The Princess and the Goblin

It is the second children's novel by George macdonald. The Princess Irene lives 'in a large house, half castle, half farmhouse' halfway up a mountainside, where she is looked after by her nurse Lootie; her father the king sometimes visits her. Beneath the mountain in a series of caves lives a race of beings 'called by some gnomes, by some kobolds, by some goblins'. It is said of these goblins that they once dwelt above ground and were much like other people, but were driven underground, since when they have become grotesquely ugly. They have no toes on their feet and are greatly contemptuous of toe-possessing humans. Their feet are, however, the most sensitive parts of their bodies, their heads being hard as stone.

Adjacent to the goblin caves are mines, worked for precious metal by the humans. The miners are wary of the goblins but not dreadfully afraid of them, for they can be sent packing by stamping on their feet and by chanting rhymes at them – the goblins hate all verse. Among the most fearless of the miners is a lad named Curdie Peterson, who works in the mines with his father and is devoted to his kindly mother.

One day Irene loses her way in the deserted upper floors of her house and comes across a stair which leads her up to a tower, where sits a lady who is both very old and very beautiful. She is Irene's great-great-grandmother. Irene is entranced by her, but on subsequent occasions when she tries to revisit the tower she cannot discover the stair – until she is desperately in need of help, whereupon she finds her way to her 'beautiful mother of grandmothers' almost in an instant.

One evening Irene and her nurse are caught out on a mountainside by the approach of darkness, and are surrounded by goblins as they try to make their way home. Curdie appears and rescues them and is rewarded by the promise of a kiss from the princess – though Lootie, the nurse, is outraged at this suggestion. Soon afterwards Curdie discovers that the goblins are plotting some great outrage against the royal house; he is captured and imprisoned in the goblin caves. Irene rescues him and Curdie warns the royal guards of imminent disaster, but he is accidentally wounded by a guard when he is mistaken for an enemy and falls ill with a fever. The goblins break into the royal house; Curdie recovers, and helps to rout them, while Irene finds safety in Curdie's parents' cottage. The goblins are drowned in an underground flood caused by themselves, and, with the approval of her father the king, Irene rewards Curdie with the promised kiss.

MacDonald himself said that the story was 'as good work of the kind as I can do', and the book, beside being his own best tale for children, is one of the most accomplished 19th-cent. fantasies by a British author. Admirers of The Princess and the Goblin have included G. K. Chesterton and C. S. lewis, while the goblin mines beneath the Misty Mountains in the hobbit owe much to it—the book was among the childhood favourites of J. R. R. tolkien. In 1877 MacDonald published a sequel, the princess and curdie.