By Donna Triggs
I love the works of Christian writer and minister George MacDonald. I also love telling stories. These are two things that I hold close; that help me weather the storms of our uncertain times.
I feel fear, very often – fear of health problems and even death for myself and my loved ones; fear of an unpredictable political climate. Fear of a future none of us feel sure of any more. Often, in times of uncertainty, it is to childhood that we turn to for answers. At the Back of the North Wind is the first story I can remember being read aloud to me as a child (by my mother, an authority on George MacDonald and author of the MacDonald biography The Stars and the Stillness); it was Lady North Wind’s all-engulfing hair that first informed my ideas of an omnipresent Christian god.
An allegory of God’s will working through pain and death for the good of all, At the Back of the North Wind has brought me comfort as I return to it in recent times. When the child Diamond discovers that Lady North Wind is going to sink a ship, he asks her how she can bear the cries of the drowning people. She replies:
‘I will tell you how I can bear it, Diamond: I am always hearing, through every noise, through all the noise I am making myself even, the noise of a far-off song. I do not exactly know where it is, or what it means; and I don’t hear much of it, only the odour of its music, as it were, flitting across the great billows of the ocean…somehow it tells me that it is all right; that is it coming to swallow up all the pain and fear of the people and set them singing it with the rest’.
It is a newly-awakened impulse to be part of ‘the song’, that has moved me to both produce and narrate an audio book version of At the Back of the North Wind. I feel a desire to pass on what my mother gave me – to gift to a new generation of children a simple story of simple faith, simply told. I also – as previously stated – love telling stories; my work as an actress and drama practitioner has shown me how the telling and re-telling of stories has the power to transform and redeem. The human voice raised in poetry or song can have a life-changing power on an audience – yet the performer can also be transformed; I have noticed that the physical expression of a great sorrow or great joy through spoken word can move us to tears in a way mere thoughts cannot. I have read At the back of the North Wind to myself many times, yet speaking the words newly aloud gave them a fresh power to surprise and move me – Diamond’s gentle faith, and the story’s ultimate message that death is conquerable – did indeed make me cry.
Creating this audio book was not easy. Sitting alone for many days in a soundproofed room reading (and re-reading over again the parts which I did not think I had read well enough!) this beautiful allegorical fantasy, was something of a soul searching journey. All I had was my own voice, and the words in print before me which I remembered from my childhood. As I strove to capture the magic of the story – of Diamond’s simple childlike faith, of North Wind’s omnipotence and infinite variability (sometimes she is so big she blots out the sky, sometimes she is the size of a dragonfly), of the characters of Old Diamond and Ruby (the horses whose speech Diamond understands) – I felt very much like a hermit of old who has cut himself off from normal human life to seek spiritual enlightenment through visions. And yes – there were times when something like visions came; when I would begin to feel the ground heaving beneath me like the waves that overcome the drowning people Diamond pitied so much. And then the tiny room would gradually darken, become North Wind’s hair, enfold and embrace me, and I would remember the sound of her song, and I would know that everything was going to be OK.
I am sure that this is the endpoint of my journey; the answer to the question I did not even know I was asking: Everything is going to be alright.
In parting I will quote from At the back of the North Wind again – ‘For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds.’ I hope the ‘echoes’ of my voice reflect the great Love that I find in George MacDonald’s work, and in that Song that drowns out our fears and carries us all onward.
At the Back of the North Wind narrated by Donna K. Triggs is available at Audiobooks.com. Listen to a sample clip here.
Ten percent of any profits will go to The Starlight Foundation, a UK based charity which supports children suffering serious illness.
George MacDonald (10 December 1824 – 18 September 1905) was a Scottish author, poet and Christian minister. He was a pioneering figure in the field of modern fantasy literature, influencing the work of C. S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll amongst others. In addition to his fairy tales, MacDonald wrote several works of Christian theology.
Donna K. Triggs is a UK based writer, actress and university lecturer. She is editor of the George MacDonald Society magazine Orts.
