33 works across 28 centuries, back to Iliad and Odyssey.
Following one thread, 6 works from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to Odyssey. 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.
1590 (Books I-III)
Edmund Spenser
Elizabethan. England. Written in English.
Allegorical romance epic in which knights representing the virtues undertake quests in Faerieland, written in the nine-line Spenserian stanza.
Structural model, probable.
Anodos's journey through Fairy Land as a series of allegorical encounters with knights, false beauties and temptations follows Spenser's method. The deceiving Alder-maiden has been compared to Spenser's Duessa, and MacDonald was a close reader of the poem.
19 BCE
Virgil
Augustan Rome. Augustan Rome. Written in Latin.
Epic of the Trojan Aeneas's wanderings and his war in Italy, written as Rome's founding poem.
Structural model, probable.
Spenser shaped his career on Virgil's, moving from pastoral in The Shepheardes Calender to national epic. He presented The Faerie Queene as a Virgilian poem that glorifies a dynasty through its legendary origins.
Structural model, well documented.
Ariosto ends his poem with Ruggiero killing Rodomonte in single combat, modelled on the close of the Aeneid where Aeneas kills Turnus. Virgilian similes and the founding of the Este dynasty through Ruggiero follow Virgil's dynastic design.
c. 725 BCE
Homer
Archaic Greece. Archaic Greece. Written in Ancient Greek.
Epic of Odysseus's ten-year voyage home from Troy among monsters and enchantresses.
Structural model, well documented.
The first six books follow the Odyssey: a storm-tossed hero tells his past at a foreign court, meets monsters such as the Cyclops and descends to the underworld.
This is one of the oldest surviving works in its tradition; the line ends here.
