SOURCE: “Circularity in Fantasy: George MacDonald,” in The Impulse of Fantasy Literature, Kent State University Press, 1983, pp. 70-92.

In the following essay, Manlove examines MacDonald's use of the typical pattern of fantasy literature wherein the hero returns to his home after an adventure.

Unlike the traditional fairy tale, in which the hero often betters himself in the world and may move place, most modern fantasy involves the notion of a return to a starting point so that one ends where one began. This motif of circularity is an image of the preservation of things as they are, and thus one expression of fantasy's delight in ‘being’. It may take the form simply of coming home at the end of one's adventures. Thus Gluck in Ruskin's The King of the Golden River returns to the wasted valley from which he and his cruel brothers were forced to leave, to...