Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women

In the language of fairy tale, the forest specifically represents chaos and transformation. It is a place outside the reason and order of civilization in which the protagonist struggles to overcome obstacles or find a path. In the process, they become someone different or actualize some potential that is dormant in the static outer world. Afterward, the protagonist returns to the ordinary world bringing a new knowledge or understanding that changes their relationship with their former life.

The forest may be the location for a coming-of-age, or it may be an obstacle or challenge through which a hero must pass in the course of a quest. In the Romantic view, the forest is nature, and nature is an expression of the divine. By entering the woods, Anodos enters on a spiritual journey of self-discovery.

In Phantastes, the forest is also personified by the spirits of trees, both malignant and beneficent. Ash is a goblin figure; Oaks are stalwart guardians; Alder is a temptress and betrayer. MacDonald seems to have a particular love for the Beech woman. Beeches surrounded the village of Huntly, where he grew up, and beech trees appear in several of MacDonald’s books as benevolent and sheltering spirits.

The shadow replaces the Ash spirit as the primary antagonist after the Ash tree is cut down. When Anodos disobeys the ogre woman, he opens a door and encounters his own shadow, which thereafter follows him. Anodos has now internalized the antagonist. The shadow repeatedly comes between Anodos and his ability to see Fairy Land. In simplest terms, it is the Shadow of Doubt. In a deeper sense, the shadow represents the clinging bonds of the mundane world. Anodos’s quest requires complete immersion in his inner world, but the demands of the ordinary world follow him, making him doubt his own instinct for truth.

MacDonald was raised in a religion of rigid laws that must never be transgressed, yet obedience to those laws could never lead to salvation. Salvation was granted at God’s whim without regard to personal merit. MacDonald was saved from that belief by his rampant imagination. In his personal theology, sin was less a transgression of laws than it was a shadow on the soul, a lack of communion with good—or God. Like the religion in which he was raised, salvation could not be won—either by following laws or any other means. Unlike that creed, MacDonald sees salvation as available to everyone. It had only to be embraced by throwing off the shadow of doubt.

The motif of armor represents virtue. When Anodos first meets him, the unnamed knight’s armor is rusted. If the knight is (as implied) supposed to be Sir Percival from the Arthurian legend, then the armor is rusted because Sir Percival failed in his virtue and barely escaped (with the aid of Sir Galahad) with his purity intact. The armor won’t be clean again until the knight has purified himself by great deeds. His first act of chivalry after meeting Anodos is to cut down the Ash tree that houses the terrifying Ash spirit. From that moment, his armor begins to lose its patina of rust. Eventually, the knight’s armor is restored to its shining condition, and he is embraced by the Marble Lady who represents union with the divine.

Armor is the outward representation of inner strength. As the brothers work to teach Anodos how to make his armor, at the same time, he teaches them to embrace their fears until their fears no longer hamper them. They help temper him into the disciplined man he needs to be. Ironically, when the three giants descend on the brothers, none of them is garbed in the armor of virtue, and they must fight unprotected. Two of the brothers defeat their foes but are killed themselves. Only Anodos defeats his own giant and survives.

Anodos is not allowed to keep the armor he made but is given new armor by the king who knights him. Anodos finds that the new armor is too heavy for him, and he doesn’t deserve it. It makes him prideful and vain and becomes tarnished by his neglect. The armor given to him by another and covered in silver and gold is a false virtue.