The Nook’s Chronicle
The weeks pass, the months gather, and the ideas remain.
Enter The Chronicle
The Chronicle gathers the Nook’s latest discoveries, thematic collections, weekly roundups, and monthly highlights.
A Thought for the Road
“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds,
the first passion and the last.”
— Samuel Johnson
—
Curiosity does more than lead us somewhere new.
It keeps the familiar
from ever becoming entirely finished.
Short Stories and Latest Nooks
From the Shelves & Fresh Ink
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Prose’s Voice
Prose is built from more than sentences. Explore twelve words—from syntax and diction to register and parallelism—that reveal how writing takes shape, moves, and develops a voice.
The Word Of The Day
Triage
/ˈtriː.ɑːʒ/ (UK),
/ˈtriː.ɑːʒ/ or /triˈɑːʒ/ (US)
Origin:
From French triage, meaning “sorting,” from trier, “to sort”; its medical sense developed from military casualty assessment.
Definition:
The process of assessing ill or injured people to determine how urgently they need treatment, so that the most serious cases can be treated first.
Example:
“The nurse carried out triage before directing the patient to the emergency department.”
What Happened On This Day?
On September 18, 1905
Death of George MacDonald
(1824–1905)
The Storyteller Who Opened the Door to Modern Fantasy
On this day — September 18, 1905 — George MacDonald died at Ashtead, Surrey, aged eighty. Born in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, MacDonald had spent a long life as a minister, poet, novelist, lecturer, essayist, and storyteller, but his most enduring influence lies in the development of modern fantasy. His name may now be less immediately familiar than those of writers who followed him, yet the path from the nineteenth-century literary fairy tale to twentieth-century fantasy repeatedly passes through his work.
In Phantastes, The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, and stories such as The Golden Key, MacDonald treated fantasy as more than entertainment or moral instruction disguised for children. Dreams, underground worlds, mysterious women, shadows, journeys, transformations, and impossible landscapes became ways of exploring fear, goodness, desire, death, spiritual growth, and the limits of reason. His influence travelled remarkably far. C. S. Lewis acknowledged him as a major imaginative influence, while J. R. R. Tolkien engaged seriously with his fairy stories, even though his later assessment of MacDonald was decidedly mixed. MacDonald’s friendship with Lewis Carroll mattered too: the enthusiastic response of the MacDonald children to Carroll’s tale of Alice helped encourage the development and publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
MacDonald’s importance lies partly in demonstrating that the impossible could carry serious imaginative weight. A fairy tale did not have to explain itself away as allegory, realism, or childish diversion; its strangeness could be part of how it reached truths ordinary description could not. That idea became fundamental to the fantasy tradition that followed him. On this day, his work reminds us that MacDonald did not invent fantasy—but he helped English literature recognise that entering an impossible world could be a serious way of thinking about the real one.
Other Milestones on This Day
Birth of Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) – The Man Who Defined English ›
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