George Macdonald, "At the Back of the North Wind"

There is no doubt that a re-evaluation of the works of the Scottish writer George MacDonald (1824–1905) and, in particular, of “At the back of the North Wind” of 1871 is underway.

George MacDonald, known for his fables and his fantastic novels, moved in that pre-Raphaelite atmosphere to which William Morris belonged and inserted himself in the ambit of acquaintances that included Mary Shelley, John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Mark Twain (of whom he was a friend) and CS Lewis.

The latter had a great admiration for the production of MacDonald, he considered him his master, unlike Tolkien who, as Roberto Arduini points out, had a real dislike for the writing of the Scotsman.

“The reason for so much growing aversion,” explains Arduini, “was just one of the main characteristics of MacDonald, which profoundly divided Tolkien from Lewis and “The Lord of the Rings” from “The Chronicles of Narnia”. As he writes in the draft preface to The Golden Key, “MacDonald is a preacher, and not only from the pulpit of the church; he preaches in all his many books. “Tolkien did not like moral allegory: “I am not very attracted (indeed, I would say the opposite) to allegories, mystical or moral”.

Diamante is a Victorian child, raised in a modest but dignified family, in the midst of honest and upright people. The father, a coachman, is a hard worker, the mother an example of virtue. Diamante himself, who bears the name of the family horse, is a “Child of God”. By this expression is meant the idea of ​​a brilliant but so candid child that he appears almost mentally retarded. Diamante has a limpidity, a goodness, an angelic generosity such as to strike the heart and redeem those who come in contact with him.

“The greatest wisdom seems madness, to those who don’t have it.”

“Good people see good things and bad people bad things”

It will be precisely for this characteristic that he will be chosen by the North Wind, which is none other than Death, a sort of gigantic goddess with many personalities, terrible as Kali and loving as Durga. North Wind is capable of benevolent and lethal actions at the same time. It is beautiful and tremendous, tiny and boundless, capable of changing dimensions from one instant to another like Lewis Carrol’s Alice.

The North Wind is therefore the Black Lady, behind her there is the end of life, there is an Eden, where one is well but cannot be completely happy because the earthly experience is lacking and we are to miss the affections.

“He couldn’t say he was happy in that place, because he didn’t have his father or mother with him, but he felt calm, peaceful, quiet and content and this was perhaps better than being happy.”

The accent is placed on the vicissitudes, on the travels, on the flights of Diamante who, hidden in the hair of the North Wind, or clinging to his maternal and welcoming breast, visits wonderful places, halfway between the dreamlike and the real, between the dream and the vision.

For those who are good, for those who are pure in heart like the little Diamond — the sweet child with starry eyes — even Death is a friend. Even the journey he takes behind her, in Hades, in the land already visited once by Dante — here called Durante — and described by Herodotus, in the freezing world of the dead, does not frighten him or make him unhappy. Diamante is not able to be frightened, Diamante loves everything and understands everything, Diamante finds beauty and goodness in everyone. Only those who possess his naivety, his wisdom, his generosity and his love for others, consider everything, even illness, even death, as inevitable, fair, necessary.

Diamante is an angelic creature, dispenser of good, capable of connecting to the rest of creation, of empathizing with nature, children and animals. He has a privileged relationship with his siblings, whom he loves as if they were his children, to whom he sings pre-intellectual songs that flow from the heart. He also knows how to understand the secret language of animals, recognizing their celestial, seraphic nature, similar to his own. Diamante is one of those people who love each other without expecting anything in return, who disarm with a smile, with kindness, who always think positive.

“Everything in that boy, so full of quiet wisdom and at the same time so ready to accept the judgment of others, even at his expense, took hold of my heart and I felt wonderfully attracted to him. It seemed to me, somehow, as if the little Diamond possessed the secret of life and that he was himself, as he was ready to think of the smallest living creature, an angel of God, with something special to say and do.”

In addition to little Diamante and his family, the characters that populate the story are the same as most of the Victorian narrative: poor girls with Dickensian traits, drunken coachmen who beat their wives, elderly benefactors who look like those later portrayed by Frances Hodson Burnett in The Little Lord Fauntleroy and in The Little Princess.

In the text there are also fairy tales, poems, riddles, as it will later be in Tolkien and as it is in the tradition of Lewis Carrol and Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes. There are also many topoi of fairy-tale literature that we find here, from the talking horse, to the fairy wardrobe, (see “The Chronicles of Narnia” but also a recent film like “Monsters & Co”), to the swirling wind that transports you to fantastic worlds (“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by Frank Baum, 1900).