Princess and the Goblin (Dramatic Reading)

High in the mountains, beneath the earth, live the goblins. They have waited for years, scheming in the dark, and now they want a princess for their prince. Young Princess Irene has never known danger. She lives in a tower with her nursemaid, dreaming of the kind grandmother who appears only to her, leaving trails of golden thread for the girl to follow. But when Irene and her nursemaid lose their way in the evening mist, they stumble into the goblins' domain, and only a coal-miner's son stands between the princess and a terrible fate. Curdie is dirty, rough, and speaks a language the palace cannot understand. Yet he alone has seen the goblins' true weakness, and he will need every ounce of his courage when the creatures devise their darkest plan yet. George MacDonald wrote this tale in 1872, and it reads like a fever dream of a fairy tale: gentle and eerie, with real peril lurking in every shadow. It influenced C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and generations of fantasy writers who came after. For anyone who believes that children's stories should be both beautiful and just a little bit frightening.