Fairy Tales: McKinley and the Search for Heaven

Robin McKinley is a prolific and enchanting fantasy writer. Her books include Beauty, Deerskin, and two short story collections.

The story reviewed here comes from The Door in the Hedge, "The Stolen Princess." The story is an appropriate follow-up to George MacDonald's Phantastes.

 

"The Stolen Princess" is set in a kingdom on the edge of Faerieland. It begins when the queen-to-be of the mortal realm loses her twin sister to the faerie realm. Several decades later, her only child, Linadel, is also stolen. The daughter Linadel, however, after she arrives in Faerieland, remembers where she came from, crying out, "I'm the only one there is [back home]." Her love, Donathor returns with her, even though accompanying her may mean exile for the couple from both kingdoms.

 

But this time, all the parents go looking for their children. In the end, the queen finds her lost sister. The prince and princess marry and are crowned as the new monarchs of the joined kingdoms.

 

The story is high romance but it contains quite endearing domestic moments. The stolen princess's father, for instance, King Gilvan, has a tendency to jingle items in his pant pockets. He grumbles when he sets a campfire and his courtiers are awed ("Of course, I can set a fire!"); he has a quirky sense of humor, and he recognizes the quite ordinary nervousness behind the immortal prince's initial greeting.

 

The story is also suffused with the same tender joy found in MacDonald's work--and C.S. Lewis's--and Tolkien's. Faerieland is awesome but also recognizable. It is grounded in palpable, touchable, reality, yet it is transcendent.

 

In a way, fantasy outclasses sci-fi here. The idea of human transcendence in sci-fi is rather dreary. Everyone turns into atoms or light or whatever. Ho hum. 

In MacDonald and his heirs, transcendence is both mundane and beautiful, real and remote, physical and mystical, lovable and loving without being abstracted.

 

Tolkien can write, "And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed into the West, until at last on a night of rain, Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise."

 

And C.S. Lewis can write, "Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

And McKinley can write, "And during that meeting in the wood, [a] golden [faerie] girl had met one of the courtiers who for love of his own King and Queen had followed them...the [faerie-human couple] were the living symbol of all that had happened and was happening. And that first marriage was a symbol too: of the love the new changed people had for their new King and Queen. [S]omewhere there is a border and sometime, perhaps, someone will decide to cross it, however well guarded with thorns it may be."

It is as if a host of writers, going back to the nineteenth century, set out to rescue heaven from what it was becoming--and still often is: a collection of properly behaved people encompassed by rules who jump through all the required hoops. 

 

Those writers sought instead to return heaven to its Old Testament-cherubim brilliance alongside the gentle embrace of the Gospels: something real and sublime, tangible and numinous at the same time.

 

They succeeded.

 

Miyazaki continued the tradition.