Leaving to Return: A look at Tolkien's Notions of Escape, Recovery and Consolation in George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind (1871)

Like lightning that falls from a clear sky, to quote his fellow fantasy writer and friend C. S. Lewis, Tolkien’s work irrupted into the literary scene to break many of the patterns that had dominated it since the late 19th century. While Modern Fantasy’s success was immediate, it still found opposition in literary critics of the time, who found the genre second-rate and escapist, for which Tolkien felt obliged to defend it in his essay "On Fairy Stories" (1947). Even if Tolkien’s work came as brand new, its roots are to be found in another author that is gradually being rediscovered and that still remains rather unknown in the Spanish literary field: George MacDonald. Among his books, At the Back of the North Wind (1871) is surely his best-known one, a novel that mixes fairy tales with Victorian children’s literature and which inspired many of the fantasy writers that would come after, especially the Inklings. Interestingly, the novel contains, albeit in an embryonic form, some of the concepts that Tolkien would theorise about in his defense essay, namely escape, recovery and consolation. Thus, the aim of this paper is to analyse At the Back of the North Wind, taking into account these concepts to see how MacDonald anticipated many of the notions that would later end up defining Modern Fantasy as a genre.