The End of the Rainbow
In Irish folklore, especially of the Lucky Charms variety 😉 , there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In this charming, aesthetically pleasing Scottish tale, MacDonald has his characters follow the rainbow to find a golden key instead. In this story, MacDonald plays with ideas of light and color, noting that when the boy, named Mossy, decides to set out in search for the key he finds he can only see the rainbow when he is not inside it. He must remain outside it, then, using it as a guide to where he is going.
Allusion
I enjoyed the allusion to Goldilocks and the Three Bears (written 30 years earlier), a story which plagued me with nightmares as a curious little girl with golden locks. But I digress. The allusion occurs when the young girl, Tangle, hears something in the house and imagines that bears have broken in and are in pursuit of her. It is actually a magical creature quite different from a bear, but the girl’s imagination literally (and literarily) runs away with her! She runs all the way into the woods, which is incidentally where Fairyland is (isn’t that always the case?).
Fairyland
There are several curiosities with hidden, ambiguous meaning in Fairyland. First, instead of birds there are flying fish, which “swim” through the air. They are magical creatures which an older woman catches and cooks for Tangle to eat. Once Tangle eats them, she becomes connected with Fairyland in a different way. Her ears become opened to understand the sounds of the magical creatures around her as speech instead of merely noise. Her mind is opened to an understanding of the rhythm of life in Fairyland.
The wise woman explains that Tangle doesn’t need to worry because the creatures she ate were not harmed. Instead, they were transformed once they were cooked, into aeranths, and their new spiritual selves are sent out into the world.
Another curiosity is the land of shadows, which Tangle and Mossy so desperately want to find. They watch the shadows dance around mysteriously and beautifully, stirring a desire to know “from whence they come.”
Interesting Characters, But No Villains!
I had read the whole story through, enjoying MacDonald’s descriptions of the children as they grow and learn in Fairyland, as well as the many characters they encounter along the way, but it wasn’t until I finished and was thinking how pleasant the story was that I realized how much MacDonald had broken faith with fairytale tradition: There were no villains nor evil characters present in the whole story!
This made it no less interesting, however, as the tale became more about growth and learning. The children were separated and had to learn on their own, meeting the Old Man of the Sea, the Old Man of the Earth, and the Old Man of the Fire (I am left to wonder why there is no Old Man of the Wind, the fourth element, but perhaps that is represented in the wise woman, a character MacDonald uses in At the Back of the North Wind as the wind itself).
Finding the Key
Mossy does find the golden key at the end of the rainbow, but sadly he dies before he finds the keyhole which he is to place it in. After he dies, he meets up with Tangle. They are both old and young at the same time (you really have to read it to understand this), having died and being ripe and old enough to enter the land of shadows, while being young in the loveliness that their bodies have grown into. They find that the key opens up a way for them to climb the rainbow to finally reach the land they longed for, the land from whence the shadows fall.
Thoughts
This was a beautiful, sad, joyful and mysterious story all at the same time. It reminds me why I fell in love with George MacDonald’s writing in the first place. He has an ability to hint at deep meaning and stir something within me that makes me ask “what is does this all mean?” and at the same time be satisfied to not have all the answers. The true satisfaction in exploring the deepest mysteries of the soul isn’t that they have one meaning or solution. It is a joy just to walk those hallowed halls and wonder “what is all this?” with moments of “ah, now I understand!”
Classic Reads 
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