33 works across 28 centuries, back to Iliad and Odyssey.
Following one thread, 5 works from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. Back to all 33 works
1997
J. K. Rowling
Late 20th century. Britain. written in English.
An orphan raised by cruel relatives learns at eleven that he is a wizard and enters Hogwarts, a boarding school for magic, where he and two friends uncover a plot to steal an alchemical stone that grants immortality. It joins the British boarding-school story to the English children's fantasy tradition and sets the plot up as a clue-planted mystery.
1950
C. S. Lewis
Mid-20th century. England. written in English.
Four children evacuated from London pass through a wardrobe into Narnia, where the lion Aslan dies and rises again to break the White Witch's winter.
Thematic kinship, probable.
Rowling has said she loved the Narnia books as a child. Like the wardrobe, the barrier at King's Cross is a hidden doorway from wartime or suburban drabness into a magical world where a child has a destined part in the struggle against an evil power.
1858
George MacDonald
Victorian. Scotland/England. written in English.
A 'faerie romance for men and women' in which a young man, Anodos, wanders through Fairy Land meeting tree spirits, knights and his own shadow.
Thematic kinship, well documented.
Lewis wrote that buying Phantastes at a railway bookstall in 1916 'baptised' his imagination, and he later called MacDonald his master. Lewis's Narnia, like MacDonald's Fairy Land, is a holy otherworld that a reader enters from an ordinary room.
Thematic kinship, well documented.
MacDonald carried the Christian fairy-land vision of his adult romance into his children's books. The wise woman in the tower and the testing of faith in unseen guidance continue themes he first worked out in Phantastes.
1802
Novalis
German Romanticism. Germany. written in German.
Unfinished novel about a medieval poet's quest for the blue flower, mixing dream, embedded fairy tale and allegory. Published after Novalis's death.
Direct source, well documented.
MacDonald opens Phantastes with an epigraph from Novalis on the nature of the fairy tale and quotes Novalis again in his chapter headings. The dreamlike wandering through a symbolic landscape follows Novalis's romance and its embedded tales.
1795-96
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Weimar Classicism. Germany. written in German.
Novel of a merchant's son who tries the theatre and finds his way to maturity under a secret society. The model for the German novel of education.
Thematic kinship, well documented.
Novalis admired Wilhelm Meister at first, then came to reject its prosaic ending. He planned Heinrich von Ofterdingen as a poetic counter-novel of education in which the hero becomes a poet rather than a practical man.
The line stops here: minor branch, followed here only as the book Novalis set out to answer.
