The Princess and the Goblin

Record summary

George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872) centers on Princess Irene, the miner boy Curdie, and a subterranean goblin population beneath a mountain kingdom. The novel offers a nineteenth-century literary model of descent below the domestic and human world, hidden ancestry, protective guidance, and contested boundaries between fairy-tale belief and rational explanation. It can be compared with mining legends, changeling narratives, and underground-people traditions. The setting and events are fictional, while the extent of MacDonald’s borrowing from particular oral traditions requires source-critical research.