33 works across 28 centuries, back to Iliad and Odyssey.
Following one thread, 7 works from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to The Song of Roland (La Chanson de Roland). 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.
1516
Ludovico Ariosto
Italian Renaissance. Ferrara, Italy. Written in Italian.
Romance epic of Charlemagne's knights at war with the Saracens, weaving many interlaced quests, enchantresses, hippogriffs and Orlando's madness for love.
Direct source, well documented.
Gabriel Harvey's correspondence records Spenser's aim to 'overgo' Ariosto. The interlaced quests, enchantresses and episodes translated or adapted from the Furioso, such as Acrasia's bower drawing on Alcina's isle, are direct borrowings.
1483
Matteo Maria Boiardo
Italian Renaissance. Ferrara, Italy. Written in Italian.
Unfinished romance epic that makes Charlemagne's paladin Roland a lover and fills the Carolingian matter with Arthurian magic.
Direct source, well documented.
Ariosto wrote the Furioso as a continuation of Boiardo's unfinished poem. He picked up its characters, including Orlando, Angelica and Ruggiero, at the point where Boiardo had left them.
c. 1100
Anonymous
High Middle Ages. France. Written in Old French.
Epic of Roland's last stand at Roncevaux against a Saracen army, the founding poem of the Carolingian cycle.
Direct source, probable.
Boiardo's paladins, Charlemagne's court and the war against the Saracens come from the Carolingian matter founded by the Roland poems, which reached Italy through Franco-Italian versions. Boiardo then fused this material with Arthurian love and magic.
The line stops here: grows from oral chanson de geste tradition with no documented literary source.
