was on MacDonald, we should be sure to take note that Ruskin was a personal acquaintance of GM. Greville MacDonald's "George MacDonald and His Wife" has a chapter on their intimacy. MacDonald gave Ruskin the first volume of his Unspoken Sermons, by the way, and Ruskin told GM "They are the best sermons -- beyond all compare -- I have ever read," though his appreciation wasn't unalloyed.
I've just rediscovered George MacDonald. I read several of these as a child. It's wonderful to be reminded of his work...thank you!
Thanks for listening
I am so glad I finally discovered this channel.
Welcome!
What a wonderful refresher re-introduction to McDonald, whom I devoured with great eagerness & joy in my teens long, long ago! I must find & re-read him. Thank you! I can see the influence of this storytelling mechanism on Lewis's novels, but not so much on Tolkien's, since the latter created a whole self-contained & self-referencing 'legendarium' which didn't intermingle with our everyday world at all (& was famously NOT an allegory of it!) though maybe his linguistic borrowings from Norse & Old English count. I LOVE this 'Spell' (capital intended!) in your library full of magical portals. THANK YOU! 🙏🤩
Loving your videos! ☕️
“I’d been looking at, instead of into the mirror......” ❤️
The Princess snd the Goblins put my feelings as a young child into words. Thank you for sharing his work.
When did move to the new house?
a couple of years ago
Do you have any videos of the new library…I see a library Wirth a solid door and one with glass in the door but the room looks the same. Cheers from Idaho,
I was reminded of this description of a library, written by an associate of Coleridge:
You saw me in London everlastingly at work in packing my books; and here they are now lying in all parts about me, up to my knees in one place, up to my eyes in another, and above head and ears in a third. I can scarcely find stepping places through the labyrinth, from one end of the room to the other. Like Pharaoh's frogs, they have found their way everywhere, even into the bedchambers. And now, Grosvenor, having been married above twelve years, I have for the first time collected all my books together. What a satisfaction this is you cannot imagine, for you cannot conceive the hundredth part of the inconvenience and vexation I have endured for want of them.
--Robert Southey, letter to Grosvenor C. Bedford, 26 April 1808
wonderful!
Thanks
How do you get on with Heath-Stubbs's "Artorius"?
I enjoyed it very much, though I found the shifts of tone frustrating. the satire on FR Leavis at Cambridge was completely out of place, but the passage on arthur's vision in the cauldron is brilliant