C. S. Lewis
1898-1963

(Full name Clive Staples Lewis; also wrote under the pseudonyms N. W. Clerk and Clive Hamilton) Irish-born English novelist, essayist, critic, autobiographer, short-story writer, and author of juvenile and young adult novels.

The following entry presents an overview of Lewis's career through 2004. For further information on his life and works, see CLR, Volumes 3 and 27.

INTRODUCTION

One of the most distinguished and influential children's writers of the twentieth century, Lewis is well known as a Christian apologist, literary scholar, novelist, poet, and critic, though he is most widely remembered for his seven-volume series for children, The Chronicles of Narnia. Beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) and continuing throughout the Narnia books, Lewis drew upon his Christian beliefs, knowledge of world legend and literature, and memories of childhood to create a wholly unique fantasy world, lorded over by a kingly lion named Aslan. The Narnia stories—which feature a rich tapestry of talking animals, mythological beings, medieval bestiaries, and the supernatural—depict young children from our reality battling forces of evil whom seek to destroy the goodness of Narnia and the values on which the world is built: courage, truth, beauty, loyalty, tolerance, and generosity. Lewis wrote each volume of The Chronicles of Narnia in an engaging, uncomplicated prose style, blending chivalric language with schoolboy slang while threading familiar childhood memories, religious ideals, and the spirit of adventure into each novel.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Lewis was born on November 29, 1898, in Dundela Villas, Belfast, Ireland, the second child of Albert Lewis, a prosecuting attorney, and Florence Augusta Hamilton Lewis. He was a quiet child who learned Irish folktales from his nurse and quickly became enamoured with Gulliver's Travels, the tales of Beatrix Potter, and the novels of E. Nesbit. Lewis and his elder brother Warren created imaginary countries such as Animal-Land and Boxen when they were small boys, inhabiting these lands with anthropomorphic animals, knights in shining armor, and other fantastic characters. Lewis's mother died of cancer when he was nine, and his father then sent Lewis away for schooling. He was unhappy at boarding school and filled much of his free time reading. At the age of twelve, Lewis began reading fairy tales and legends, becoming particularly interested in Norse mythology. At sixteen, he read The Iliad and The Odyssey and soon thereafter was introduced to the works of George MacDonald, who along with Nesbit became one of the greatest influences on Lewis's writing. While at preparatory school, Lewis began to become disillusioned with Christianity and became a atheist, though he would later fervently return to the Christian faith in 1929. In 1917 Lewis enrolled at Oxford University, but attended for only one year before being called to serve in World War I. He received wounds during a battle in France and, once he recovered from his injuries, he returned to Oxford. In 1925 he was elected as a Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he would remain for the next thirty years. During this time, Lewis founded a literary group called The Inklings, whose membership included J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. Tolkien would later credit Lewis as one of the earliest supporters of his Lord of the Rings series. In 1939, during the German bombing campaign of London during World War II, Lewis opened his home to four schoolgirls who had been evacuated to the countryside. After one of the schoolgirls showed an interest in Lewis's large wardrobe and asked if she could go inside it, Lewis began composing a fantasy tale, revolving around the image of the child inside of the wardrobe. That image along with several other fantastic scenes from Lewis's imagination, such as a faun carrying an umbrella in a snowy wood, became the basis for the first volume in Lewis's Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Within six years, Lewis would author six additional volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia, concluding the series with The Last Battle in 1956. In 1954 Lewis resigned from Oxford and took a position as a Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University. A steadfast bachelor, Lewis married Joy Davidman Gresham in 1956. However, shortly after they wed, she was diagnosed with cancer and died four years later in 1960. In 1963 Lewis retired from his position at Cambridge due to failing health. He died on November 22, 1963.

MAJOR WORKS

Although Lewis is highly acclaimed for his adult fiction, religious essays, and literary criticism, he will forever be best remembered for The Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis began the series with the intention of writing a single-volume fairy tale. However, once he had written a large portion of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the introduction of the lion Aslan changed the focus and direction of the story. Lewis then decided to create a series of seven books that combined fantasy, adventure, and mythology with Christian gospel teachings in order to prepare children for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens with the four Pevensie children—Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy—being evacuated from London to the English countryside during the Nazi bombing campaign of WWII. They take up residence at the large country manor of the reclusive Professor Kirke and soon begin to explore Kirke's large, rambling house. During a game of hide-and-seek, Lucy, the youngest, hides in an old wardrobe. As she pushes towards the back of the wardrobe, Lucy finds herself in a snowy wood where she sees a faun with an umbrella and a streetlight glowing incongruously in the forest. Lucy learns that she has reached the magical land of Narnia and, eventually, her siblings also enter the world. It is now always winter in Narnia (though never Christmas) thanks to the magic of the evil White Witch, but a prophesy states that when the four thrones of Narnia are filled with two human boys and two human girls—called the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve—the Witch's spell will be broken. The children are also told about Aslan, the lion savior of Narnia. The children set off to find Aslan, though Edmund soon betrays them and goes to the White Witch, who promises to make him king without his siblings. As the three remaining Pevensie children continue their journey to find Aslan, they notice signs of the coming spring. They finally meet Aslan and beg him to save their brother Edmund. Aslan confronts the White Witch and offers himself in the place of the now penitent Edmund. The Witch ritually murders Aslan, but the next day, Aslan comes back to life, defeating the White Witch and her evil minions. The Pevensie children are crowned as the rulers of Narnia and reign wisely for many years. During their coronation, Aslan quietly leaves; the children are told that Aslan has other lands to help and that he will return to Narnia when he is needed. Many years later, the four rulers are out hunting when they come upon a vaguely familiar area of woods. As they walk through the forest, they suddenly find themselves coming back out of the wardrobe at the Professor's house, the same age as when they first left, finding that only minutes have elapsed in the "real" world. Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy return to Narnia in Prince Caspian (1951). In this second installment, they are called back to Narnia to help Prince Caspian claim the throne of Narnia. Although only one year on Earth has passed since the children were last in Aslan's world, in Narnia, hundreds of years have elapsed. With the help of Aslan, the children defeat Caspian's evil Uncle Miraz, an usurper to the throne, and rightfully restore kingship to Caspian. When the children depart from Narnia this time, Aslan tells Peter and Susan that they will never return to Narnia because they are now too old.

However, Lucy and Edmund journey back to Narnia with their cousin Eustace in The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" (1952). The three children materialize on a ship, three Narnian-years in the future. Caspian, now King, is on a quest to find seven explorers who set out into unknown reaches of the sea during Miraz's reign. Eustace whines and complains constantly, but during a stop at a mysterious island, Eustace's selfishness turns him into a dragon. He makes a pathetic dragon, filled with self-pity, though he eventually tries to help the others by scouting and hunting. When Eustace is truly sorry for his past behavior, Aslan appears and peels away the dragon skin, returning him to his human form. The adventurers travel from island to island, discovering the fate of all seven explorers, and then continue east to the edge of the world. They encounter Aslan at the edge; here Lucy and Edmund are warned that they are now too old to return to Narnia, though Eustace may come back. They then step through a door and return to England. The Silver Chair (1953) opens with Eustace attending boarding school. He befriends a girl named Jill and tells her about his adventures in Narnia. One day, while they are trying to escape from bullies, Eustace and Jill open a door and find themselves at the edge of a tall cliff in Narnia. Eustace falls from the cliff and, as Jill wonders what to do, she meets Aslan. Aslan assures her that Eustace is safe and charges her with a mission to rescue Prince Rilian who is imprisoned by the Queen of the Underland. Aslan gives Jill four signs to help her on her quest, telling her that she must repeat the signs every morning so she will not forget them. As Eustace and Jill undertake their adventure, Jill becomes complacent, neglecting to repeat the signs, and begins to confuse and forget Aslan's words. Through trial and error, Jill and Eustace eventually meet Prince Rilian (son of the now aged King Caspian), but he is under the spell of the Queen of the Underland who uses a silver chair to enchant him. Jill and Eustace untie Rilian from the chair, and Rilian then kills the evil Queen. The fifth novel in The Chronicles of Narnia series, The Horse and His Boy (1954) takes place during the timeline of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Shasta lives in Calormen, a land south of Narnia, with a man he assumes is his father and who treats Shasta cruelly. Shasta finds that he is not the man's son and escapes before the man can sell him into slavery. He meets Bree, a talking horse from Narnia who is also trying to escape Calormen; the two decide to flee together. As they travel toward Narnia, they are forced into a forest by a lion (later discovered to be Aslan), where they meet a girl named Aravis from the land of Tarkaan. Aravis is riding Hwin, who is also a talking Narnian horse. The four uncover a plot by Rabadash, Prince of Calormen, to invade the neighboring land of Archenland and, in turn, use Archenland as a fortification from which to launch an attack on Narnia. After the combined forces of Narnia and Archenland defeat the Calormenes, Shasta discovers that he is the long lost son of the King of Archenland.

Although sixth in the series, The Magician's Nephew (1955) is actually the first Narnian adventure chronologically. In The Magician's Nephew, Lewis travels back to turn-of-the-century England and introduces a young Digory Kirke, the professor from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Digory and his friend Polly travel to different worlds using magical rings and witness Aslan's creation of Narnia. They accidentally bring an evil queen into Narnia and therefore introduce evil into an otherwise perfect world. Aslan compels Digory to quest for a magic apple which will limit the effect of the queen's evil. Although tempted by the queen to use the apple on his ailing mother instead of returning it to Aslan, Digory chooses to obey Aslan. Aslan plants the apple to ward off evil, and the tree grows so quickly that Aslan also gives Digory an apple from the new tree which he can use to heal his mother. Many aspects of this story relate to other novels in the series; the evil queen becomes the White Witch in the first novel, a horse that Digory and Polly bring into Narnia becomes the forbearer of Bree and Hwin from The Horse and His Boy, and after Digory's mother is healed by the magic apple, he buries the core in his yard. Years later he chops down a tree that has grown from the core and fashions a wardrobe—the same wardrobe that started the Narnian adventures. With the history of Narnia established in book six, Lewis ends the series, and the world of Narnia, in The Last Battle. The story opens with an ape duping a kindhearted donkey into wearing a lion skin and pretending to be Aslan. The ape talks for the imposter Aslan, creating an atmosphere of hatred and distrust that threatens to destroy Narnia. Jill and Eustace are called to help save Narnia from the false Aslan. Although they ultimately fail to save the world, Aslan gathers together the loyal Narnians past and present—along with most of the Pevensie children (who we find have perished in a train accident in the real world)—and transports them to a Heaven-like paradise, which Aslan calls the real Narnia. After concluding the series, Lewis stated that he preferred the Narnia books to be read in the following order: The Magician's Nephew, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader," The Silver Chair, and finally, The Last Battle.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Published at a time when realistic stories for older children were more fashionable than fantasies, The Chronicles of Narnia have become widely acknowledged as exceptional contributions to the fantasy genre, with Lewis winning praise for increasing the popularity of fantasy among other writers of juvenilia. On the whole, the critical response to The Chronicles of Narnia has been largely favorable. Reviewers have complimented Lewis's reinforcement of Christian tenets without resorting to didacticism, noting that his inviting narratives compel children to see the honor in choosing to do good deeds, even if a level of self-sacrifice is involved. Commentators have also commended the positive messages of truth, love, compassion, and redemption throughout the series. Many have debated the quality of the writing in The Chronicles of Narnia, with some arguing that the first and last volumes of the series are noticeably better written than the middle volumes. The Horse and His Boy and The Silver Chair have particularly been singled out as the lesser of the seven Narnia books. Although immensely popular with young readers, The Chronicles of Narnia's religious symbolism has inspired almost-vitriolic critical debate among literary scholars. Most notably, Philip Pullman, the Whitbread-winning author of the His Dark Materials fantasy series, has publicly denounced The Chronicles of Narnia as both racist and misogynist. As examples, Pullman has cited Lewis's portrayal of the Arab-like Calormen race and noted how, in The Last Battle, Susan Pevensie is denied access to the new Narnia (which is seen as a metaphor for Heaven) because she is now interested in lipstick and boys. Lewis's supporters have rebuffed these accusations, faulting Pullman's interpretations of the text.

AWARDS

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1962. In a 2003 poll by BBC Parenting magazine, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was named "the book parents most want to share with their own youngsters" and was voted one of Britain's twenty-one best-loved novels in the BBC's 2003 The Big Read. The Horse and His Boy was honored with a Carnegie Medal Commendation from the British Library Association in 1955, and The Last Battle received a Library Association Carnegie Medal in 1957. Lewis has also won awards for his adult works and received honorary degrees from the University of St. Andrews, Laval University, the University of Manchester, the University of Dijon, and the University of Lyon.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (prose) 1933; revised editions, 1935, 1943

∗Out of the Silent Planet (young adult novel) 1938

The Screwtape Letters (novel) 1942; enlarged as The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast, 1961

∗Perelandra (young adult novel) 1943; republished as Voyage to Venus, 1953

The Great Divorce: A Dream (novel) 1945

∗That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (young adult novel) 1945; abridged as The Tortured Planet, 1946

Transposition and Other Addresses (essays and criticism) 1949; republished as The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, 1949

†The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe [illustrations by Pauline Baynes] (juvenile novel) 1950

†Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia [illustrations by Pauline Baynes] (juvenile novel) 1951

Mere Christianity (essays and criticism) 1952

†The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" [illustrations by Pauline Baynes] (juvenile novel) 1952

†The Silver Chair [illustrations by Pauline Baynes] (juvenile novel) 1953

†The Horse and His Boy [illustrations by Pauline Baynes] (juvenile novel) 1954

†The Magician's Nephew [illustrations by Pauline Baynes] (juvenile novel) 1955

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (autobiography) 1955

†The Last Battle [illustrations by Pauline Baynes] (juvenile novel) 1956

Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (novel) 1956

A Grief Observed [as N. W. Clerk] (autobiography) 1961

The Complete Chronicles of Narnia. 7 vols. (juvenile novels) 1965

Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories [edited by Walter Hooper] (essays and short stories) 1966; republished as On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, 1982

God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (essays and criticism) 1970

The Dark Tower and Other Stories [edited by Walter Hooper] (short stories) 1977

Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis [edited by Walter Hooper] (short stories) 1985

Letters to Children [edited by Lyle W. Dorsett and Marjorie Lam Mead] (correspondence) 1995

The Chronicles of Narnia (juvenile novels) 1998

∗These three novels comprise what is variously referred to as the Space Trilogy, Cosmic Trilogy, or Ransom Trilogy.

†These seven novels comprise The Chronicles of Narnia series.

GENERAL COMMENTARY

Chad Walsh (essay date 1979)

SOURCE: Walsh, Chad. "The Parallel World of Narnia." In The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis, pp. 123-57. New York, N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jonavich, 1979.

[In the following essay, Walsh expounds on Lewis's early writings and compares them with The Chronicles of Narnia novels, focusing on the religious themes present throughout the series, particularly in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Magician's Nephew, and The Last Battle.]

Lewis's first book for children, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was published in his early fifties. For seven years, at the rate of one a year, the Narnia books came off the presses. Readers accustomed to adult fare found themselves puzzled by this sudden alteration in his focus.

The shift is easier to comprehend if one takes a second look at Lewis's childhood, when he and Warnie played in the roomy attic. Their principal activity was composing adventure tales set in such imaginary locales as Animaland, India, or Boxen. Lewis continued this activity up to his early teens, as in a story probably written around 1912—"Boxen: or Scenes from Boxonian City Life." ¹ This tale, never published in book form, begins as follows:

I

Night was falling on the Bosphorus as the town guardsman sighted a small but tidy schooner tacking up to Fortessa. Forward stood a young Fracity Chessary Pawn and at the tiller a sturdy thickset knight stolidly smoking his pipe. With a little deft maneuvering he brought her up a secluded, rocky creek and dropped anchor about 200 yards from the shingle. He called the assistance of the Pawn to lower his solitary boat, which soon was lying under the schooner's counter, and several vigorous strokes sent him to the beach. Mooring the boat he stepped out and in the dusk descried two athletic figures walking along a short distance away.

"Why! Your Majesties!"

They turned. "Macgoullah."

"At your service. What are you doing here?"

"Oh," said the 'Jah. "Learning Turkish."

"Alone?" inquired the knight.

"No. Big's here," answered Buny.

"At the inn?"

"Yes."

The three friends walked together to the postern gate, where the guard admitted them for a small fee. A few hundred yards brought them to the inn. Through the door into the dinner room Macgoullah caught sight of a stout frog in evening dress.

"I'll stay in the Outer," he observed.

The boys walked into the Inner. It was a small room crowded to overflowing. Round the table sat Puddiphat, Goose, Quicksteppe, and the Little Master.

"Boys, where have you been?" asked the Frog.

"Oh, nowhere special," returned the 'Jah with characteristic vagueness. Big gulped and continued bisecting a portion of cod. All present were Boxonians except one Prussian who sat in a far corner silent and morose, unnoticed by all: true, there was a cautious look in Quicksteppe's grey eyes, but no one observed it. The company bent over their meal and conversation and quietly the Prussian slipped into a curtained cupboard. Big looked up.

"Are we alone?"

"Yes, my dear little Master," said Goose.

"Now Goose, tell your tale."

"Yes. Gentlemen, I have just found that the whole Clique is threatened by Orring, one of the members for 'the aquanium—'"

"Come, my good bird," cried Big. "What does that mean?"

"For Piscia, my good Frog," Big gulped, "has determined to throw all the present clique out of office, and is bribing right and left."

One touch of the future scholar is seen in the story's footnotes. Two occur in the passages just quoted. The first explains that "The kingdoms of Boxen, although united in Parliament, retain their monarchs, the Rajah of India and the King of Animaland." The other fills in background: "'Little Master' was the speaker of the Parliament, and had many powers, including that of being the constant guardian and adviser of the Kings. The present one, Lord Big, exercised much influence over King Benjamin and the Rajah, as he had been their tutor in their youth: in private he neglected all the usual formulae of address to a prince…."

One hopes that some day a selection of Lewis's juvenilia will be published, both for scholars and the simply curious. Meanwhile, the portions quoted from "Boxen" give some idea of Lewis's writing as he entered his teens.

A reader coming on "Boxen" might first leap to the conclusion that here is the ancestry of the Narnia tales, but he would quickly learn that the resemblance is superficial, amounting to little more than a cast that includes talking animals. These characters seem like normal men dressed up for a masquerade. The profound difference is in atmosphere. Narnia is a kind of fairyland, and even its political and military events have an otherworld quality. In "Boxen," one is plunged into a tale of cliques and conspiracies and counter-measures. The everyday Tellurian world is very much with us. One seems to hear in the background the voice of Lewis's father, declaiming political opinions. Or one senses the influence of cheap adventure and mystery books in which such sinister characters as a Prussian lurk in curtained cupboards.

In short, "Boxen," despite its vocal animals, represents one side of Lewis: the realist. From this book he could have evolved into a realistic novelist, determined to present the earthly condition in all its photographic concreteness.

This was not the road he took, and yet in minor ways "Boxen" foreshadows things to come. Even if the animals act completely human, still they are animals and they do talk. The theme of inner and outer circles, so important in Lewis's later work, is already here, as is the conviction that government must function as a kind of conspiracy. There is a keen eye for small, specific details. Most of all, perhaps, even at this early age we have a smooth narrative style.

More typical of the later Lewis is "The Quest of Bleheris," written two or three years later after he had fallen under the magic spell of the Arthurian legends. Here instead of talking animals there are knights and fair ladies. It begins:

"The Quest of Bleheris"

Chapter I—Of the City of Nesses and of certain that dwelt therein

As I sate in the garden in summer time, when the sun had set and the first stars were trembling into light, and while the ghostly, little bats were bleating above me, it came to me in mind to write for you, Galahad, somewhat of the life and dealings of this Bleheris; for—in my conceit—since he was surely not unlike yourself, it seemed that you might have pleasure in hearing of his life and his death, that fell so many years ago. Know then, that in the old days, when this world was still young and full of wonders, there lay a little country that men called The Land of Two Nesses: for there was a wide bay, and on either side of it stood great, bold nesses where the rocky hills sank down into the sea, and between them was a beach of fair, golden sand…. Now from out of the heights that were thereabouts came a swift and deep stream, called Coldriver, that ran through the valley-land, and out into the bay beyond, on the which stood the City of the Nesses: the same was a very fair city of stones, with five bridges over that stream, and good wharves for many ships of the merchants that lay by them, and towers and palaces and rich halls as fair as might be….

For in that city was a rich old knight, a worthy man who had done great deeds of arms in his day, driving back rovers that came to harry them from over the seas, and riding at all adventure in the ill lands beyond the pass of which I told you…. Now the whole prop and stay of this old knight, and all his pride and glory was [his daughter] for she was the fairest and most virtuous maiden as at that time alive: and her hair was more yellow than corn and her feet and her breasts more white than—But, in truth, my friend, there is little need to tell of such matters: for I believe well that you, who have read so deep in old books, must have heard this same lady spoken of ere now….

Now the fame of this lady was very great in the land, inasmuch as all squires and knights, yea and barons and great kings wooed her to wife: but she would have none of them…. But though many said that they would, yet it is not known that any man died for love of her: nay, some even were so ungentle that they went afterwards and wed others, and lived merrily all their life days…. But let us go forward: now, as might be looked for, this young knight [Bleheris] would be no worse than his fellows either in love or in war or in any other thing, so that he too sought the favour of Alice the Saint, and wrote verses upon her and jousted for her, and sighed piteously and altogether deemed that he was no less sorely smitten in love than Lancelot or Palomides or any of the knights of old song. None the less, he forebore not to eat lustily, to ride to the chase with a good heart, and to sleep sound of nights.

So far the tale shows Lewis wavering between complete commitment to his story and a schoolboyish debunking tone. He makes Alice the Saint a frigid maid, and as we have seen, comments on her conventional beauty with tongue in cheek. As the story goes on, Lewis falls more under its spell and develops a series of visionary scenes, some of which are powerful. For instance, the death of Wan Jadis, a companion of Bleheris (Chapter XI):

… now nothing was left of Wan Jadis, above the marish, but only his head and his arms stretched out desperately to the landwards. And, whereas his helmet was off (for in his haste he had left it hanging by the saddle), Bleheris could see the beautiful, sad face strained and drawn with loathing and the agony of death: it seemed that he strove to speak, but in that moment the slime and mud rose to his white lips, and the evil creeping things crawled over the fair skin, more delicate than porcelain. His eyes cast one more look upon Bleheris: and then the marish closed over his head, and thus Wan Jadis died.

"Bleheris" is full to overflowing with marvelous sights and strange adventures. It is that form so beloved of Lewis, the quest story, but not a Christian one; indeed there is an antichurch tone and Christianity is treated as a superstition. At times the description of scenery reminds one of The Great Divorce and the variety of symbolic episodes suggests The Pilgrim's Regress. The turning point in Bleheris's quest is the death of Wan Jadis, which is one event he cannot take half frivolously.

Lewis's mature talent represents a merger of the fanciful and the realistic, the quest and the intrigue. In "Boxen," despite its talking animals, one sees the realist at work, and there is even a foreshadowing of the future logician and satirist. "Bleheris," by contrast, explores mysterious landscapes where the soul is challenged to know itself; realms of deadly perils but also occasional hints of Joy [Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life ].

Lewis was not a man who consorted much with children. Then how did he learn to depict them so well? The answer may be the obvious one, that like almost all effective writers, he both grew up and stubbornly refused to grow up. As a small boy he was fascinated by never-never lands. He never lost this interest. Advancing years merely gave him the courage and skill to exploit the abiding dreams of childhood.²

Though Lewis speaks of the influence of Beatrix Potter, he seems to have been more familiar with the stories of E. Nesbit. On the whole, however, he appears not to have read vast quantities of children's stories in his early boyhood but he devoted a good deal of time to producing his own.

The adult Lewis was haunted by a mental picture of a faun carrying parcels in a snowy wood, a picture that went back to about the age of sixteen. Eventually, when around forty, his imagination began to play with the recurrent picture. This appears to have coincided with the arrival at Lewis's home of some schoolgirls who had been evacuated from London in fear of air raids. Perhaps, one can speculate, their presence aroused and intensified his long-standing interest in children's stories. It is not certain that he did much actual writing on the project at the time. I recall that in 1948 when I first met Lewis, I asked him what he intended to write next, and he said something rather vague about completing a children's book he had begun "in the tradition of E. Nesbit." By this time he was beginning to see more pictures, including a "queen on a sledge" and perhaps Aslan.

Another catalyst may have been a still unpublished tale by his former pupil, Roger Lancelyn Green, The Wood That Time Forgot. A reader coming on it today would be sure it derived heavily from The Lion, but the truth is if anything the opposite. Green told Lewis about the fantasy he was writing; Lewis asked to read it and tried, unsuccessfully, to find a publisher for it. The tale concerns three children and an undergraduate friend who stumble into a wood where time is suspended. There they find a girl who is a kind of succuba; she is pursued by a bad angel. With the aid of the children, she and the undergraduate finally meet, and by saving each other, save themselves. Several parts of the story have a strong Narnia flavor. When the children visit Agares in his home, he seems a jolly and innocent old man, and they do not suspect the drink, a sort of raspberry cordial, which lures one of the children to side with the forces of evil. This instantly brings to mind the White Witch's temptation of Edmund by the use of magic Turkish Delight. It is, however, not so much individual episodes as the total feeling of the wood that brings most strongly to mind the enchanted world of Narnia. Lewis's cavalier disposal of his own manuscripts makes it impossible to determine how detailed an impact Green's book had on him but, at the very least, we know he was greatly excited about it.

As Clyde Kilby has pointed out in his excellent discussion of the Narnia tales in The Christian World of C. S. Lewis, the order of publication of the tales does not correspond to the chronology of events inside the sequence. The Magician's Nephew should come first, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe next, and The Last Battle of course last.

All seven of the stories are rich in Christian symbolism. Three, however, carry major themes. The Magician's Nephew presents the creative act by which the divine Aslan sings Narnia into existence. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe dramatizes the crucifixion and the resurrection, as Aslan first dies at the hands of the White Witch and then triumphs over the bonds of death. The Last Battle is, as its title indicates, the account of how the earthly Narnia comes to an end and the heavenly Narnia takes its place.

The remaining four stories are by no means lacking in theological themes, but they are less conspicuous. It is as though these books correspond not to the key events in the Bible but the quieter events and dimensions of everyday life. Aslan, it is true, weaves in and out of the four books, but not as centrally as in the three key tales. The chapter in Kilby's book, "The Kingdom of Narnia," points out the many ways that these four other stories embody Christian themes: In The Silver Chair Jill must pass close to Aslan in order to drink of the sparkling water she craves. Aslan will not promise to leave her untouched if she moves toward the water; at the same time He tells her there is no other source for the kind of water she seeks. In The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" a lamb gives the children fish, an ancient Christian symbol, and then reveals Himself as Aslan. In The Horse and His Boy, which Kilby rightly singles out as the tale having the fewest explicit Christian echoes, we find Aslan insisting that the skeptic Bree touch Him and know from experience that Aslan actually exists.

Some critics have asked whether the symbolic dimensions of the seven tales are handled in such a way as to make the stories more effective works of literature. Or rather, do Christian doctrines seem dragged in by their heels, converting the stories at their most theological moments into sugarcoated Sunday school instruction? Perhaps those best able to answer this question are the people who read Narnia as children. I have had the chance to talk with many of them, particularly as they move on into college and perhaps seek counsel on additional Lewis books they might read. I find two things: the first is that children almost always recognize a second level in the tales. This in no way obstructs or engulfs the primary level, which is simply a series of good stories. But they become alert to characters and events operating on two levels. This is rarely taken as the sly attempt of an older and pious man to sneak in religious propaganda. Children know from fairy tales and science fiction all about "willing suspension of disbelief." They enter into the game. They welcome Aslan as a special kind of talking animal and the focus of luminous meaning. Second, this acceptance of Aslan and the whole other level of the stories may or may not take an explicitly Christian form, depending on what sort of religious background the young reader has. The one who has been brought up as a Christian instantly recognizes Aslan as a kind of Christ for the talking animals and begins to see parallels with specific events in the life of Christ. The child lacking this background sees in Aslan something awesome and compelling, however he may put it in words. It is interesting that often readers of both backgrounds single out the most theological events of the tales as the most effective episodes. This suggests that the firm theological themes running through the tales may be a literary asset rather than otherwise.

Another factor is at work here. If the Chronicles of Narnia were a straight allegory, in the manner of The Pilgrim's Progress (or The Pilgrim's Regress ) the reader would expect every event to have a precise correspondence with some proclamation of Christian doctrine. In Narnia, life simply goes on. It has its occasional epiphanies and revelations, but it also has long stretches in which the characters have interesting but rarely definitive adventures. The realism and detail of these routine experiences help to make the high points stand out more sharply.

Since a full treatment of Narnia would require a book the length of this one,³ I shall concentrate on the three major tales which are central from both a literary and a religious viewpoint.

In The Magician's Nephew, the land of Narnia is sung into existence by Aslan. The actual creation comes rather late in the book. This is partly a way of building toward a climax, but it also represents a way of dealing with fantastic material. We saw the same strategy earlier in the interplanetary tales, all of which commence with realistic, indeed prosaic details, thereby winning the reader's confidence, and preparing him for a gradual movement toward the unexpected and incredible.

The earthly setting is a line of Victorian row houses in the time of Sherlock Holmes. Polly, a young girl living in one of the houses, gets acquainted with Digory, who later—in The Lion —reappears as an adult, Professor Kirke. Digory lives in the adjoining house; his father is away in India on some imperial mission; his Aunt Letty and eccentric Uncle Andrew Ketterley are more or less taking care of him, while concentrating their attention on his gravely ill mother. The uncle is something of an amateur magician, and is perfectly ready to use the children as guinea pigs in his experiments.

Digory and Polly play in the connected attics and explore Uncle Andrew's study. There they find yellow rings and green ones, which—they accidentally discover—have the power to transport them to other worlds and to bring them back.

The uncle has the trademark of Lewis upon him. He is a little like Weston, a little like Devine, but more absurd than either. Andrew defends the practice of magic as a prerogative of superior persons. He recalls how his godmother, Mrs. Lefay, who helped inspire his passion for magic, had given him a box of magic before her death and instructed him to burn it unopened; he did not carry out her instructions. Digory is shocked at this betrayal, but his uncle explains:

… Oh, I see. You mean that little boys ought to keep their promises. Very true: most right and proper, I'm sure, and I'm very glad you have been taught to do it. But of course you must understand that rules of that sort, however excellent they may be for little boys—and servants—and women—and even people in general, can't possibly be expected to apply to profound students and great thinkers and sages. No, Digory. Men like me who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules just as we are cut off from common pleasures. Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny.⁴

This sounds like Weston proclaiming the higher morality that could justify the extinction of the Malacandrans if the deed would advance the Tellurian destiny. Later, in a conversation with Jadis the Witch, Digory hears her make exactly the same defense of her destruction of the city of Charn. "You must learn, child, that what would be wrong for you or for any of the common people is not wrong in a great Queen such as I. The weight of the world is on our shoulders. We must be freed from all rules. Ours is a high and lonely destiny."⁵

If the White Witch, alias Queen Jadis, represents pure, metaphysical evil, Uncle Andrew in his eager and bumbling way is trying hard to catch up with her but will never make it. She attracts; she terrifies; she never amuses. Uncle Andrew's grand gestures are more often comic than lordly in their consequences.

The plot of the tale is built around a series of adventures in other worlds with return visits to the earth. Digory and Polly travel by means of the magic rings. One world they visit is Charn, obviously the victim of some vast destructive force. Here they first encounter Queen Jadis. She discovers the children are from a newer world and instantly resolves to conquer it. The children hastily touch their rings to return to London, but Jadis goes along by touching the children. The queen and Uncle Andrew meet in London and he finds himself spending his last penny to entertain her in proper queenly style. Their night on the city ends in a wild hansom cab ride and the beginnings of a local riot, with Uncle Andrew humiliated almost to the point of losing his elevated dignity.⁶ The children manage to touch the queen with their rings and then find themselves in the Wood between the Worlds, from which they enter the world of nothing. With them are Jadis, Uncle Andrew, the cabbie, and his horse.

Up to this point the story has been a rather relaxed adventure tale, spiced with magic. The one serious metaphysical theme is the nature of good and evil, simplified and indeed almost oversimplified into the contrast between the Witch and the naturally good and kind cab driver. Another theme running through the story is health and illness, life and death. One gets the impression that Digory's mother has some lingering and probably fatal illness. She is constantly on his mind, and he yearns to find, perhaps in "another world," a cure for her.

These themes begin to draw together when Aslan starts singing. High, heavenly voices join in harmony with His deep notes; the black heavens suddenly gleam with countless stars. Out of nothing, hills emerge and take shape. Grass springs up and trees grow tall before their eyes. Flowers pierce the air. A new earth stands in its first perfection. Animals now appear. Aslan wanders among them, picking out cer-tain ones and giving them the gift of speech, almost as though the image of God were being planted in them. The Witch futilely opposes him. The evil she represents may have eventual consequences in Narnia and require strange and even hideous remedies, but for the moment she is defeated.

The great lion sends Digory to the mountains of the Western Wild to pluck a particular kind of apple and bring it back uneaten. The cab horse, now turned into a winged Pegasus, carries the two children on his back. Arrived there, they discover Jadis eating an apple, and she almost persuades him to follow her example. Obedient to Aslan, Digory resists the temptation, and he brings the apple back intact. A new tree springs up from its seeds and Aslan gives Digory an apple to take back for the healing of his mother. Meanwhile, the new tree will protect Narnia from the Witch for many years, though not forever.

Back on earth, Digory buries the core of the apple that cured his mother in his back yard, and with it the magical rings, to prevent future harm. What he does not know is that the tree that grows from the core still has some of the magic of Narnia, and that when later he fashions its wood into a wardrobe, it will prove an entryway to Narnia.

These magic apple trees seem to serve a double role in the story. Depending on who uses them and under what circumstances, they can be trees of the knowledge of good and evil (with all those fateful possibilities) or trees of life, incarnating in their quieter way the overwhelming abundance of life that Aslan has sung into beautiful existence.

The Magician's Nephew provides a theological and metaphysical background for the other tales. The theme of the apple trees is less convincingly depicted than that of creation. It is almost as though Lewis were here guided more by theological necessities than literary imperatives. This episode lacks the freshness, the sense of "So this is what the legend is all about," that a reader of Perelandra experiences when he suddenly realizes what the fixed land symbolizes.

The Magician's Nephew has relatively few clanging swords and bloody tumults compared to some of the other tales. With the exception of climactic moments, it moves quietly, as one adventure fades into another. Thus, even the creation of Narnia has a more lyric and less epic tone than one might expect. Aslan quietly goes about His business, and His fullness of life, expressed through His singing, brings forth a universe and its inhabitants. For all its quietness, it is one of the great creation myths. Few readers will quickly forget the rapid stages of Narina's creation, and such startlingly effective pictures as the little hillocks out of which all varieties of animal burst forth into the splendor of existence. Abundance is the word for all Aslan's creative deeds; He has come into the world of nothing and made it something, gloriously alive and fertile.

The distinction between good and evil, as has been suggested, is brought to a point in the contrast between Queen Jadis and the cabbie and his wife. No explanation is ever offered of why the Witch is evil. After all, who can give a genealogy for a metaphysical absolute? It is not that she is filled with evil. She is evil, and anyone who is locked in combat with her is battling demonic forces. The cabbie and his wife are simply plain, good people. They have come from the innocence of the countryside into teeming London, driven by the necessity to earn a living. When Aslan names Frank and his wife the first king and queen of Narnia, they represent everything that is lacking in the glittering but utterly evil Witch.

Aslan's song, to Uncle Andrew, is unrecognizable as song; His attempts to communicate with animals fail. They are puzzled by Him—is He an animal, a tree, or what? In a scene reminiscent of the dunking in cold water that Weston endures at the court of Oyarsa, the animals decide He is a tree and try to plant Him in the soil, with great squirts of river water delivered from an elephant's capacious trunk.

In Aslan, Lewis has created a highly effective objective correlative to Christ. Bestiaries are not a favored literary form today, but popular assumptions about the nature of animals still color metaphorical speech. A fox is automatically assumed to be clever and crafty, a snake is sneaky, a wolf (despite all the zoologists may say) is bloodthirsty, and so it goes. The lion is the noblest of the beasts, formidable in his power to destroy but regal in that very power. At the same time, a lion looks remarkably like a magnified kitten. The lion, Aslan, can roar with the authority of the universe and advance into battle with fierce face and gleaming teeth. But at other times, and with no loss of leonine dignity, He takes children riding on His back, or tussles with them in a montage of flailing limbs and teeth. He is ultimate power, ultimate gentleness, ultimate goodness, even ultimate cuddlesomeness. Without Aslan, we would have simply stories of cute talking animals with a few human beings scattered in. They would be superior tales, more vivid and convincing than most in their genre, but not fundamentally different. The presence of Aslan introduces and sustains the additional dimension that makes the Chronicles of Narnia more than a series of adventures and marvels; Lewis infuses them with the spirit of great myth. One suspects this is the largest element in the near-universal appeal of these stories, which introduce the reader not merely to strange lands and odd creatures, but into that holy land of the unconscious where the mighty archetypes dwell, and both sacred and demonic figures act out their ritual dramas.

These archetypes never die in our consciousness, no matter how rigidly modern and reductionist the mind may fancy itself. They are waiting in the shadows, to transform a familiar landscape. Lewis, through Aslan and the events he sets in motion, challenges the reader to say yes or no to what is already affirmed in his innermost soul. Thus it is that the religious (or mythological) strand of the tales is the source of their greatest power, and that the three most theological (or mythic) stories are the ones that last longest in the memory and reverberate with the most resonance. They take us to where we already are in our inwardness.

The relatively quiet tone of The Magician's Nephew helps make it a good contrast to the tale immediately following in the Narnian chronology. In this story the dark prophecies of Aslan come true, and He plays a more central role, acting out his passion and resurrection. Once again, Lewis is careful to create a matter-of-fact, prosaic setting for the beginning of the tale:

Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids. They were sent to the house of an old Professor who lived in the heart of the country, ten miles from the nearest railway station and two miles from the nearest post office. He had no wife and he lived in a very large house with a housekeeper called Mrs. Macready and three servants.⁷

Like Polly and Digory in The Magician's Nephew, they set out to explore the more than ample house. Lucy, more curious and venturesome than the others, goes into a huge wardrobe, not knowing it is built of magic wood from the apple tree that Digory (now Professor) Kirke planted many years ago. Suddenly, she finds that the coats hanging there have disappeared, and she is standing in a dark woods with snow falling. As she looks around she notices a faun carrying an umbrella and some brown-paper parcels. He is described in realistic detail, as though it were important to distinguish one faun from another. The meeting of beings from two worlds is initiated courteously; the faun exclaims a conventional "Good gracious me!" and well-bred Lucy says, "Good evening." The faun picks up the packages he has dropped, makes a belated bow and tactfully inquires whether she is a "Daughter of Eve." When she looks puzzled, he explains, "a girl." She accepts the label. He then asks how she got into Narnia and where she is from, but their lack of geographical knowledge about the other's country makes communication vague and unclear. Finally, he suggests a cup of hot tea to ward off the winter chills, and Lucy—worried about what people will be thinking back at the professor's house—agrees, but says she can't stay long. He takes her arm and holds the umbrella over both of them, and they walk to his tidy cave, inside of which a wood fire is cheerfully burning. He lights a lamp with a piece of blazing wood, and puts the tea kettle on to boil. Something of a "beauty and the beast" intuition stirs her in a gentle way—the meeting of the human and the nonhuman.

Tumnus the faun is a troubled soul. He bursts out sobbing and disjointedly reveals that he is in the pay of the White Witch. Then he escorts Lucy as far as the wood from which she can see the wardrobe door, and in fear and trembling says goodbye to her. She soon finds the other children in the old house and is astounded to learn that no time has elapsed. Her story of strange adventures falls on deaf ears; they think she is attempting an obvious hoax.

Tumnus is destined to reappear in the tale. When the children finally enter Narnia as a group, they go to his cave and find a notice nailed to the floor proclaiming that "The former occupant of these premises, Faun Tumnus, is under arrest and awaiting his trial on a charge of High Treason against her Imperial Majesty Jadis … also of comforting her said Majesty's enemies, harbouring spies and fraternising with Humans."⁸ Later they learn that he has been taken to the queen's house, where doubtless he will join the group of stone statues she has created by her magic of ossification. Mere human power cannot save him; only Aslan is equal to that task.

In the group of four brothers and sisters there is a Judas, by name Edmund. At first, his leaning toward the side of the enemy seems trivial, almost harmless. It begins with his passion for Turkish Delight. The Witch lures him by promising an infinity of this delicacy. What he does not know is that the confection is habit-forming. The witch offers to bring him up as a prince, and when she is gone, he will reign with a golden crown on his head and eat Turkish Delight from morning to night. He is still not a complete scoundrel in his heart, but he is weak and unable to resist temptation. The plight of the repentant Tumnus and the traitorous Edmund both cry out for supernatural rescue. The case of Edmund is particularly grave, for by the rules of the Deep Magic of Narnia, traitors belong to the White Witch, and only a terrible deeper magic can release them.

The movement of the story is a leisurely progress from yearning for Aslan to rumors of His return and His actual appearance. Some of the episodes, such as the visit with the cozy beaver family, seem deliberately prolonged for perhaps two purposes: to create a sense of ordinary life in Narnia going on as best it can, and to allow sufficient time for tension to build up as the world turns more and more demonic. Long before Aslan appears, He is firmly planted in the reader's imagination as a messiah, the only one who can save the suffering folk of Narnia.

The White Witch's downfall comes about very gradually—as two things happen, closely connected. Rumors of Aslan's return combine with the empirical fact that in the south a thaw is setting in and there are signs that the long winter is drawing to an end. Lucy asks if Aslan is a man. Mr. Beaver emphatically replies in words that suggest the Divine becoming incarnate: … "Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. Don't you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion—the Lion, the great Lion."⁹

Further conversation makes it clear that Aslan is good but not safe—as one person after another in the tales puts it, "He is not a tame lion." Mr. Beaver also explains that the four children are the first humans to come to Narnia, and that their arrival and the simultaneous arrival of Aslan is no coincidence. An old Narnian saying has it that when the four thrones at the palace of Cair Paravel are occupied by two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve, it will mean the end not only of the White Witch's reign; it will also mean her death. No wonder, then, that the Witch is implacably pursuing the earthly visitors, whose survival can mean her destruction. Through Mr. Beaver, the children learn that Aslan has summoned them to meet Him at the ancient Stone Table. Aslan is on the move, Aslan is on the move. The phrase begins to be a kind of drumbeat, building up in intensity each time it is uttered. Some revelation is at hand.

Mr. and Mrs. Beaver and the three children continue their journey to the Stone Table, as commanded by Aslan's message, and come to the top of a long hill. In the middle of the open hilltop is the Stone Table. A great crowd of creatures is assembled, among them Tree-Women and Well-Women (Dryads and Naiads) who are playing stringed instruments. In the center of the throng stands Aslan. It is an overwhelming experience of the numinous. Aslan is both ultimate good—the goal of all truly seeking hearts—and awesome. No one is willing to approach him. Finally, Peter advances, salutes with his sword, and says, "We have come—Aslan."¹⁰ Lucy begs Aslan to do something to rescue Edmund, and Aslan promises all possible help, but explains that the task may be more difficult than they think.

The climax of the book, the Passion and Resurrection of Aslan, now approaches. Here Lewis achieves one of his most remarkable reimaginings of a familiar biblical theme. He undertakes a thorough process of translation. The human figure of Christ is replaced by the noblest of the animals. A Witch becomes the concentrated embodiment of all the converging forces of evil that brought Christ to His death. In Edmund is symbolized the self-serving self-deceptions of ordinary life, which have their inevitable consequences and can be redeemed only by the deepest magic of all.

It is not enough, in the economy of the divine Magic, to slay the Witch and rescue Edmund. A price must be paid for the affront to the Tao (the term Lewis uses in The Abolition of Man ). The moral foundations of the Narnian universe have been undermined. Mere fleshly strength cannot rebuild them. But what Lewis dramatizes is not simply the price but the glory of the price, as new life is released into a redeemed world.

Despite the profound theological overtones at this point, the reader does not find the story heavy. Aslan catches us with our guard down. And He is not merely an animal objective correlative to Christ. He is, in some ways, a vegetation god in addition to all else; where He stands, there is abounding life, not just of the spirit but also of the very earth with its teeming manifestations of vitality.

The action of the tale speeds up once Aslan appears. The desperation of the Witch increases. She is frantic to accomplish the death of Edmund, to make sure only three children are left to reign at Cair Paravel. What the Witch does not know is that in her own completely evil way she is moving the course of Narnian history toward a good greater than any the land has ever known.

Later, Aslan and Edmund have a private, heart-to-heart talk. Edmund goes to his brother and two sisters and tells each of them, "I'm sorry," and they all reply, "That's all right."¹¹ Meanwhile, the Witch's Dwarf approaches and arranges a conference between Aslan and the Witch. She soon appears in an eddy of cold air and takes her place face to face with Aslan. The two confer with a circle of humans and talking animals eavesdropping as best they can. The Witch summarizes the Deep Magic that is written on the Stone Table. All traitors belong to her and death is her prerogative. The fact that no treason was committed against her personally is irrelevant. Unless she has blood as the law commands, Narnia will perish in fire and water.

The great Lion denies none of this. He orders the group to fall back while He and the Witch continue talking in low voices. Finally, He summons the multitude and tells them the Witch has renounced all claims to Edmund's life. What he does not reveal is that Aslan has agreed to take Edmund's place. This is the deepest magic of all.

The climactic moment is near. The death of Aslan at the hands of the Witch is one of the most compelling Passion stories. It achieves its power partly by a process of selection. Many events from the biblical story are repeated here, suitably modified for a Narnian setting. Jesus had a large and loyal following of women; likewise, on Aslan's last night it is the two girls who accompany Him to the Stone Table and try to comfort Him. The tone of this scene is like that on the Mount of Olives; Aslan, the very channel through whom God's creative energy has brought Narnia into being, is weary, sad, desolate.

When they reach the Stone Table, a vast concourse is there:¹² the Witch, of course, and multitudes of "Ogres with monstrous teeth, and wolves, and bull-headed men; spirits of evil trees and poisonous plants," not to mention "Cruels and Hags and Incubuses, Wraiths, Horrors, Efreets, Sprites, Orknies, Wooses, and Ettins." Aslan is spat upon, and His mane shaved off. The hideous creatures pluck up courage to mock him: "'Puss, Puss! Poor Pussy,' and 'How many mice have you caught to-day, Cat?' and 'Would you like a saucer of milk, Pussums?'" The Witch whets her knife, as Aslan—quiet but unafraid—looks up at the sky. Then, before she stabs him to death, she bends down and speaks her words of triumph into His ear:

And now, who has won? Fool, did you think by all this you would save the human traitor? Now I will kill you instead of him as our pact was and so the Deep Magic will be appeased. But when you are dead what will prevent me from killing him as well? And who will take him out of my hand then? Understand that you have given me Narnia forever, you have lost your own life and you have not saved his. In that knowledge, despair and die.

It is a moment when Aslan might well cry out, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" But Lewis knew better than to overwork the parallel.

At dawn the children discover that Aslan is gone and the Stone Table is cracked in two. A mighty voice calls from behind them. They turn. There, gleaming in the sunrise, even larger than they remember him, stands Aslan, shaking His mane, which is now fully restored in all its splendor. The risen Lion explains that the Witch's magic goes back only to the dawn of time. If it had extended farther back, she would have known that when an innocent victim took a traitor's place on the Stone Table, the table itself would crack, and Death would begin working backward. Moment by moment, new life flows into Aslan. He then commands the girls to climb on His back and they begin the most glorious of bareback rides, lasting almost till noon, when they come to the Witch's castle. With His breath Aslan restores the stone statues to life. He then organizes a search of the castle to find any more prisoners, and in the course of this operation liberates the poor faun, who is none the worse for having been a statue. After a pitched battle, Aslan slays the Witch. He then knights Edmund, who has behaved with great heroism.

The children gradually signalize their new adult and royal status by adopting a style of speech reminiscent of Bleheris—for example, King Peter to Queen Susan:

… never since we four were Kings and Queens in Narnia have we set our hands to any high matter, as battles, quests, feats of arms, acts of justice, and the like, and then given over; but always what we have taken in hand, the same we have achieved.¹³

The purpose is obviously to dramatize their metamorphosis from ordinary British school children to monarchs with golden crowns. Some critics, including the author of children's books Jacqueline Jackson, have found this sudden linguistic shift jolting. Perhaps it is a little too cute, seeming to introduce a note of condescension toward the young which is otherwise blessedly lacking in the book.

The rest of the story moves swiftly. The four children are solemnly installed on the four thrones of Cair Paravel. Great multitudes cheer, and there is the sound of mermen and mermaids singing close to the castle in honor of the new queens and kings. Aslan quietly slips away; no one knows when He will return, but that is His way. The children grow up, prove excellent rulers.

The Magician's Nephew and The Lion have some elements in common. Each is full of talking animals acting remarkably like ordinary children and adults. Each has Aslan as the central character. Each succeeds in making a never-never land convincing. Where they differ is in intensity. Aslan's supreme deed in the earlier book is that of creation, which He accomplishes so easily that it seems the by-product of a song. But in The Lion, His great deed is one that Christians refer to with such words as propitiation, redemption, and salvation. The whole moral landscape darkens from one tale to the other. Uncle Andrew fraternizes with evil; Edmund is shown moving steadily toward absolute complicity. When in The Lion Aslan pays the price to rescue Edmund, there is a depth of feeling that one does not find in The Magician's Nephew. At the same time, Aslan's resurrection evokes deeper joys and more spontaneous gaiety.

The Magician's Nephew has the more casual structure. It moves along from one adventure to another. When the great act of creation comes, it appears almost as offhand as the other marvels of the tale, suggesting that the creation of a world, while impressive to mortals, is all in a day's work for the Aslans of this universe.

The Lion has a more tightly organized structure, built around the Witch-Edmund relation, and the coming of Aslan. These two strands interweave and finally coalesce. The tempo of the tale is carefully controlled, so as to move from faint rumors of Aslan to signs of his activity (like the melting snow) to his final manifestation. In the same way, by slow and measured stages, Edmund gives himself into the hands of the Witch. With the intersection of these two strands, there is the image of the cross. Only by Aslan's sacrifice can Edmund the traitor be saved.

The firm framework of the three key Narnia tales is theological, reaching from the creation of Narnia to last things, when the old Narnia ceases to exist. If one thinks of the biblical perspective as involving a cosmic five-act drama, the parallel becomes clear:

The four tales that, by Narnia chronology, belong between The Magician's Nephew and The Lion at one end, and The Last Battle at the other, are episodes from Act IV of the Narnian drama. Lewis's fantastically fertile imagination, so well stocked with all the conventions and traditions of fairy tales, and so free in reshaping them and supplementing them by pure products of his own imagination, pours forth one set of adventures after another. We see earthly children restoring Prince Caspian to his throne. We experience one of the most haunting of myths, the land of eternal youth, when a group of children sail into clear seas and find the water is fresh and filled with white waterlilies, while the sun is much larger than they remember. In another story we encounter a prince always in danger of turning into a serpent. In yet another, a queen must be rescued before she is compelled to marry a man she detests. In all these tales, Aslan weaves in and out, supplies advice, sometimes crucial aid, but does not perform any of the grand, cosmic deeds such as those in The Magician's Nephew and The Lion.

Although relatively marginal, the role of Aslan in the four tales critically affects the reader's response to the total myth of the seven chronicles. If Lewis had written only the three most theological stories—or if he had contrived to pack more theology into the other four—there might have been a stronger sense of the swift rush of divine events. But at the same time, the portrayal of daily life would have been out of balance; Heaven, so to speak, would have engulfed earth.

Finally comes The Last Battle. This is surely one of the most astounding children's stories ever written. Such tales do not ordinarily end with the death of all the characters. But as Ransom was told in Out of the Silent Planet, Maleldil creates new worlds but not one of them is meant to last for ever. So it is with Narnia. It has served its purpose; it is time now for the heavenly Narnia, on the other side of death, to take its place.

The Last Battle begins quietly. There is first of all Shift, an old ape, clever, selfish, malicious. He notices a strange object in the water and commands his companion, the dull-witted donkey, Puzzle, to pull it out. It is a lion's skin. Always eager for mischief, especially when it can advance his own comfort and power, Shift makes a garment to put on Puzzle so that he will look, more or less, like a lion. He wants Puzzle to pass himself off as Aslan and thus gain control over the inhabitants of Narnia, who desire nothing so much as the return of their leonine ruler. Poor Puzzle is pushed into the role of being a fake messiah, receiving the adoration of the people. Shift promises Puzzle that he will tell him what to say. The donkey, dim-witted but right-minded, protests.¹⁴ "It would be wrong, Shift. I may be not very clever but I know that much. What would become of us if the real Aslan turned up?" Shift has an answer for every objection: "Probably he sent us the lion skin on purpose, so that we could set things to right. Anyway, he never does turn up, you know. Not now-a-days." As usual, Lewis does little to reshape the traditional symbolism associated with animals. Apes are clever and crafty, donkeys are stubborn but not intellectual giants.

After the prologue of the ape and donkey, the scene quietly shifts to King Tirian at his hunting lodge, in conversation with his beloved friend, Jewel the Unicorn. The king is in a state of euphoria as he recounts all the reports he has heard of Aslan's return. They are joined by Roonwit the Centaur, who bluntly tries to destroy their dream. No matter what gossipmongers may report, the message of the constellations is a clear negative. Not only do they deny the rumors about Aslan's return; they prophesy unspecified but terrible events for Narnia. The tone of the story, still very quiet, is becoming more somber and foreboding. Next they hear a voice, Cassandra-like, crying out, "Woe for my brothers and sisters! Woe for the holy trees! The woods are laid waste. The axe is loosed against us."¹⁵ The speaker appears, a tall tree-spirit or Dryad. She explains that the talking trees are being felled. In his fury, the king and Jewel rashly set out to find the axemen and stop them. Soon they encounter a Water Rat on a raft and he explains that Aslan has given orders to fell the trees and sell them to the barbaric, dark-skinned Calormenes. The king and Jewel are bewildered. Could this be possible? After all, as Jewel points out, Aslan is not a tame Lion. Presumably his thoughts are not always their thoughts. A terrible ambiguity has entered their lives. They want to serve and obey Aslan, but first they must find out if this rumored lion is Aslan. Uncertain whether they are doing the right thing, and heavy-hearted, they continue on their way and soon hear the sound of axes on tree trunks. A great crowd of talking animals and human beings is at work. The men were "… not the fair-haired men of Narnia: they were dark, bearded men from Calormen, that great and cruel country that lies beyond Archenland across the desert to the south."¹⁶

The mention of the Calormenes and their complexion is worth a moment's pause, as an indication of how readily Lewis accepted conventional symbolism. In the space tales he uses the contrast of light and darkness for good and evil. To anyone ever caught in a cave, it might perhaps seem an inevitable association. The reference to the dark skins of the Calormenes evokes the British Empire at the height of its civilizing zeal when clean-cut blond young men went to darkest Africa to suppress the Fuzzy Wuzzies. Darkness (to blond people) suggests aliens, probably dark within as well as without. European fairy tales and romances of the Middle Ages prefer blonds.

Lewis was less bothered by these matters than a modern liberal would be. He simply took his symbols where he found them. And as we will see later, Lewis could depict a noble, dark-skinned Calormene who turned out to be a true servant of Aslan without knowing it. This, however, is a cause for much astonishment as well as rejoicing.

When Tirian and Jewel the Unicorn discover two Calormenes savagely whipping a Narnian talking horse as he strains at a heavy log, their fury knows no bounds. They plunge in and slay the aliens. The king leaps on the unicorn's back and they quickly make their escape. Tirian is then smitten by pangs of conscience. They have slain two men without challenging them—and furthermore, can they be sure that the felling of the trees is not being done at the command of Aslan? More by tone than explicit exposition, the story increasingly conveys the feeling of a moral order falling apart; no one is any longer sure what is right and what is wrong. If Aslan has become an ambiguity, then the center cannot hold.

Tirian and Jewel walk back and give themselves up to the Calormenes. "Then the dark men came round them in a thick crowd, smelling of garlic and onions, their white eyes flashing dreadfully in their brown faces."¹⁷ The captors lead them to a small stable, outside of which Shift the ape is eating. He is dressed in odds and ends of fancy clothing like some savage who has raided a wrecked passenger ship, and the main thing on his mind is nuts. In the name of Aslan he commands the squirrels to bring a better supply. From the ape's rambling oration it becomes clear that he is in alliance with the king of Calormen and is using the prestige of the false Aslan to sanctify such activities as the felling of talking trees.

The general situation is like a fairy-tale version of the opening of That Hideous Strength, when the forces of progress, represented by the N.I.C.E., move in on the university. The land of the Calormenes is a modern results-oriented society advancing and taking over. Most of the Narnians are uneasy and miserable, but they believe, more or less, that everything is at the will of Aslan—though Aslan seems to have changed His values since the Narnians last saw Him. The Ape assures the talking animals that they will learn the value of hard work, dragging things and working in mines. All in all, the Ape's rambling discourse is a classical description of imperialist capitalism on the march, spreading civilization and gaining profit. This is accompanied by theological warfare, as the invaders coin the portmanteau word, Tashlan, to express the belief that Tash and Aslan are really the same god.

King Tirian finds himself thinking about the long history of Narnia, and how when things are at their worst, a rescue expedition is always mounted by earthly children in alliance with Aslan. In despair he cries out the name of Aslan and asks that Narnia be saved though its king may die.

His prayer is answered by a vivid dream in which he makes spectral contact with seven humans in a lighted room. Two of them, a man and a woman, are very old; the others are children. They see him faintly and exclaim. One of the children is Peter the High King, who commands Tirian to explain his mission. Tirian tries to, but his lips make no sound. The vision fades, but not until some sort of contact has been made with earthlings who may prove of help.

In fact, two children shortly appear from nowhere. They are Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole, who in an earlier adventure had rescued a Narnian king from a long enchantment. They cut the king's bonds and sate his hunger with six sandwiches. The children, back on earth, had been traveling on a train when there was a terrible crash, and immediately thereafter they found themselves talking with King Tirian. What they do not know until later is that they are dead. From this point on, the distinction between the living and the dead becomes blurred.

It is not necessary to follow the military operations in detail. The king and his little following of children and talking animals put up valiant rearguard resistance to the massed forces under the Calormene banner, but it is almost as though this struggle were being fought to keep the record clean rather than in any real hope of victory. The basic problem is not a military one; rather, a question of morale. The lies about the false Aslan and the new doctrine of the universal god, Tashlan, have eaten away at the moral and psychological integrity of the Narnians. Even when the fakery of the false Aslan is finally revealed, many of the Dwarfs draw the conclusion that everything, including also the real Aslan, is propaganda, and impartially fight both the Calormenes and the Narnians.

King Tirian now has another vision—or is it simple reality? He sees seven kings and queens in their crowns and glittering garments. One of them is Jill, another is Eustace, both fresh and clean and splendid in their attire. Tirian himself is no longer battle-stained; he is dressed as though for a great feast at Cair Paravel. The other monarchs all turn out to be previous participants in the annals of Narnia.

Soon the air turns sweeter and a brightness flashes. Aslan, the true Aslan, has returned. Tirian flings himself at the divine feet, and the great Lion commends him for standing firm at Narnia's darkest hour. From now on, it becomes harder and harder to say who is living and who has passed through death. All this is eloquently dramatized in Chapter XIV, "Night Falls on Narnia." Father Time wakes from his long sleep and blows a strangely beautiful melody on his horn. At once, the stars of the sky begin to fall by the hundreds, and soon not a star is left. Great companies of living beings, both animals and humans, begin streaming through the stable door. They are being called home. As each comes close to Aslan he is impelled to look Him straight in the eye. Those whose faces mirror fear and hatred disappear to the left of the doorway. Those who gaze upon Him with love do not disappear. In the mirror of Aslan's eye, each creature finds out what he is.

Dragons and giant lizards denude the landscape; the sun enlarges and begins to die. As Jewel the Unicorn said earlier in the tales, all worlds draw to an end. This one ends with a surrealist landscape: enormous red sun, the moon in the wrong position, a great tide of water that washes away the mountains. The moon and sun come together; masses of fire drop into the sea; steam rises. The giant reaches out one arm and squeezes the Sun as though it were an orange. Utter blackness everywhere. The story of Narnia is over. Aslan commands Peter the High King to shut the door.

But the new Narnia is beginning. The children find blue sky now above them, flowers, and laughter in Aslan's eyes. While they yet mourn for all that was good and beautiful in the old Narnia, Aslan summons them to come further in, come further up. It is while exploring the paradise in which they now find themselves that they meet a wandering Calormene, Emeth, who tells his story. He has long been a true devotee of Tash, and has yearned to meet him face to face. He was one of the disguised soldiers sent into Narnia. This pleased him, for he hated Aslan and felt that by defeating the Narnians he would be striking a blow against a false god. When the Ape had invited people to enter the stable to meet Tashlan, Emeth accepted the invitation, hoping the true Tash would be there. Once through the door, he found himself in a land of grass and flowers, and set out to find Tash. Suddenly, Aslan appeared in his path, terrible in His gleaming beauty. Then followed a dialogue in which Aslan explained that Emeth had sought Him all along.

… the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of Thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me…. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, Child? I said, Lord, thou knowest how much I understand. But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet have I been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.¹⁸

The episode of Emeth is one of the few places where one may feel that for the sake of theological completeness Lewis has inserted what is more an essay than part of a story. It is disproportionately long for the pace of the narrative, but its beauty is so great one cannot really regret that it is included. In fact, as The Last Battle ends, it is on the verge of bursting the narrative bonds and becoming a great hymn of praise. Narnia, which in book after book has dramatized the ways of God with man, is pointing beyond all symbols and allegories to Him who is not a symbol but sheer being.

The Last Battle has a particular wealth of symbolism which serves not merely to convey ideas but to create moods. It is a darkening world; the human enemies ranged against the world of Aslan show it in the very color of their skin. Ordinary, decent life itself is under attack. The talking trees are being felled, the talking beasts whipped into slavery. The gift of speech that many of the animals possess seems to be a symbol of "the image of God" (or image of Aslan) that was originally breathed into them, for when any of them reject Aslan at the end they simply lose this gift and become ordinary animals. The god Tash is not an illusion. He symbolizes brute evil and thus is the opposite of Aslan. The one is like a hideous vulture with cruel beak and flailing arms to grasp and tear, the other glorious in his golden mane and justly hailed as the king of the beasts. The remaining characters are the spectrum of mortal possibilities in between, pulled this way and that, but in the long run making their choice between the two absolute alternatives. That choice is made as they pass through the narrow door of the stable and read in Aslan's eyes their decision.

All this vast cosmological drama is firmly buttressed by details of ordinary realism. The Ape is real as any selfish schemer. The Donkey reacts in a dim-witted way human readers can consider plausible. King Tirian is believable as one who has lost hope but finds honor still worth dying for. The invasion of the Calormenes is as carefully organized as any imperialist expedition, complete with psychological warfare and the manipulation of religion. Much of the action and many of the incidental details in The Last Battle are perfectly convincing from the purely terrestrial viewpoint; at the same time the reader never forgets that eternal and ultimate forces are locked in conflict, and that, as Lewis liked to say, things are coming to a point.

The charge most frequently leveled against the Narnia tales is that they cash in on "stock responses," particularly to the high points of the Christian tale. Nearly two thousand years of psychic history have engraved these pictures in our imagination. Thus—so the criticism runs—Lewis could achieve an easy victory by presenting this cultural heritage under a trans-parent disguise. A half-truth is involved here. Western man does indeed carry within himself this storehouse of significant images, but they would not have gripped him so powerfully in the first place if they had not seemed the fulfillment of still older images living immortally in the unconscious mind. The earliest converts to Christianity already knew that a self-sacrificing God is needed to resolve the contradictions of existence. When Lewis evokes Christian parallels, he is at the same time profiting by racial memories older than Christianity.

Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, was himself troubled by the Narnia stories. In part, it may have been a feeling that the stories came too easily. Lewis could write seven books quicker than Tolkien could write one. But he also disapproved of the obvious Christian correspondences. He was attempting a different kind of imaginary world, one overwhelming in its own integrity and relying less on resemblances to the earth and its familiar beliefs. Where Lewis redramatizes the decisive moments of the Christian story, Tolkien slowly, stroke by stroke, builds up a world that is heroic and tragic, more akin perhaps to Beowulf and the Icelandic sagas than to the relative cheerfulness and hopefulness of a believing world that beholds its salvation in a Christ or an Aslan.¹⁹

By the time Lewis began writing Narnia, his mind was uniquely filled with usable images and symbols. He knew his Germanic, Celtic, and classical mythology. He commanded the literature of Western Europe, at least through the Renaissance period. He had already created many symbols in his own writing, particularly in The Pilgrim's Regress and the space tales. With the freedom that seems to characterize a major writer, he was willing to draw on his own private store as well as from the public symbology that he shared. He used talking animals in Out of the Silent Planet and used them again in Narnia. His Weston corresponds in his early stages to a more impressive Uncle Andrew, and in his later Unman stages he would be a suitable mate for the White Witch. As early as The Pilgrim's Regress, varied landscapes of mountains, hills, and well-watered valleys had been symbols of the heart's desire, paradise, the new Narnia, Heaven. Symbolism of light and dark runs through his books. Speech itself is a symbol of rationality and the kind of relation with God that only rational beings can experience. In his use of animals, Lewis was like the author of a medieval bestiary. Of a given animal, he is less interested in "What is this animal good for?" (still less its exact biological classification) than in "What does this animal stand for?" Thus, it is no surprise when Lewis chose a Lion for his central character; the bestiaries would have certified the choice. Even Lewis's use of cold as a symbol of evil has its precedent in the bottom circle of The Inferno where the worst of sinners lie perpetually congealed.

In a way, the mature Lewis (maybe apart from his literary criticism) had one main theme, which is to reveal and justify the ways of God to man. This did not prevent him from writing books which can be thoroughly enjoyed by a reader as atheistic as the Great Knock. It emphatically does not mean that the literary merit of his books is a kind of disguised religiosity. No, from a literary viewpoint, the religious themes of his books are like the moral themes of Dickens or the sociological themes of Ibsen. They are part of the structure of a given book, and must be evaluated not by whether they will get you to Heaven, but by whether they are doing their literary job.

It is an irony of literary history. This man, who wrote the most glittering religious apologetics of his time, and who was a major literary historian, may well have created his most lasting work in seven fairy tales nominally for children. All theories of literary determinism and influence falter at the thought. He had no children of his own; the tales were launched before he acquired stepsons. It is said that a fetal ape looks more human than a mature one, and some have suggested that humanity arose through a process of arrested development. A writer sometimes succeeds as much from his limits as from his unlimited outreach. By remaining a boy as well as becoming a man, Lewis was able to speak in a language which is simultaneously the tongue of the fairy tale and the epic; he speaks to the adult, the child, and the child within the adult. He speaks to everyone, except to those ossified grown-ups who have stifled the child within.

Notes

1. Quotations from Lewis's juvenilia ("Boxen" and "Bleheris") are courtesy of The Trustees of the Estate of C. S. Lewis, and are copyrighted by the Estate.

2. Anyone wishing a fuller account of the genesis of Narnia should consult Chapter X of Green and Hooper's C. S. Lewis: A Biography, which lays out the background in great detail. In the present book I am concerned more with the finished works than with their evolution.

3. An interesting start, mainly theological in emphasis, is provided by Kathryn Ann Lindskoog, The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land (Grand Rapids, Michigan: W. B. Eerdmans, 1973).

4. The Magician's Nephew (New York: Collier Books, 1955, 1970), p. 18.

5. P. 62.

6. As Clyde Kilby points out, this is one place where a direct literary influence is obvious; the ride and near-riot are inspired by a similar scene near the end of G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday.

7. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: A Story for Children (New York: Collier Books, 1950, 1970), p. 1.

8. P. 55.

9. P. 75.

10. P. 123.

11. P. 136.

12. Pp. 148, 150, 152.

13. P. 184.

14. The Last Battle (New York: Collier Books, 1956, 1970), p. 10.

15. P. 16.

16. P. 21.

17. P. 25.

18. Pp. 164-65.

19. A short but valuable comparison of Tolkien's and Lewis's imaginary worlds is contained in Charles Moorman, "'Now Entertain Conjecture of a Time'—The Fictive Worlds of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien," published in Mark R. Hillegas, editor, Shadows of Imagination (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), pp. 59-69. See also Richard Purtill, Lord of the Elves and Eldils (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1974).

Donald E. Glover (essay date 1981)

SOURCE: Glover, Donald E. "The Chronicles of Narnia, 1950-1956: An Introduction." In C. S. Lewis: The Art of Enchantment, pp. 131-34. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1981.

[In the following essay, Glover explores Lewis's use of the fantasy genre in The Chronicles of Narnia and illustrates the benefits of using fantasy to make literature more approachable for children.]

The history of the composition of these seven "children's" stories [The Chronicles of Narnia ] has been drawn in considerable detail by Walter Hooper in "Past Watchful Dragons" and more recently in A Biography so that I will not rehearse these facts in detail, being satisfied merely to point to significant aspects which relate to this study.¹

John Haigh, one of Lewis's critics, has suggested that Lewis moved into the new form of children's fantasy because he wanted to avoid repetition.² Lewis was, he felt, saying the same things but simply using another vehicle. Lewis himself commented that his children's stories were side chapels off the nave of his basic work, which suggests an acknowledged consistency running through all the fiction.³ Even Robson grudgingly admits that these stories did embody "things" which Lewis was profoundly sincere about though the form was inadequate to what Lewis tries so hard to make it accomplish.⁴

There can be little question of Lewis's sincerity and seriousness in writing these books. Numerous letters attest to his interest in catching his readers, of all ages, off guard. "If I am now good for anything it is for catching the reader unawares—thro' fiction and symbol."⁵ "The fairy-tale version of the Passion in The Lion, etc. works in the way you describe because—tho' this sounds odd—it by-passes one's reverence and piety…. Make it a fairy-tale and the reader is taken off his guard (Unless ye become as little children….)."⁶ His credo, stated in the letter to the Milton Society, makes clear that the imaginative man was "he who brought me, in the last few years to write the series of Narnian stories for children; not asking what children want and then endeavoring to adapt myself (this was not needed) but because the fairy tale was the genre best fitted for what I wanted to say…."⁷

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe began, we know, with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and standing in a snowy wood. The picture had been in Lewis's mind since he was about sixteen.⁸ An early draft was begun in 1939 and put aside until the mid-1940s. Stimulated by reading Roger Lancelyn Green's The Wood That Time Forgot, Lewis had more mental pictures of a queen on a sledge and a magnificent lion and nightmares about lions.⁹ He read his developing story to Green, who liked it although Tolkien did not, and Lewis records that with the entry of the lion, all the rest of the story came together as the Lion soon pulled the other six Narnian stories in after Him.¹⁰ He began to fill in the events before the action of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but produced only the Lefay fragment.¹¹ The Lefay fragment, unpublished, is Lewis's first attempt at what later became in completely revised form, The Magician's Nephew. Prince Caspian (other titles: Drawn into Narnia, A Horn in Narnia) was finished by December 1949, and by February 1950, The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" was ready in manuscript. July 1950 saw the completion of the manuscript of The Horse and His Boy (other titles: Narnia and the North, The Horse and the Boy); November brought The Silver Chair. By October 1951, a version of The Magician's Nephew was shown to Green, but Lewis finished The Last Battle in March 1953 before making the revisions suggested by Green to The Magician's Nephew. ¹²

There is little else that can be drawn from firsthand sources concerning the genesis of these stories. We may speculate on why Lewis came to write them when he did: the wartime evacuee children in his home in 1939, his lifelong admiration for Kenneth Grahame, George MacDonald, and E. Nesbit, the resurgence of his interest during the late forties after the success of The Screwtape Letters and the space trilogy in a form he last used in 1939, and his growing conviction that fantasy could act as a spiritual preparation for young minds. Retrospectively, in a series of essays on the subject of stories and fairy tales, Lewis made his intentions in using the genre quite clear. Moving from the general "On Stories," through "On Three Ways of Writing for Children," to the specific "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to be Said," we arrive at the following rationale for the writing and reading of stories. One might be tempted to say "use" of stories had Lewis not forbidden that as a possibility.

Stories move us by casting actuality into another perspective, catching us off guard, challenging our deeper imagination and sending us back with a renewed pleasure to the actual world from our sojourn in what Lewis calls plausible and imaginatively moving other worlds.¹³ Stories, unlike realistic novels, do not set themselves up as actuality, fact or information, but they do intend to give us an exciting glimpse of the "as if," a sense of the unexpected, an adventure into possibilities, an image of what reality might be like at a more central region.¹⁴ Art, the art of the story specifically in this case, is an invitation to come further in and higher up. We are not, as F. R. Leavis suggests, attracted to the thing in itself, its plot, characters, symbols, irony, or structure. Through the artistry, the "net" of plot or adventure and excitement, we are drawn out of ourselves and into meaning which we had not dreamed of before. Here it is tempting to suggest that the whole process of transcendence which is central to the Chronicles of Narnia is a metaphor for Lewis's mature view of the art of fiction, and that these stories were written to exemplify this theory, further in and higher up symbolizing the author's method and the reader's road as well as the evolution within each book and across the Chronicles as a whole. But an honest look at the facts forbids such neat theorizing, and the second essay on how one writes for children indicates that Lewis was observing what had happened in his own case and that of other writers, not giving us the outline of how he went about writing fairy tales. It is this delight in organic creativity which throughout acts as a balance to Lewis's otherwise overpowering rationality. He makes no attempt to explain the mechanics of writing stories or how an author succeeds in moving his readers. We are given no practical advice.

Having firmly established children as legitimate readers, not a group to be written at or down to, Lewis defends his use of the fairy tale on the basis of its appropriateness to his subject. His defense rests on the premise that life and art are organic and evolutionary. The creative acts of writing and reading are also evolutionary, a progression from meaning to meaning. Lewis's statements on his own writing and the evidence of his work show that writing is as much a journey of discovery for Lewis as reading his work is for us. He discounted, especially in the Chronicles, any preconceived program which Narnia would flesh out, and the facts of composition recently revealed in the Hooper and Green Biography bear him out.

The form attracted Lewis, he said, because of its restrictiveness, on the one hand, and on the other, the opportunity which fantasy and the fairy tale offered him to convey meaning in a way which is generally unavailable to the novelist. He particularly appreciated the enforced condensation, the check on his expository demon, the curtailment of length and scope, the exclusion of erotic love, the equally balanced chapter lengths, the restraint on description, and the virtual exclusion as he said of analysis, digression, reflection, and "gas."¹⁵ Fantasy offered the chance, when presented in fairy tales, for using as Lewis said "giants and dwarfs and talking beasts … an admirable hieroglyphic which conveys psychology, types of character, more briefly than novelistic presentation and to readers whom novelistic presentation could not yet reach."¹⁶

It seems fair to suggest, having seen in some detail what Lewis's fiction had developed into by this point, that he had come back, in a sense, to write the sort of fiction which had intrigued and delighted him as a child. But that was not his only motive. He had much to say about the achievement of Joy and to an audience whom from his own experience he knew to be turning away both from the literature which could suggest the sources of Joy and from the Church which should teach it. His motives for writing may have been multiple. First he wanted to convey the pictures he saw. Next came the expression of longing, the askesis, the spiritual exercise now identified with the creative act of fiction writing; third was the challenge of whether he could keep in control, not letting either description or argument overbalance each other. Finally he wanted to steal past the ever watchful dragons, the stereotyped responses to religion. Perhaps there were other reasons hidden even from himself: a desire to rival the Hobbit, a wish to emulate MacDonald, the psychological insistence of his pictures, dreams, and nightmares. We cannot know with certainty what all his motives were. The result, however, was Narnia, which expresses thematically and artistically all that is central to Lewis's art and theory of literature and which many critics feel will be that part of his fiction which gains him permanent literary recognition.¹⁷

Since I wish to trace the evolution of Lewis's technique as he wrote the stories without losing the overall pattern which emerges from reading the seven in the order he recommended, I will begin where he began, with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and deal with The Magician's Nephew just before The Last Battle, putting the framing books side by side in their compositional order. In the final analysis, I think this will do less damage than might be supposed since the greatest affinity is between The Magician's Nephew and The Last Battle, with the other five books falling into an order with an inner consistency. I do not propose separate chapters on each book since I have found them exemplary of Lewis's organic creativity, and thus I think they would profit by examination in one long chapter with subsections devoted to individual works. Critics have already cited many sources and parallels to other works admired or read by Lewis, so I shall confine myself to a study of his technique and themes in the light of the earlier chapters on his work to this point. Much has been written about the Christian allegory and symbolism to be found in Narnia; again, I leave the reader to other readily available sources since my attention will be directed toward the integration of meaning in the form Lewis chose rather than an exclusive selection of meanings.

Notes

1. See also: Walter Hooper, "Narnia: The Author, The Critics, and the Tale," Children's Literature, 111 (1974), pp. 12-22.

2. Haigh, p. 109.

3. Bod., c/220/1, #181, March, 28, 1953, to W. L. Kinter.

4. Robson, p. 68.

5. MSFAC, c/48, #113, September 28, 1955, to Mr. Henry.

6. MSFAC, c/48, #123, August 18, 1953, to Allen C. Emery, Jr.

7. Letters, p. 260.

8. Worlds, p. 42.

9. Biography, p. 239 and Bod., c/220/4, #188, November 16, 1956, to C. A. Brady. "It might amuse you that the whole thing took its rise from nightmares about lions which I suddenly started having."

10. Biography, p. 240.

11. Walter Hooper, "Past Watchful Dragons," in Imagination and Spirit (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), pp. 306-307.

12. Biography, p. 248.

13. Worlds, pp. 12, 15.

14. Worlds, p. 15. See also: Letters, p. 283, to Mrs. Hook. Also: MSFAC, c/4, #145, December 29, 1958. This letter indicates that the "as if" in Aslan as Christ is not allegory. The point Lewis makes in the letter and in the essays is that we are, in fact, in another world, not just this world with a few changes. This is a crucial point because it is the "otherworldiness" which attracts us, seduces us, and gets us past the dragons. Narnia is not England anymore than the Shire is. One of Lewis's greatest achievements, parallel to Tolkien's in The Lord of the Rings, is his creation of a world. Certainly the only other fiction in which he approaches this success is Perelandra, and there I have pointed to the dichotomy and opposition between the world and what takes place in it. In Narnia there is no disunity of description and meaning.

15. Worlds, pp. 28, 36. See also: Letters, p. 307, December 2, 1962, to an Enquirer, on the restrictions imposed by this form of fiction.

16. Worlds, p. 27.

17. Father Walter Hooper suggested that Lewis may be known for these stories because they are classics in children's fiction.

Margaret Patterson Hannay (essay date 1981)

SOURCE: Hannay, Margaret Patterson. "Further Up and Further In: Chronicles of Narnia." In C. S. Lewis: Modern Literature Series, edited by Philip Winsor, pp. 53-71. New York, N.Y.: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1981.

[In the following excerpt, Hannay discusses how Lewis presents Christian ideas and morals in The Chronicles of Narnia in such a way that young readers wish to emulate the upstanding behavior of Lewis's protagonists.]

Lewis began The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1939 while four children were evacuated to his house during the air raids: "This book is about four children whose names were Ann, Martin, Rose, and Peter…. They all had to go away from London suddenly because of the Air Raids, and because Father, who was in the army, had gone off to the War and Mother was doing some kind of war work. They were sent to stay with … a very old Professor who lived by himself in the country."¹ In this first draft he drew on stories he had loved as a child, particularly "The Aunt and Anabel," in which a child enters a magic world through "Bigwardrobeinsparoom." The story was then set aside for almost ten years.

In March of 1949 he read the complete story to his friend Roger Lancelyn Green. Green recalls that Lewis then spent some time on a sequel, beginning a story about Digory and his fairy godmother Mrs. Lefay, which was to tell of the beginnings of Narnia. That fragment still exists, opening with Digory's ability to talk to trees and animals, a gift he lost when he sawed off a branch of his friend the oak in order to avoid the taunts of a playmate, Polly. Then the fascinating Mrs. Lefay enters, assuring Digory "Don't be afraid you're going to have to kiss me … I'm too ugly for that and ten to one you don't like snuff. I do, though."² Although elements of this story survive in other places—Digory and Polly, the red squirrel Pattertwig—it was apparently never developed further. Instead, Lewis thought of an immediate sequel to the first book, Prince Caspian, and completed it by the end of 1949. The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" and The Horse and His Boy were written in 1950, The Silver Chair in 1951. The Magician's Nephew, which had begun with Mrs. Lefay, went through many revisions, including the removal of a long story about Digory's visit with a farmer and his wife in the dying world of Charn; it was not completed until early in 1954, several months after The Last Battle was written.³ So the order in which the books were written is not the same as that in which they were published or that of events in Narnia. Walter Hooper says that Lewis told him they should be read in the following order: The Magician's Nephew, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader," The Silver Chair, The Last Battle. ⁴

Not until the stories were completed did Lewis chart out the history of Narnia as a whole, including events and characters which had never appeared in the seven chronicles. Because of the difference in times between our world and Narnia, the entire history of Narnia takes 2555 Narnian years, but only fifty Earth years. Narnia is created in 1900, when Digory is twelve and Polly is eleven. The Pevensies arrive in 1940, which is the year 1000 in Narnian time. Professor Digory Kirke, who seems ancient to the children, is fifty-two, about Lewis's age when he wrote the story. In 1941 the children return to Narnia to aid Prince Caspian, discovering that 1303 Narnian years have passed and all their old friends have died. But by their next visit, in 1942, only three Narnia years have elapsed, so they travel with Caspian on the Dawn Treader. Fifty Narnian years go by before Eustace and Jill rescue Prince Rilian later in 1942. And then no one from our world visits Narnia until 1949, when the railway accident sends all the friends of Narnia into that world for the last battle (2555 Narnian time). In between come stories about characters Lewis never wrote up—Moonwood the Hare, Queen Swanwhite of Narnia, Ram the Great, the outlaws who move into Lantern Waste.⁵

It is easy to find parallels to Lewis's life in the Narnia books. After all, he began a story about four children evacuated to a professor's house in the country at a time when four children were evacuated to his house. We know that he owned wardrobes somewhat similar to the one he described. (One of his wardrobes is now on display in the Wade Collection at Wheaton College.) The house the children explore, with its unexpected rooms and piles of books, is like his childhood home, Little Lea. The children visit Narnia when they are exploring inside because of the rain—Lewis remembers his own childhood as being mainly indoors, out of the Irish rain. The attic which Digory and Polly explore is similar to that of Little Lea, which was full of tunnels. Perhaps more significantly, Digory's mother is lying very sick, probably dying, when he goes to Narnia. We could say it is the most obvious sort of wish fulfillment for Digory to bring back the silver apple that makes his mother well; of course Lewis wanted to make his mother recover from cancer. But we should also notice that Aslan cries with Digory over his mother, that he is even sadder than Digory about it, and that Digory is not allowed to use unlawful means to make his mother well.

It is also pertinent that there are few scenes where children meet with their parents. Mr. and Mrs. Pevensie come into the story only by waving to the children in The Last Battle, after they, too, have died. In Prince Caspian, Caspian's father and mother are dead, and he is at the mercy of his uncle, who usurped the throne. At the beginning of The Silver Chair, Caspian, an old man whose wife has died, sets sail; his son, Rilian, does not meet him until the end, when he is carried ashore on a stretcher. Even that scene we see from a distance, watching (with Jill and Eustace) Caspian raise his hand, as he dies, to bless Rilian. Jill and Eustace later meet Caspian on Aslan's mountain, but Rilian does not. In The Horse and His Boy Shasta's abusive "father" turns out to have found him after a shipwreck; when Shasta is finally reunited with his true father, King Lune, his mother is already dead. And both of Tirian's parents are dead before the last battle. Lewis himself had so little experience of family life that he was no doubt wise (if it was a conscious choice) in avoiding those scenes.

Because The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has obvious affinities to the passion and resurrection of Christ, many readers assume that Lewis began with Christian truth, then thought of a story to sugarcoat it. That is almost the opposite of what he says happened. He says he saw pictures, pictures which began to join up into patterns: "a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn't even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord."⁶ Once he had the images, he had to search for a form, a literary type, which was appropriate. Because the story had no love interest and no deep psychological probing, the fairy tale suggested itself. And the more he thought about the fairy tale, the more he was intrigued by its brevity, its restrained descriptions, and its traditions.

After he had the pictures and a form to fit them, he had to ask himself if the story was worth writing. He says he began to realize that a fairy tale "could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to." But if the story were set in an imaginary world, one might be able to "steal past those watchful dragons."⁷ Walter Hooper believes Lewis was successful. "By degrees which are often unnoticed by even the most cautious atheist, we progress from a love of Narnia, to a greater love of Aslan himself, to a sharp regret that there is no Aslan in this world, to a sudden recognition which makes the heart sing that there is an Aslan in this world—and then, if my own experience is any guide—Narnia and this world interlock and Aslan and Christ are seen as one."⁸

Yet any summary of the books makes the Christian parallels more obvious than they are in context; many people simply read the books for the story, unaware that there is any theological parallel. The closest Lewis ever comes to direct theological comment in the stories is at the end of The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" when Aslan tells Lucy she will meet him, even though she cannot come back to Narnia. He is in their world too, but there he has another name. "You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there."

When one little girl wrote to Lewis asking Aslan's other name, he told her he wanted her to guess. "Has there never been anyone in this world who (1) Arrived at the same time as Father Christmas (2) Said he was the Son of the Great Emperor (3) Gave himself up for someone else's fault to be jeered at and killed by wicked people (4) Came to life again (5) Is sometimes spoken of as a Lamb…. Don't you really know His name in this world?"⁹ Because there has been considerable discussion over whether or not the Narnian chronicles are a Christian allegory, Peter Schakel suggests that while the stories contain some elements of allegory, like the death and resurrection of Aslan, they are not themselves allegorical: "The Christian meaning is deeper and more subtle than the term allegory permits…. When the Chronicles are at their best, they do not just convey Christian meanings intellectually … but … communicate directly to the imagination and the emotions a sizable share of the central elements of the Christian faith."¹⁰

The death and resurrection of Aslan parallels the death and resurrection of Christ—parallels, not repeats or allegorizes. For Aslan is a lion, not a man; he dies only for Edmund's sin, not to redeem the world. The creation of Narnia parallels the Genesis account—but there are significant differences. The land already exists when the children arrive, so that the order of creation is significantly altered. The animals are shown climbing out of the earth in vivid detail. There is no creation of mankind, for people already exist on earth; the nearest parallel to the account in 2 Genesis is the calling of certain animals by Aslan, who breathes upon them, making them the talking animals. There is no temptation and fall as such in Narnia. Evil is brought in by the children in the person of the Witch, but her presence is only the indirect result of their sin (when Digory strikes the bell, awakening Jadis in Charn). Jadis does attempt to get Digory to take an apple for himself, but he does not succumb; the garden itself is more like the Hesperides than like Eden.

The end of the world in The Last Battle obviously draws on elements from the Apocalypse of Saint John, such as the sounding of a trumpet and the falling stars, but some reverse evolution creeps in, with the giant lizards devouring the vegetation before they themselves die, and after the sun goes out, utter cold descends on Narnia. Instead of ending the world with fire, like the Apocalypse, Lewis ends the world with ice, like Norse mythology. After the door is shut, we do see a new Narnia, but it is a world of gardens, not the new Jerusalem of the Apocalypse; the garden always had a greater appeal to Lewis than the city as image of perfection.

Lewis was perturbed by the simpering, wishy-washy way goodness was portrayed in most religious teaching, making children inevitably feel that it was much more glamorous to be bad. He agrees with the aesthetic tradition that art should teach by delighting, by making the reader enchanted with an ideal. Emotions should be evoked in order to develop the imagination, so that the person can conceive of a higher level of existence. "Imagination exists for the sake of wisdom or spiritual health—the rightness and richness of a man's total response to the world."¹¹ The correct responses to life, although they may now be mocked as "bourgeois" and "conventional," are not innate; they must be carefully taught. Therefore, the older poetry, like that of Milton and Spenser, constantly insisted on certain themes—"Love is sweet, death bitter, virtue lovely, and children or gardens delightful." These writers were setting up models for each new generation to follow.¹²

And this is what Lewis himself is doing. When he presents the heroism of Peter and the treachery of Edmund, what child would not rather be Peter than Edmund? When we see Lucy giving up her water ration for Eustace, after he has attempted to steal water from the crew, what child would not rather follow Lucy than Eustace? Again and again the children are confronted with situations when doing the right will be painful and difficult. Lucy is told she should have followed Aslan alone, even if the others were not willing to come; she must climb up to the magician's study to help the Dufflepuds no matter how frightened she is. Shasta must run to warn King Lune of Archenland, even though he is exhausted by his trip across the desert. Jill, Eustace, King Tirian, and Jewel must fight bravely, although all Narnia is being destroyed around them. And there are smaller decisions, too, which change the course of events. For example, Puddleglum stamps out the fire of the Emerald Witch, burning his feet, and so dissolves her enchantment.

These fairy tales react on the readers, making us understand and long for the Good. Most writers make the bad characters more interesting, lively, and far more attractive than the good ones; Lewis does not, for he has a stern and splendid vision of goodness. We have been deceived, he says, by "that prosaic moralism which confines goodness to the region of Law and Duty, which never lets us feel in our face the sweet air blowing from 'the land of righteousness,' never reveals that elusive Form which if once seen must inevitably be desired with all but sensuous desire—the thing (in Sappho's phrase) 'more gold than gold.'"¹³

There is terror and joy in the goodness portrayed in Narnia. Aslan, we are constantly reminded, "is not a tame lion." We would do well to be frightened of him, as Mrs. Beaver tells the children when they first hear his name. "If there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else just silly."

"Then he isn't safe?" said Lucy.

"Safe?" said Mr. Beaver. "Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you."

Jill has a similar reaction when she first meets Aslan, who is lying by a stream. The lion speaks to her in a "heavy, golden voice," a voice that is "deeper, wilder and stronger" than a man's, inviting her to drink. When Jill asks if he would go away first, he only growls.

"Will you promise not to—do anything to me, if I do come?" said Jill.

"I make no promise," said the Lion….

"Do you eat girls?" she said.

"I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms," said the Lion….

"I daren't come and drink," said Jill.

"Then you will die of thirst," said the Lion.

"Oh dear!" said Jill, coming another step nearer.

"I suppose I must go and look for another stream then."

"There is no other stream," said the Lion.

This lion, who has swallowed kingdoms, who will not promise safety, is far from the "meek and mild" Jesus many children meet (and despise) in Sunday school. He is not a tame lion, and his ways are unpredictable. Aslan quietly disappears during the celebration of the crowning of the four kings and queens of Narnia; Mr. Beaver warns them that "He doesn't like being tied down—and of course he has other countries to attend to. It's quite all right. He'll often drop in. Only you musn't press him. He's wild, you know."

What this means, in practice, is that the children are very often left in extremely dangerous situations without Aslan's help. In Prince Caspian Aslan stays with the girls, sending Peter and Edmund alone to the Mound to overcome the hag and the werewolf and then to plan the military campaign. It seems hopeless; their forces are besieged by a far greater army. Peter tells them that Aslan is close. "We don't know when he will act. In his time, no doubt, not ours. In the meantime he would like us to do what we can on our own." So Peter bravely challenges King Miraz to single combat with no assurance that he will survive the fight. As it turns out, of course, Aslan comes in time to save him, but Peter does not know that when he decides to fight.

Often the children are placed in tight places with no assurance that they will be delivered—sold to slavers, imprisoned by giants, tossed in a dreadful storm at sea—and always they are delivered, but only after they have shown considerable cleverness and bravery of their own. Always they are delivered, that is, except for The Last Battle. Aslan does not appear in that book when the centaur is slain; when the holy trees are chopped down, killing the dryads; when the talking animals are made slaves of the Calormenes; or when Ginger cleverly forestalls their attempt to prove that the Narnians were in bondage to a fake Aslan. Aslan does not appear even at the battle itself, when Jill, Eustace, Tirian, and Jewel die bravely in combat. Indeed, they do not see Aslan at all until they go through the stable door, into Aslan's own land; they must go by faith, not sight.

This combination of Aslan's apparent unpredictability and the children's absolute responsibility for their own actions disturbs some people, for there is no cheap grace in Narnia. Eustace becomes a dragon for his greed and nastiness; he can be cured only by letting Aslan tear off the dragon skin with his claws, piercing him to the heart. Aravis is clawed by a lion as she flees to warn Archenland of the coming attack, punished for allowing her slave girl to be beaten for her. Sometimes it is difficult to follow Aslan's commands. As he himself warns Jill, the signs that seem clear and easy to remember on his mountain will not be as she expects them to look when she goes down to Narnia. She is at fault in forgetting to repeat her signs each day as commanded, but the reader is apt to have some sympathy with Eustace for not recognizing Caspian as an old man and with Jill for not recognizing the trench as a letter of her sign. That is what life is like, Lewis would reply. We are required to be obedient, to be alert, to be courageous in the face of adversity, with no assurance that we will succeed or that we will be saved from suffering and death.

But death is not the worst of all fates in Narnia. Prince Rilian, as they attempt to escape the rising flood in the Underworld, exhorts Jill and Eustace to courage: "Whether we live or die Aslan will be our good lord." (To which Puddleglum adds a typical comment: "And you must always remember there's one good thing about being trapped down here; it'll save funeral expenses.") Earlier Puddleglum had defeated the enchantment of the witch, who had almost convinced them that there was no such thing as Aslan: "I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia." In The Last Battle Roonwit the centaur sends a message to his lord with his dying breath "to remember that all worlds draw to an end and that noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy."

Death is not the worst evil, for death in Aslan's service, as we learn in The Last Battle, leads to glory. The worst evil is to reject goodness and joy, to choose to separate oneself from Aslan. In The Horse and His Boy the results of such a choice are given a comic touch. When Rabadash rejects the forgiveness of the Narnian kings, he is turned into an ass, becoming a figure of mockery to his own people. Uncle Andrew has a similar humiliation in The Magician's Nephew, when the animals plant and water him. But such a choice can have terrifying consequences too. The ape and Rishda Tarkaan, who call on Tash, are given to him; Ginger is punished by ceasing to be a talking beast. And most poignant of all, Susan is no longer a friend of Narnia. For such is Lewis's power to stir our emotions that we suspend the usual judgment of our age, finding in Susan, the only one not killed in a train crash, the only tragedy.

There is no arbitrary justice in Narnia. Each one is punished only by being what he or she is. When the children ask about the apple the witch ate, Aslan tells them, "Things always work according to their nature…. All get what they want; they do not always like it." The apple she has stolen will give her endless days, but they will be only misery to her. On the other side we have Emeth in The Last Battle, who has truly sought goodness all his life. Although he thought he was serving Tash, he was serving Aslan, "for all find what they truly seek."

As Clyde Kilby, founder and curator of the Wade Collection, observes, in Narnia we are presented not so much with characters who are good or bad as with characters who are progressing toward one state or the other by their choices.¹⁴ And a person can alter direction, as Eustace and Edmund did—and as Susan, more tragically, did. Lewis firmly believes in free will, that we each must daily make the choices which will lead us to one destiny or another. In The Last Battle each animal and person looks into the face of Aslan, then either departs into his shadow, or enters into Joy. In an essay called "The Weight of Glory" Lewis explains the New Testament warning that we must appear before God to meet our judgment: "In some sense … we can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all. We can be left utterly and absolutely outside…. On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged. We walk every day on the razor edge between these two incredible possibilities." Each person we meet, even the "dullest and most uninteresting … may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare." We each become one or the other by our choices, as the children choose in Narnia.

As is fitting in a book for children, Lewis does not dwell on the fate of those who disappear into Aslan's shadow. Instead, he makes each reader feel what it is like to choose rightly, to be welcomed into Joy, and this vision is perhaps his greatest appeal as an author. "Eucatastrophe" is the word invented by Lewis's friend J. R. R. Tolkien to cover this kind of joy, which grows out of the acknowledgment of sorrow and death: "the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous 'turn' (for there is no true end to any fairy tale)" does not deny the possibility of failure. "It denies … universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."¹⁵ Nihilists would call this escapism; Lewis and Tolkien call it realism. They knew that for the Christian there can be—ultimately—no tragedy, although events may now appear tragic from our perspective. The most obvious example of eucatastrophe in Narnia is the death and resurrection of Aslan, but in each of the stories a similar turn occurs, bringing deliverance or redemption in unanticipated ways. The structure of the plots themselves thus reflects both the genre, the fairy tale, and the theological position of the author, Christianity.

Joy is often evoked in Narnia through dance, celebration, and feasting. After Aslan's resurrection he takes the girls for a romp, round and round the hilltop, "now diving between them, now tossing them in the air with his huge and beautifully velveted paws and catching them again, and now stopping unexpectedly so that all three of them rolled over together in a happy laughing heap of fur and arms and legs." Lucy could never decide "whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten." In Prince Caspian even the wild dances of Bacchus and his Maenads have their place. As the dancers circle Aslan and the girls, laughing and shouting out "Euan, euan, eu-oi-oi-oi," grape vines spring up everywhere, even in Lucy's hair. Later Susan whispers, "I wouldn't have felt very safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we'd met them without Aslan." Lucy sensibly replies, "I should think not." After the defeat of the Telmarines, comes the "magic dance of plenty" and the feast itself: "sides of roasted meat that filled the grove with delicious smell, and wheaten cakes and oaten cakes … peaches, nectarines, pomegranates … pyramids and cataracts of fruit." In The Silver Chair Jill watches the great snow dance of the dwarfs, as they throw snowballs through the patterns made by the dancers in the moonlight. The dance is so wild and splendid that "I wish you could see it for yourselves," the narrator tells us.

But the evocation of Joy reaches a higher level, a mythic level, in three of the books. In The Magician's Nephew things are created "out of the lion's head…. When you listened to his song you heard the things he was making up: when you looked round, you saw them." His song is so beautiful, Digory "could hardly bear it," an evocation of the beauty that stabs like pain. Later Polly and Digory journey to that most mythic of places, the enclosed garden, with its echoes of Eden and the garden of the Hesperides. Their first hint of Paradise is the smell, "warm and golden," the air so sweet, it "almost brought the tears to your eyes." The sense of awe is increased by the placement of the garden on top of a very steep, smooth hill; it has a high wall around it, and a golden gate that magically swings open for those who should enter. The great silver apples, with a light of their own, are watched by a wonderful bird instead of the traditional dragon, but they are watched. The punishment for stealing is to find the heart's desire and have it bring despair.

The end of The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" is a more powerful evocation of Joy. After they leave Ramandu and his daughter, there are no more adventures per se, just a growing sense of wonder, one of the most difficult effects to achieve in writing. Nothing much happens, except for seeing the Sea People; they just sail on toward the end of the world. Then Reepicheep falls overboard, tastes the water, and repeats the prophecy: "Where the waves grow sweet … There is the utter East." They all drink the water. Caspian says "I'm not sure that it isn't going to kill me. But it is the death I would have chosen—if I'd known about it till now." The water is like light, making them able to look directly at the sun glowing on the white fields of water lilies. Everyone is filled with the kind of excitement that brings a hush as they are surrounded by the smell of the lilies, a smell Lucy said was a "fresh, wild, lonely smell that seemed to get into your brain and make you feel that you could go up mountains at a run." Their joy is so intense that they feel they cannot stand much more, yet they do not want it to stop. When the Dawn Treader must turn back, the children and Reepicheep continue east toward the light, toward a range of mountains rising beyond the world (no doubt the same unimaginably high peaks where Jill and Eustace meet Aslan, his own country). A breeze from the east brings them a smell and a musical sound. Afterwards Lucy could only say, "'It would break your heart.' 'Why', said I, 'was it so sad?' 'Sad! No,' said Lucy." There they meet a lamb who feeds them a breakfast of fish, as the disciples had been fed by the risen Christ who was called the Lamb of God. Then the lamb turns a tawny gold, becoming Aslan himself. It is a fitting climax to the silence and the piercing sweetness.

The Last Battle intensifies this feeling of Joy. When the kings and queens are mourning Narnia, they turn—and recognize the new Narnia, the same but more splendid than the old. Lord Digory explains that the Narnia they had known was only a shadow or a copy of the true Narnia, which has always existed in Aslan's real world. It is different, but only "as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream." Jewel the unicorn understands: "I have come home at last! This is my real country! … This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this." He leads the cry of "Come further up, come further in" as the children run up mountains and swim up waterfalls, exulting in their new bodies in this fresh new (and yet eternal) land. They find magical fruit—and know that this time it is for them. At the golden gates of the Garden, Reepicheep welcomes them. They meet all those they have loved who had died, but this is not the end; it is the beginning "of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

The vision, presented in the guise of a fairy tale, is all but prophetic. No one who experiences it fully will ever again assume that goodness must be dull, for to experience it fully is to experience Joy. In creating this effect, Lewis is drawing on the major symbols of Western tradition—the quest, the garden, the worlds of Greek, Norse, and Celtic mythology, in addition to the Bible. Of these traditions, the Arthurian is probably the most important to our appreciation of Narnia.

The court of Cair Paravel is apparently derived from the Arthurian court, perhaps as described at the beginning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an English romance of the fourteenth century which Lewis loved. He said that he borrowed two of Aslan's characteristics, his brightness and sweet odor, from the Grail itself; the mystic table and stone knife also come from the Grail legends, which are part of the Arthurian myth.¹⁶ The clothes, the armor, the weapons, and the pavilions are medieval; medieval, too, is the ideal of chivalry which the children and the Narnia kings seek to fulfill.

In an essay called the "Importance of an Ideal," Lewis quotes a description of Sir Lancelot, the noblest knight of Arthur's court: "Thou wert the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest."¹⁷ The importance of this ideal is the contrary demands it makes; the knight "is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth." The naturally meek person is not naturally fierce in battle; the naturally fierce person is not naturally gentle in peace. What is needed to preserve civilization (Lewis is writing during the darkest days of World War II) is someone who values learning and courtesy, and yet is courageous enough to defend them against attack. Otherwise, he says, history becomes a series of raids on civilization by hardy barbarians; when the barbarians become civilized, they become soft, and then the cycle is repeated. He admits that the ideal exemplified by Lancelot may be unattainable, may be escapism. "But it is 'escapism' in a sense never dreamed of by those who use that word; it offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable."¹⁸

The kings and queens of Narnia strive for that ideal balance, a balance that can be attained only by the most strenuous efforts. They endanger their lives to save their subjects from the Calormenes, or from the White Witch; they are compassionate to those who are weaker and forgiving to those who repent; they are strong in battle when it cannot be avoided, yet delight in music, in dance, and in listening to the stories of the bards. They seek peace, yet do not shrink from wars brought against them. And they never turn down an adventure, with the one exception of the Island of Dreams, a place no human can face.

Reepicheep the mouse, a noble warrior who goes into battle with his slender rapier and is aghast when his king turns back from the Island of Dreams, is given specifically Arthurian attributes. He challenges Eustace to a duel after Eustace has swung him around by his tail, a challenge the boy must take seriously. When Reepicheep plays chess, he loses because he sends his knight into incredible danger: "This happened because he had momentarily forgotten it was a game of chess and was thinking of a real battle and making the knight do what he would certainly have done in its place. For his mind was full of forlorn hope, death or glory charges, and last stands." As the Arthurian knights sought the Grail, so Reepicheep sought Aslan's country; the fulfillment of his quest was prophesied in his infancy. When the water is too shallow for the Dawn Treader as it draws near Aslan's country, Reepicheep takes off his sword, flinging it across the lilied sea; it lands upright, the hilt above the water in a clear allusion to Arthur's sword held up by the Lady of the Lake. Then he disappears over the wave; later he appears in the garden of the New Narnia, even as Arthur is said to have disappeared, and, according to That Hideous Strength, lives now in "the cup-shaped land of Aphallin, beyond the seas of Lur in Perelandra," where Ransom will join him at the end of that story.

All this chivalry, involving as it does sword fights and other violent combat, has caused some to say the books are not suitable for children, but Lewis answered this charge in his defense of the fairy tale. It would be false to pretend to children that they are not born into a world of death and violence. "Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage…. Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book." Do not attempt to banish the terrors. "For in the fairy tales, side by side with the terrible figures, we find the immemorial comforters and protectors, the radiant ones."¹⁹ Narnia is full of wicked kings, dragons, giants, and violence, but it is difficult to imagine more valiant heroes than the children who become its kings and queens, or a more radiant protector than Aslan.

Lewis is able to make us believe in this world made of pieces of Christian doctrine, Arthurian legend, Norse mythology, and English boarding schools because it is a real world, full of homey detail. We believe in it because we have walked through it. We know just how Mr. Tumnus has arranged the furniture in his cave, how he lights a lamp with a flaming piece of wood from the fire that he holds in tongs, how the tears run down his cheeks and trickle off the end of his nose. When Susan helps Mrs. Beaver with the potatoes, she drains them, then puts them back in the empty pot to dry on the side of the range. We so easily picture her fixing the potatoes in just that way that we suspend our disbelief that she is visiting beavers.

When Jill, Eustace, and Tirian spend the night in the tower, Puzzle and Jewel decide they would be more comfortable outside. "This perhaps was just as well, for a Unicorn and a fat, full-grown donkey indoors always make a room feel rather crowded." Well, yes, of course they would. But the use of the word "always" makes us feel that this is a normal social situation. We know what a centaur has for breakfast, filling its man-stomach with porridge, fish, kidney, bacon, omelette, cold ham, toast, marmalade, coffee, and beer, then its horse-stomach with grazing, hot mash, oats, and a bag of sugar. We know that no one would dare suggest putting saddles on centaurs, but when they courteously offer to carry Jill and Eustace, they speak to the children in a very grave and polite way, telling them herbs and roots, the influences of the planets, and the nine names of Aslan. These details are not explicit in Greek mythology, but they do fit in with what we know about centaurs from Homer.

We always know what the characters have to eat, whether it is boiled potatoes, marmalade rolls, or the delicate earths favored by the trees; we are told where the children wash (usually in a stream), and what kind of bed they have, whether it is a stone floor, heather, or a giant's nursery. We know whether the path is slippery shale, soft grass, or steep rocks, so of course we feel that we have walked it.

We know Narnia as Lewis says we know the world of Spenser's Faerie Queene or Robinson Crusoe's island; we have trudged from one end to the other on our own feet. If dropped suddenly into Narnia, careful readers could find the way from Cair Paravel to the Fords of Beruna. And these readers would have a clear understanding of what Aslan would expect of them if they were offered enchanted candy by a wicked witch, or were attacked by Calormenes, or were faced with a water shortage at sea. One critic complained to Lewis that fairy tales were not practical, they could not teach a child to build a boat. No, Lewis replied, but they would teach him how to act if he ever found himself on a sinking ship.

Notes

1. Walter Hooper, Past Watchful Dragons (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1979), p. 30. This is an expanded version of the essay "Past Watchful Dragons" included in Imagination and the Spirit, ed., Charles Huttar (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1971).

2. Hooper, Dragons, p. 63. That fragment was apparently set aside, somehow surviving Lewis's habit of discarding manuscripts; the only other Narnia manuscript extant is a five-page fragment of Eustace's diary, an earlier draft of the version published in The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader."

3. Green and Hooper, pp. 242-248.

4. Hooper, Dragons, p. 32.

5. Hooper, Dragons, pp. 41-44, reproduces Lewis's "Outline of Narnian History so far as it is known."

6. C. S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, ed., Walter Hooper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1966), p. 36.

7. Ibid., p. 37.

8. Walter Hooper, Preface to The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land by Kathryn Lindskoog (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1973), p. 13 (italics his).

9. C. S. Lewis, letter to an American girl, printed in Lindskoog, p. 16.

10. Peter Schakel, Reading with the Heart: The Way into Narnia (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1979), p. 17. Schakel's per-ceptive study includes an archetypal analysis of the narratives stressing such patterns as initiation of the hero, descent and ascent, voyage, creation and dissolution, and the four phases of Northrup Frye's monomyth.

11. C. S. Lewis, A Preface to "Paradise Lost" (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 54.

12. Ibid., p. 57.

13. C. S. Lewis, Preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946), p. xxxiv.

14. Clyde S. Kilby, The Christian World of C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1964), p. 141.

15. J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories," in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 81.

16. Hooper, Dragons, p. 90.

17. C. S. Lewis, "Notes on the Way," Time and Tide 21 (17 August 1940), p. 109.

18. Ibid., p. 111.

19. Lewis, Of Other Worlds, pp. 31-32.

Jim Pietrusz (essay date summer 1988)

SOURCE: Pietrusz, Jim. "Rites of Passage: The Chronicles of Narnia and the Seven Sacraments." Mythlore 14, no. 4 (summer 1988): 61-3.

[In the following essay, Pietrusz draws correlations between the novels in The Chronicles of Narnia and the Seven Sacraments of the Christian faith: Baptism, Confirmation, Extreme Unction, Holy Eucharist, Holy Orders, Matrimony, and Penance.]

It is quite obvious the C. S. Lewis had no intention of writing more than one book when he started the Chronicles of Narnia :

Apart from that, I don't know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the other six Narnian stories in after Him.

So you see that, in a sense, I know very little about how this story was born. That is, I don't know where the pictures came from. And I don't believe anyone knows exactly how he 'makes things up.' Making up is a very mysterious thing. When you'have an idea' could you tell anyone exactly how you thought of it?¹

The series was not planned before-hand as she thinks. When I wrote the Lion [the Witch and the Wardrobe ], I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote P[rince] Caspian as a sequel, I still didn't think there would be anymore, and when I had done The Voyage [of the "Dawn Treader"] I felt quite sure it would be the last. But I found I was wrong.²

It also becomes apparent then, that these books wrote themselves. Lewis had no intention of writing didactic books for children.

Let the pictures tell you their own moral … for the moral inherent in them will rise from whatever spiritual roots you have succeeded in striking during the whole course of your life. But if they don't show you any moral, don't put one in.³

But any reasonable examination of the series shows that the books are about, if not devoted to, the Seven Sacraments. What are the seven sacraments?

The sacraments in the Christian Church are solemn oaths, promises, or pledges ratified by rites, and ordained by Christ to give grace. The Catholic Church as well as the Anglican Church recognize all seven, most Protestants recognize Baptism and the Lord's Supper (Holy Eucharist). Lewis had adopted the Anglican Faith.

These sacraments are demarcation points in a person's spiritual growth; they are rites of passage that are really present in each person's life whether one is Christian or not. Baptism is a naming ceremony—the family and the community recognizing a new individual into society. Confirmation is the individual choosing to take responsibility as an adult. Matrimony is the binding of two individuals to progress in their spiritual life together—traditionally to raise a family. Holy Orders is the rite of priesthood, but it can be stretched to include any vocation or career, the calling of which can be ritualized—graduation, for example. Anointing of the Sick (Extreme Unction) is the recognition of the ending of a life and preparation for the new. Whereas these sacraments are traditionally received once, the remaining two are rituals that keep individuals on the path to growth and so are needed more or less frequently. Penance is the recognition that an individual has transgressed the way of growth and seeks to return. And finally, Holy Eucharist is the food of life, the nurture that each person needs to grow.

These rituals, these sacraments are present in the Chronicles, sometimes explicitly, sometimes inferred. Lewis is writing stories for children, stories that are Christian, stories that are about "growing up". The Sacraments as such would be unavoidable themes for a Christian writer. They are, in context, presented simply as a part of Life, the way children can understand and accept them.

But they are not presented in the logical order of reception, nor in any perceptible pattern, obviously betraying Lewis' unconscious progression of relating them in story form, or his accidental use of them at all.

For the logic's sake we will follow the order in which they were published:

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe centers around Edmund's betrayal of his brother and sisters to the Witch. It would seem to be a classic study of seduction by the tempter. Edmund is not evil, but he does an evil thing, easily lured by the promise of sweets. He needs to ask forgiveness.

There they saw Aslan and Edmund walking together in the dewy grass, apart from the rest of the court. There is no need to tell you (and no one ever heard) what Aslan was saying, but it was a conversation which Edmund never forgot. As the others drew nearer Aslan turned to meet them bringing Edmund with him.

"Here is your brother," he said, "and there is no need to talk to him about what is past."

Edmund shook hands with each of the others and said to each of them in turn, "I'm sorry" and everyone said "That's all right." And then everyone wanted very hard to say something which would make it quite clear that they were all friends with him again—something ordinary and natural—and of course no one could think of anything in the world to say.⁴

This apparent confessional scene between Aslan and Edmund is still not enough, for Aslan, Christlike, must go through the ritual sacrifice at the table. But Edmund is forgiven and set on the right path again.

Prince Caspian is certainly a "coming of age" story. A hero on a quest—someone rectifying justice, Caspian is seeking his future, realizing at each turn the responsibilities of being a hero—an adult. The battle is bloody—but Caspian stands firm—a soldier for Christ/Aslan. In the end there is a ceremony in which Caspian takes on responsibility.

"Welcome, Prince," said Aslan. "Do you feel yourself sufficient to take up the Kingship of Narnia?"

"I-I don't think I do, Sir," said Caspian. "I'm only a kid."

"Good," said Aslan. "If you felt yourself sufficient, it would have been proof that you were not. Therefore, under us, and under the Emperor of the High King, you shall be King of Narnia, Lord of Cair Paravel and Emperor of the Lone Islands."⁵

But this is not yet all, for he is knighted, he knights others and a big party is thrown. Prince Caspian is now an adult with adult responsibilities—dubbed, sworn, and crowned.

The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" is a long rambling adventure of many individual episodes. One deals with Eustace the "unbeliever," Eustace the one who cares for only himself, the one who doesn't like anyone or anything (unless he just happens to), the one who doesn't know what dragons are, the one who doesn't know Aslan even when he sees him. In short, Eustace is an ignorant baby. In using his unwise autonomy, he gets himself turned into a dragon; and only then does he realize how miserable a creature he is. Aslan takes him to a well to wash. Eustace attempts to scratch off his skin, but succeeds in only removing a few surface layers. Aslan, in one painful stroke gets rid of the old dragon to the new boy beneath. He then tosses Eustace into the Well. Later Eustace apologizes (punningly?).

"I'm afraid I've been pretty beastly."

"That's all right," said Edmund. "Between ourselves, you haven't been as bad as I was on my first trip to Narnia. You were only an ass, but I was a traitor."⁶

Edmund is referring to his own rite of passage. Eustace has relapses to his old self, but has been born again, baptized by Aslan. Notice too, the Dawn Treader is on a voyage, symbols of beginnings and water. Convenient symbols—intended or subconscious?

The Silver Chair is the story of being kidnapped into the Underworld, sharing the elements of the Oraneus and Tam Lin legends. Caspian's son is the victim. Caspian's wife is killed early in the story; and now he, an old man, is sailing off on a voyage from which many believe he will not return. In rescuing Prince Rilian, the children have to dig out of the underworld, the land of death. Their conversation contains expressions like:

"Whether we live or die Aslan will be our good Lord," and "it'll save funeral expenses."⁷

There is also the ritual that changes Caspian after his death. Asian tells Eustace to stab his right fore-paw with a thorn.

And there came out a great drop of blood, redder than all redness that you have ever seen or imagined. And it splashed into the stream over the dead body of the King. At the same moment the doleful music stopped. And the dead King began to be changed.⁸

Caspian "youthens" to a boy again, awakens, and realizes that he is in Aslan's country, a land closely resembling a Christian notion of heaven. Caspian is dead, but his life is not ended, merely changed. Aslan is awaiting him at his death, to further him along. Anointing of the sick is administered with holy chrism, not blood; but blood is a rich symbol of life. Here it is Aslan's life, afterlife. This sacrament prepares one for death, dispersing the fear. Aslan has certainly presented death as a welcomed conclusion to a life. Children reading this would find death less frightening.

The Horse and His Boy is the most paradoxical element in this sacramental association. This book seems to be about marriage, but fairy tale marriage not real everyday marriage. And it certainly is confusing. Aravis has run away because she does not wish to be married against her will. Susan changes her mind about marrying Prince Rabadash; and at the end of the story, in a sort of epilogue, we find out about Shasta (Cor) and Aravis

that years later, when they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.⁹

And then we are told that Bree and Hwin (the talking horses) both got married, but not to each other.

This perplexing and certainly not positive view of marriage may be explained by the fact that C. S. Lewis was very reluctant to get married himself and was involved with Joy Davidman at this time.

The Magician's Nephew is a book for tying up loose ends. It is a book that explains the origins of the Wardrobe as well as how it came to be in the Professor's house. The Professor's name is Digory Kirke. "Kirk" is the Scottish word for "church", and what he does for the children—providing asylum in the first story and coaching Peter for an exam in the third—are examples of pastoral duties of the church, of the priesthood.

He starts out as a reluctant sorcerer's apprentice forced into service to save Polly from the experiments of his uncle, who we find out to be only a petty trickster descendant of someone named LeFay. Sorcerers, Magicians, Shamans, and Priests are of a similar calling. They function as power brokers. Queen Jadis, the evil sorceress, hoards her power and has a false notion of her importance. Digory sees only the good his power can be put to. Jadis eats her apple; Digory thinks only of its life giving power in bringing his mother back to health. Digory becomes a healer, bringing the grace of God to the ill. This life-giving Food can easily be compared to the Eucharist brought by a priest to the sick as Holy Viaticum, and only a priest can change bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ. And finally, Digory completes his priestly duties by creating a channel from this world to the other by building a wardrobe from the wood of the tree grown from the seed of the apple he gave his mother.

Thus Lewis completes the cycle of the Seven Sacraments in the first six books. In the seventh he ends his tales. Could it be that there were no more stories once one has touched all of the main rites of passage in a person's life? This also reinforces the point of there being a lack of organization in the series. Seven Sacraments in six books is not very symmetrical. There are more symbols and more discussion possible here in relating the sacraments to the series but this is by no means an exhaustive analysis.

Christianity so pervaded the being of C. S. Lewis that anything he put his hand (or pen) to would be imbued strongly with a thorough Christian ethic. How unintentional the sacraments are infused here may be in direct proportion to the depth of Christianity that C. S. Lewis lived. The sacraments are the important rituals, the rites of passage in every Christian's life, what else could C. S. Lewis write about when he would write stories for children?

Notes

From an idea of Lisa Mosier's and discussed at Search Summer Reflections 1985.

1. C. S. Lewis. "It All Began with a Picture …" in Of Other Worlds, ed. W. Hooper. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966, p. 42.

2. Lewis, C. S. Letters to Children ed. L. W. Dorsett & M. L. Mead. MacMillan, 1985, p. 68.

3. Lewis, C. S. "On Ways of Writing for Children," in Of Other Worlds, ed. W. Hooper. Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1966, p. 33.

4. Lewis, C. S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Collier Books 1971, pp. 135-36. All remaining references to the Chronicles of Narnia are from this boxed set edition.

5. Prince Caspian, p. 200.

6. Voyage of the "Dawn Treader," p. 91.

7. The Silver Chair, p. 187.

8. Ibid., p. 212.

9. The Horse and His Boy, p. 216.

Frank P. Riga (essay date spring 1989)

SOURCE: Riga, Frank P. "Mortals Call Their History Fable: Narnia and the Use of Fairy Tale." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 14, no. 1 (spring 1989): 26-30.

[In the following essay, Riga distinguishes between aspects of "truth" and "reality" in The Chronicles of Narnia, noting how Lewis uses the fairy tale genre to encourage a wider understanding of the multidimensional aspects of Christianity.]

"I call our world Flatland," says Edwin A. Abbott's hero, "not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you,… who are privileged to live in Space" (Flatland 3). In this Romance of Many Dimensions, the Flatland hero travels from his world of two dimensions to Lineland, a world of one dimension, and then to Spaceland, a world of three dimensions. Because of his wide experience, he knows to use the dimensional language of Spaceland when addressing its inhabitants, but in his tale, he also makes it clear that the third dimension is inherent in Flatland, though Flatlanders have no untutored way of perceiving it. So after assimilating the experience of three dimensions, the hero tells his host in Spaceland that he is now ready to experience the fourth dimension. His announcement is greeted with derision, for surely he must know there are but three dimensions. By this pattern of regression/progression, Abbott is, of course, satirizing human limitation, the arbitrary and contingent nature of human awareness. The whole of his fable attempts to compensate for this limitation by encouraging growth in the human imagination. By allowing the reader to enter several worlds of different dimensions and to aspire to others, this enlarged imagination enriches the commonplace world and indicts intellectual pride. The gift of modesty, or humility, promotes further knowing. As the hero explains, "even I—who have been in Spaceland, and have had the privilege of understanding for twenty-four hours the meaning of 'height'—even I cannot now comprehend it, nor realize it by the sense of sight or by any process of reason; I can but apprehend it by faith" (Flatland, Preface to 2nd. ed., n.p.).

The shifting perspectives on reality offered by the several worlds of Flatland parallel the reader's shifting perspective in the Chronicles of Narnia. C. S. Lewis, who knew and wrote about Flatland in several places, may not have been influenced by Abbott directly, but his imaginative world proceeded from a similar, though not the same, multi-dimensional viewpoint. Like Abbott, who gives Flatland as the world of commonplace reality from which he can regress to a simpler and then progress to a more complex world of reality, Lewis takes us from our own world to the story world of Narnia and then, at the end of the Chronicles, from Narnia to the true Narnia and the Land of Aslan. And like Abbott, whose fable allows us to imagine "other worlds" that shed light on our understanding of this, Lewis helps us re-imagine this world by creating Narnia. But his purpose does not end here. He wants to insist that, in re-imagining our world, we must include another dimension that validates all the rest. As Lewis argues in his essay, "On Stories," "to construct plausible and moving 'other worlds' you must draw on the only real 'other world' we know, that of the spirit" (On Stories 12).

Two passages tell us how to dispose our imaginations in order to participate in the fictional world of Narnia. The first passage is from Prince Caspian. Here, Peter comments that he can hardly believe they were drawn into Narnia by a blast from Susan's horn:

"I don't know why you shouldn't believe it," said Lucy, "if you believe in magic at all. Aren't there lots of stories about magic forcing people out of one place—out of one world—into another? I mean, when a magician in The Arabian Nights calls up a Jinn, it has to come. We had to come, just like that."

"Yes," said Peter, "I suppose what makes it feel so queer is that in the stories it's always someone in our world who does the calling. One doesn't really think about where the Jinn's coming from."

"And now we know what it feels like for the Jinn," said Edmund with a chuckle. "Golly! It's a bit uncomfortable to know that we can be whistled for like that …"

                                         (96)

By this deft reversal of the ordinary way we think of the Jinn stories, Lewis, like Abbott, gives us a novel perspective from which to see our own world. But unlike the world in the Jinn stories, which we do not know, Lewis's allusion to it allows us to keep both worlds in mind, our own and Narnia, and because we know the one and imaginatively participate in the other, we can compare and measure one against the other. The passage, moreover, analogically makes our own world the world of the marvellous. The second passage is from The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader." Coming to the end of the voyage, and the end of Narnia, Reepicheep speculates on the marvel of looking "for one moment beyond the edge of the world."

"But look here," said Eustace, "this is all rot. The world's round—I mean, round like a ball, not like a table."

"Our world is," said Edmund. "But is this?"

"Do you mean to say," asked Caspian, "that you three come from a round world (round like a ball) and you've never told me! It's really too bad for you. Because we have fairy-tales in which there are round worlds and I always loved them. I never believed there were any real ones. But I've always wished there were and I've always longed to live in one. Oh, I'd give anything—I wonder why you can get into our world and we never get into yours? If only I had the chance! It must be exciting to live on a thing like a ball."

                                      (201)

Again the perspective is reversed and we have a novel sense or feel of the imagined world. What appears as fantasy of one world is the reality of the other: here, our world is the fairy tale world of Narnia. In both passages, by inverting the reality of the commonplace, Lewis implies that the rich possibilities of faery are inherent in our own world.

But to read both of these passages in this way seems only a half reading, since, while both passages refer the reader back to the actual world of experience, they do so from the world of the marvellous. That is, while the world being commented on is our own, the adventures take place in Narnia, the world of fantasy. Is the enrichment of our daily experience the only purpose of fantasy, then? Lewis himself provides the answer in his essay, "The Novels of Charles Williams." Here, Lewis argues that the novels of Williams are generically impure because "they mix the Probable and the Marvellous" (On Stories 22). They assume "a violation of frontier" in which the workaday world is invaded by the marvellous. Lewis then argues the experimental nature of such a speculation, or supposal:

Every supposal is an ideal experiment: an experiment done with ideas because you can't do it any other way. And the function of an experiment is to teach us more about the things we experiment on. When we suppose the world of daily life to be invaded by something other, we are subjecting either our conception of daily life, or our conception of that other, or both, to a new test. We put them together to see how they will react. If it succeeds, we shall come to think, and feel, and imagine more accurately, more richly, more attentively, either about the world which is invaded or about that which invades it, or about both.

                              (On Stories 23)

A book like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde uses the violation to experiment on the world of daily life, but Williams "is interested in both sides of the frontier" (24). Like Williams, Lewis wants to say something about both worlds.

Though the Chronicles of Narnia suppose the commonplace world and the fantasy world, they reverse the pattern of Williams's novels: rather than the marvellous invading the daily reality of earth, the marvellous, in the form of earthly children, invades the daily reality of Narnia. That the children are the marvellous to the Narnians admits of little doubt. Among the books on Mr. Tumnus's bookshelf are Men, Monks, and Gamekeepers: A Study in Popular Legend and Is Man a Myth? (Lion 12). That Prince Caspian should note that "we have fairy tales in which there are round worlds" (Voyage 201) implies, of course, that beings from fairy tale worlds are creatures of fantasy. Yet for the reader of the Chronicles, it is Narnia, not the earth, that is marvellous. In fact, in response to Caspian's wonder and excitement at the children's world, Edmond says, "there's nothing particularly exciting about a round world when you're there" (Voyage 201). On Digory's return from Narnia with the magic apple he hopes will cure his mother, he too notices the commonplace character of daily reality: "for the rest of that day, whenever he looked at the things about him, and saw how ordinary and unmagical they were, he hardly dared to hope" for his mother's recovery, "but when he remembered the face of Aslan he did hope" (Magician's Nephew 181). The last part of this quotation speaks to half of Lewis's ideal experiment, the half that concerns itself with the enrichment of this world.

By this enhancement of Digory's commonplace world, Lewis reveals one of the functions of his fairy tale. Habit and familiarity have dulled our ordinary experience of everyday life, and in a real, imaginative way, the reading of fantasy makes our world more fully magical. As Lewis says in his essay, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children" :

… fairy land arouses a longing [in the child] for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his lifelong enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.

                              (On Stories 38)

In Digory's experience, the return from Narnia to the "ordinary and unmagical world" is emptied of all hope until he remembers Aslan's face; then, his despondency is mitigated by the marvellous recollected in the ordinary. In the Chronicles of Narnia, then, Lewis shapes his ideal experiment in such a way as to add a luster and richness to the world of ordinary experience.

Through this added luster and richness, Lewis implies that something wonderful inheres in the ordinary experience of everyday reality. This way of looking at Lewis's purpose in the Chronicles seems to contrast with another viewpoint, perhaps more commonplace, that recurs in Lewis criticism: that is, the Chronicles promulgate certain moral and ethical duties. From one angle, this viewpoint is true, apparent, and intended. In fact, given the genre of the fairy tale, it would be puzzling if the didactic impulse were missing. Lewis deals explicitly with such ethical issues as keeping promises, loyalty, truthfulness, responsibility, and the many levels of faith. The world of the Chronicles is a moral world, one in which the structures of natural, moral law obtain. This, too, would be puzzling if it were missing, and being there, Narnian law directly refers to the moral law of everyday reality. But this didactic purpose of the Chronicles is only partially stated if given as ethical rules and expectations. Again, Lewis's commentary on the novels of Charles Williams suggests the way in which these principles are to be inculcated:

The truth is, it is very bad to reach the stage of thinking deeply and frequently about duty unless you are prepared to go a stage further. The Law, as St. Paul first clearly explained, only takes you to the school gates. Morality exists to be transcended. We act from duty in the hope that someday we shall do the same acts freely and delightfully. It is one of the liberating qualities in Williams's books that we are hardly ever on the merely moral level.

                              (On Stories 27)

Conceived of in this way, then, the Chronicles are didactic in so far as they promulgate certain ethical and moral duties, but this observation "only takes you to the school gates." Such obligatory behavior must be transcended by behavior in which doing the right thing and doing the desired thing coincide. Or to put it in another way, the reader does not despise real duty because he has read of enchanted duty; the reading makes all real duties a little enchanted.

Of course this enchantment may be merely an illusion, "the light that never was on sea or land." If fantasy merely makes life easier because it allows us to fictionalize, that is, falsify, reality, then it is truly nothing other than the opium of the reader. Here, the second aspect of Lewis's ideal experiment must be considered, the aspect that emerges from his religious thought. For Lewis, the enchantment fairy tales cast over reality is true enchantment and originates in the source of all reality. Like Williams, Lewis "is interested in both sides of the frontier," and what validates the terrestrial side of the frontier "is what he tells us about a different world" (On Stories 25). This argument can be specified by an examination of natural law in the Chronicles.

As Peter Schakel has so well argued in Reading with the Heart, the Deep Magic in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the natural law, and that law has its origins in the realm of Aslan's father, the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea (22-25). The words of the Deep Magic, or natural law, are carved on the Stone Table and "on the trunk of the World Ash Tree," but these Narnian words are authentic because, finally, they are "engraved on the sceptre of the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea" (Lion 138). Two things here are particularly noteworthy. The first is the materiality of the image, both in Narnia and in the land beyond the sea. The second is the way that the Narnian words are referred to, and thus validated by, the words in the land beyond the sea.

While it is not surprising that the Deep Magic should be logos, the cosmic source of law and order, it is somewhat puzzling that the words should be inscribed in material objects, and especially so in the Emperor's world. The obvious explanation, of course, is to argue that the inscriptions are symbolic and are "a manner of speaking" about things that cannot be spo-ken of in any other way. On one level, this is true enough, since language itself is symbolic, and the Chronicles themselves, being but a structure of language, are also symbolic. Yet the imagery evokes a common pattern in Lewis and recalls other passages of a similar kind. In Mere Christianity, for example, Lewis speaks of the atonement of Christ and how, in order to redeem man, God in the person of Christ had "to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die" (60). Christ's death allows man to return to God through death, or as Lewis puts it: "Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God's dying unless God dies: and He cannot die except by being a man" (60). Man's thinking and dying are thus referred to God's thinking and dying. There would be no thought, no significance to death, unless they were referred to, and validated by, those things which are God. Man must participate in a real way, then, in God.

This argument for the authentic participation in two worlds manifests itself in the Chronicles and suggests how Lewis's fairy tale casts light, not only on the temporal side of the frontier, but also on the eternal. The origin of the magic wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is given in The Magician's Nephew. There, the seeds of the Narnian apple, brought back to earth by Digory Kirk, grow into a tree. The tree is later cut up into planks and made into the wardrobe. (In its history, the wardrobe parallels the Legend of Seth where the seeds of the forbidden fruit grow into the tree of Christ's cross.) This material link between our world and Narnia, not only expresses a connection between the real and the imagined world, but it also expresses the formula for the nature of that connection. That is, the connection is not allegorical or symbolic, but consubstantial: it is part of the reality it reveals. To put this in another way, if the world of spirit is real, Narnia being a manifestation of it, then we must have some way of participating in it. Should the mode of participation be allegorical or symbolic, then our participation is merely fictional: it may have truth in it, but in the final analysis, the mode is only make-believe. If, however, the mode of participation is with things that are real in both worlds, the participation is real. By using make-believe, Lewis thus indicates the consubstantial connection between the world of nature and the world of spirit.

This notion of consubstantiality is related to a basic Christian doctrine. All of the Creeds contain the assertion, "I believe in the resurrection of the body" (or the flesh). Christ's resurrection, according to the New Testament, was a bodily rise. For Roman Catholics, the Assumption of the Virgin also involved the resurrection of the flesh. Lewis was fully aware of this belief in bodily resurrection and promulgated it. In That Hideous Strength, Ransom, like Elijah, is translated bodily into Perelandra without dying. And in The Silver Chair, when Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole see the resurrected King Caspian, Aslan and Caspian must reassure them:

"Yes," said the lion in a very quiet voice, almost (Jill thought) as if he were laughing. "He has died. Most people have, you know. Even I have. There are very few who haven't."

"Oh," said Caspian. "I see what's bothering you. You think I'm a ghost, or some nonsense. But don't you see? I would be if I appeared in Narnia now: because I don't belong there any more. But one can't be a ghost in one's own country …"

                                      (213)

The nature of the resurrection is material, and any afterlife must accommodate itself to man's materiality, no matter what the quantitative or qualitative change in that material. Because of this materiality on both sides of the frontier, man's participation in the spiritual realm is authentic in a literal, not a metaphoric, sense because he is, in fact, part of that reality. God's reality is thus accommodated to man's materiality, or more precisely, according to one of the Creeds, the Incarnation worked, "not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God" (Weight of Glory 27).

Unlike many modern Christians, Lewis did not shy away from the doctrine of the body's resurrection and its implications. In one of his best-known sermons, "Transposition," he addresses its implications head-on. Discussing the pentecostal glossolalia, Lewis sets the question in its most candid form:

Put in its most general terms, our problem is that of the obvious continuity between things which are admittedly natural and things which, it is claimed, are spiritual; the reappearance in what professes to be our supernatural life of all the same old elements which make up our natural life and (it would seem) of no others.

                        (Weight of Glory 18)

To address the problem, Lewis gives a number of analogies, one of the more useful being that of a drawing in which three dimensions must be represented on a flat surface. The figures in a drawing do not, and cannot, have a one-for-one correspondence to the objects they represent: "If the richer system is to be represented in the poorer at all, this can only be by giving each element in the poorer system more than one meaning" (21). Perspective, the way three dimensions are represented on a flat surface, gives multiple meanings to shade and shape. A creature that can only perceive two dimensions, Abbott's Flatlander for example, when offered a sphere would only see a circle; a road in perspective would only be a triangle. The Flatlander would be right in saying: "Is it not obvious that your vaunted other world, so far from being the archetype, is a dream which borrows all its elements from this one" (23). Yet we who know the reality represented, a three dimensional world, "see" depth in the drawing. "It is clear that … what is happening in the lower medium can be understood only if we know the higher medium" (22).

Lewis does not see transposition as merely symbolical, since symbolism is often inadequate to express the relationship between the reality and its representation. Writing, for example, is symbolic of language, and since a visual sign represents a sound, the mode of transposition is discontinuous: they are not like each other nor do they cause each other. Pictures work differently:

Pictures are part of the visual world themselves and represent it only by being part of it. Their visibility has the same source as its. The suns and the lamps in pictures seem to shine only because real suns or lamps shine on them: that is, they seem to shine a great deal because they really shine a little in reflecting their archetypes…. It is a sign, but also something more than a sign: and only a sign because it is also more than a sign, because in it the thing signified is really in a certain mode present. If I had to name the relation I should call it not symbolical but sacramental.

                        (Weight of Glory 23-24)

Now a sacrament is a material sign that participates in the reality it manifests. That is, in some way, the sacrament is consubstantial with the reality it connects to; it participates in it because it is a part of it. Speaking of the sacrament of communion, for example, Lewis argues that it did not develop or evolve from eating:

… the Spiritual Reality, which existed before there were any creatures who ate, gives this natural act a new meaning, and more than a new meaning; makes it in a certain context to be a different thing. In a word, I think that real landscapes enter into pictures, not that pictures will one day sprout into real trees and grass.

                        (Weight of Glory 27)

The richer reality assumes the simpler, and in doing so, gives it a dimension that it does not have when understood from the simpler level. Lewis then applies his speculations on transposition to the doctrine of the resurrection of the body:

May we not, by a reasonable analogy, suppose … there is no experience of the spirit so transcendental and supernatural, no vision of Deity Himself so close and so far beyond all images and emotions, that to it also there cannot be an appropriate correspondence on the sensory level. Not by a new sense but by the incredible flooding of those very sensations we now have with a meaning, a transvaluation, of which we have here no faintest guess?

                                        (29)

So once again, Lewis returns to materiality, to the consubstantiality of earth and paradise. Should we be startled at this, Lewis, I believe, would respond: How else can God communicate Himself to man who is, after all, an incarnate spirit?

The end of The Last Battle reaffirms Lewis's speculation that the world of nature is in direct contact with the world of supernature—that in fact, the world of spirit is inherent in the material world. And the "further up and further in" man goes, the clearer the hypostasis becomes and the more immediate and real the world of the spirit becomes. Digory Kirk summarizes this position:

"The Eagle is right," said the Lord Digory. "Listen, Peter. When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia, which has always been here and always will be here: just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan's real world. You need not mourn over Narnia, Lucy. All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia through the Door. And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream."

                                      (169)

As drawings represent three dimensions, here the shadow and the dream, old Narnia, are imperfect representations of things richer and more real. Again, Lewis uses the regressive technique to flesh out and suggest the reality beyond the evidence considered from a lower level. When Digory adds, "It's all in Plato, all in Plato," he is merely giving us one more formula by which to imagine this relationship. Old Narnia was the ectype of the true Narnia, the archetype. But we must not Platonize, that is, etherealize, the relationship of the two, since both sides of the frontier remain unabashedly substantive.

Let me end this discussion by adding one more complication which is really a return to what I have already said. In the controversy whether the Chronicles are allegoric or symbolic, several writers bypass the argument altogether by claiming they are neither: for them, the Chronicles are myth. Peter Schakel, one of the best commentators, claims: "At their very best … the Chronicles are high myth, communicating so directly to the imagination and emotions through powerful images and symbols that they cannot be translated fully into intellectual terms" (Reading with the Heart 5). This strikes me as essentially correct, but from the perspective of this paper, myth is a fantasy that allows us to carry out an ideal experiment, in which the natural and supernatural sides of the frontier are, not only elucidated, but imaginatively experienced. As Lewis argues in "Myth became Fact," the "human intellect is incurably abstract" and "yet the only realities we experience are concrete …" When we apprehend experience intellectually,

the concrete realities sink to the level of mere instances or examples: we are no longer dealing with them, but with that which they exemplify. This is our dilemma—either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste—or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it.

                        (God in the Dock 65)

For Lewis, myth allows man to overcome this dichotomy and to experience "a universal principle," which, unlike truth, is not abstract and which, unlike direct experience, is not bound to the unique particular. As a result, what we receive from myth "is not truth but reality" since "truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is" (66). The power of the myth for Lewis is particularly profound because he understands "the heart of Christianity" as "a myth which is also a fact," for "without ceasing to be a myth … it happens …" (66).

If the Chronicles of Narnia are myth, or at least mythic, we need not claim they are fact, as Lewis does for the Incarnation, in order to assert they allow the flow of reality as Lewis understands it. The Chronicles, as Lewis tells us, are fairy tales, and fairy tales are a mode of the mythic. They are vital and nourishing manifestations of the spirit, and in the Chronicles, finally, of the absolute spirit. By showing us how to participate in the fairy tale world of Narnia, his ideal experiment, Lewis gives us a sense of what it means to participate in the world of spirit by referring our world to it. Since man is incarnate spirit, an inseparable unity of body and soul, the mode of participation must permit a kind of hypostatic activity on the human level. In this ideal experiment, the Chronicles enrich the natural world, not by fictionalizing reality, but by becoming a medium through which the transcendental world, or absolute reality, flows into nature. Transposed from such a reality, a dimension invisible from the lower level, the world of daily experience can hardly be anything but a little enchanted. The fairy tale, then, becomes the vehicle by which we imagine the indivisible unity of the natural and the transcendental worlds. By the manifestation of this unity through the fairy tale, Lewis intimates that the living substance that flows through the tale is more nourishing than any truth we might derive from it.

Works Cited

Abbott, Edwin A. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. 6th ed. Intro. Banesh Hoffmann. New York: Dover, 1952.

Lewis, C. S. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Ed. Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1970.

―――――――. The Last Battle. Illus. Pauline Baynes. New York: Collier, 1956.

―――――――. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Illus. Pauline Baynes. New York: Collier, 1950.

―――――――. The Magician's Nephew. Illus. Pauline Baynes. New York: Collier, 1955.

―――――――. Mere Christianity. New York: Macmillan, 1943.

―――――――. On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. Ed. Walter Hooper. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966.

―――――――. Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia. Illus. Pauline Baynes. New York: Collier, 1951.

―――――――. The Silver Chair. Illus Pauline Baynes. New York: Collier, 1953.

―――――――. The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader." Illus. Pauline Baynes. New York: Collier, 1952.

―――――――. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1949.

Schakel, Peter J. Reading with the Heart: The Way into Narnia. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1979.

Nancy-Lou Patterson (essay date autumn 1991)

SOURCE: Patterson, Nancy-Lou. "Always Winter and Never Christmas: Symbols of Time in Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia." Mythlore 18, no. 1 (autumn 1991): 10-14.

[In the following essay, Patterson examines the appearances of Father Christmas and Father Time in The Chronicles of Narnia and analyzes Lewis's use and perception of linear time and eternity.]

Time, both cyclical and linear, and eternity, both durational and simultaneous, are symbolized in the Narnian Chronicles by figures of Good—Father Christmas and Father Time—and evil—Jadis the White Witch. The origins, parallels, and developments of these symbols in Western culture, and their theological implications in the Narnian Chronicles, are the subject of this paper. Its thesis is that despite Clyde S. Kilby's opinion that the "appearance of Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe " is "incongruous,"¹ this figure holds the key to Lewis' understanding of the theological significance of Time.

A number of writers have discussed the element of Time in the Narnian Chronicles. ² In these seven books, Lewis describes parallel times which are so disparate in duration that what occupies a lifetime on Earth is the entire history of Creation of Narnia. The action of The Magician's Nephew, which although not first written or published, is chronologically first in terms of the human timeline of the Chronicles, describes the origins of Narnia, while the final book, The Last Battle, not only describes the end of Narnia, but sets the entire duration of Narnian time into the context of the lives of Digory Kirke, Polly Plummer, and the other child visitors to Narnia. The history of a world from beginning to end is a figure for a human lifetime, and the myths of origin and doom, found in so many religions, can be seen as metaphors for the human experience of life, which comes from mystery and goes to mystery.

The central salvational event is, in the Christian idea of time, singular, and it operates both forward and backwards: Jesus is born, dies, descends to hell/death, rises, and ascends to heaven, and in so doing, determines the ultimate outcome of the lives of all people of both past and future. This infinitely efficacious sequence, enacted in the single human/divine lifetime of Jesus, presents the grand salvific programme as a dialectic process, thus: Thesis: Earth is made; Antithesis: Earth is marred; Synthesis; Earth is remade and/or renewed.³ In each of the Narnian Chronicles the same pattern appears, and each book ends with the restoration or renewal of good elements from the past. Lewis set forth this pattern first and most powerfully in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, with the story of the death and resurrection of Aslan, and in that book Lewis uses a set of very potent images of time, exactly described in the phrase, "Always Winter and Never Christmas," which I have chosen as the title of my paper. Father Christmas, whose coming heralds the arrival of the saviour Aslan, is Lewis' first symbol of Time in the Narnian Chronicles.

A peculiarity of the books is that they can be read in two orders: either as they appeared in order of publication, with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe first, or as they are ordered in accordance with the internal sequence of events, with The Magician's Nephew first. As Lewis wrote the novels, Paul Ford perceptively says, he sets forth "the redemption story" first. After telling a series of these stories, "he was able to tell the story not only of Narnia's beginnings but also of its consummation."⁴ A key image of this consummation, and Lewis' second symbol of Time is found in The Silver Chair, in the figure of Father Time, who makes a reappearance in The Last Battle. My essay will discuss these twin symbols of Time as representing in Father Christmas both the individual salvational event and the cyclical element of Time, and in Father Time both the general creation-to-consumation sequence, and the linear element of Time.

In the book Lewis based on his World War II BBC broadcasts, Mere Christianity, he discusses Time as a phenomenon. "Almost certainly God is not in Time,"⁵ he said, implying that Time is an aspect of Creation rather than of Creator. He compares Time with a written narrative possessing its own internal time, set against the time of an author: "I could think about Mary … for as long as I pleased, and the hours spent … would not appear in Mary's time … at all." (Ibid.) Thus, Lewis concludes, "If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn." (Ibid. p. 132.) Note that Time is specifically defined here as a linear process or sequence.

Very late in his apologetic career, in Letters to Malcolm, Lewis returned to the theme of Time, introducing some emendations. "I certainly believe that to be God is to enjoy an infinite present, where nothing has yet passed away and nothing is still to come."⁶ This corresponds to his earlier image of God as "the whole page." But Lewis continues, "The dead might experience a time which is not quite so linear as ours—it might, so to speak, have thickness as well as length." (Ibid.) Indeed, he adds, "I feel … that to make the life of the blessed dead strictly timeless is inconsistent with the resurrection of the body." (Ibid.)

The relationship of Time and Eternity for Christians is given a malign expression in Alan W. Watts' study, Myth and Ritual in Christianity. At first, Watts seems to agree with Lewis: "the life of the soul-in-body in Heaven will be at once eternal … and everlasting."⁷ He explains, "the soul will see time as God sees it—all at once, past, present, and future," (Ibid., p. 226.) but "It will contemplate the 'moment' of eternity for an everlasting time." For Watts, "Taken literally, the state of the blessed in Heaven is actually no less frightful than that of the damned in Hell." (Ibid., p. 225.) This, he tells us, is because the blessed will suffer "the terrible monotony of everlasting pleasure." (Ibid., p. 227.) A frozen Hell is no more terrible than an infinitely extended Heaven. This is precisely the dilemma that Lewis' fantasy series addresses.

When Lucy enters Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, her first physical sensation is of "something soft and powdery and extremely cold,"⁸ in a word, snow. "A moment later she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air." On the next page, the idea of Christmas is introduced, as Lucy sees her first Narnian: "What with the parcels and the snow it looked just as if he had been doing his Christmas shopping. He was a faun." (Ibid., p. 6.) Thus, Winter (snow) and Christmas (parcels) are central elements encountered by Lucy as by the reader in Lewis' first book about Narnia. Note that the concepts—Winter, Christmas—are presented in physical form—snow and parcels—from the outset.

When Lucy joins the Faun in his cozy cave to share a wonderful tea, the Faun confesses that he is a kidnapper, working under the orders of "The Witch Witch." (Ibid., p. 14.) In answer to Lucy's question, he explains, "Why, it is she who has got all Narnia under her thumb. It's she that makes it always winter. Always winter and never Christmas; think of that?" Lucy immediately replies, "How awful!" (Ibid.) in response to this terrible state of affairs.

With the five words "always winter and never Christmas," Lewis presents a fundamental structure in which every word is significant. "Always" here means continuously, in the sense of duration, or an on-running, linear state of being, which takes place in Time. "Winter" means a time of severe cold, heavy snow, frozen streams, and long nights. "And" connects or relates two sets of paired terms. "Never" means that within this endlessly continuing winter, there is no moment when the possibility of spring is anticipated, when the nights begin to shorten and the light begins to return. "Christmas" means that the central focus of human history, the moment when the Creator enters His own Creation, to which the cycling years return again and again, is kept outside of Narnian time, and does not bring its yearly gifts of renewal, its (to use that untranslatable Greek term employed in theological discourse) anamnesis. Anamnesis means not only to recall in the sene of remembering, but to recall in the sense of calling back, bringing something from the past into the present.

Narnia is a frozen world. Its "always" implies a "never." In this symbolism, winter is used as a negative image, embodied not only in the landscape and season but in an evil personage, the White Witch. This personage, who appears in the book's title, appears first not to Lucy, but to Edmund, the potential traitor; her coming is announced by the distant sound of sleighbells, and "at last there swept into sight a sledge drawn by two reindeer." (Ibid., p. 23) Riding "in the middle of the sledge" (Ibid., p. 24.) is a great lady," who is "covered in white fur up to her throat." Moreover, "Her face was white—not merely pale, but white like snow," a face not only "beautiful … but proud and cold and stern." Like the Snow Queen in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, upon which she is modelled,⁹ the White Witch is as white and as cold as snow. And like the Snow Queen with her Kay, the White Witch carries a boy, Edmund, away on her sledge to a castle. It is significant that in the Snow Queen's castle, "in the middle of that bare, unending snow hall there was a frozen sea."¹⁰ One thinks immediately of the frozen sea in which Satan is plunged forever in Dante's Inferno. Here, Gerda at last finds Kay, "quite blue with cold," desperately trying to solve the "Ice Puzzle of Reason" by assembling fragments of ice: "He arranged whole figures that made up a written word, but he could never figure out how to arrange the very word he wanted: the word 'eternity.'" (Ibid.)

The frozen sea in "the Snow Queen" is not, then, a symbol of eternity, but of some terrible opposite. The Snow Queen has told Kay that "if you can arrange that pattern for me, then you shall be your own master, and I shall make you a present of the whole world and a pair of new skates." (Ibid.) Whatever the whole world may mean, skates change winter's frozen rivers into speedy roads, and frozen lakes or seas into vast vistas of freedom. Narnia's winter lacks the Christmas gift of freedom, or to put it another way, the perspective of eternity.

Snow is a true symbol, in the Jungian sense that it is ambivalent, capable of expressing both evil and good. The Snow Queen, unlike the White Witch, is not evil. Like the North Wind in George MacDonalds' At the Back of the North Wind, she is about her Father's business even when she beings snow. "Now I'm rushing off to the warm countries!" she tells Kay, as she flies off to visit Etna and Vesuvius; "I'm going to whiten them a bit; that's customary; it does good above lemons and wine grapes!" (Ibid.) In the same way, snow reappears in The Silver Chair when Jill and Eustace return with the rescued Prince Rilian from Narnia's Underworld. Jill's experience echoes Lucy's: "The air seemed to be deadly cold, and the light was pale and blue," and there were "a lot of white objects flying about in the air."¹¹ It comes to her that "the pale, blue light was really moonlight, and the white stuff on the ground was really snow." And the white flying objects are snowballs, thrown in the complex movements of "the Great Snow Dance … done every year in Narnia on the first moonlight night when there is snow on the ground." (Ibid.) This figure of the dance is Lewis' favorite, derived from Medieval and Renaissance thought, and it symbolizes the dance of all creation in its orderly round.

The White Witch is evil not because she brings cold and snow, but because she will not relinquish her power and allow the stately rotation of the year to proceed. Like Satan, she would rather reign in a frozen Hell, than serve in a fecund Heaven. She does not want to take her place in the stately dance of creation. She is like the Green Witch of the Underworld in The Silver Chair, who urges her captives to choose illusion—over reality—the unseen sun.¹²

Lewis returned to the Witch in The Magician's Nephew, describing how, in a previous existence in the world-city of Charn, she has been Queen Jadis, and has chosen to pronounce the Deplorable Word (which undoubtedly is not "Eternity") rather than allow her own sister to occupy the throne. Lewis describes her "white, beautiful hand"¹³ and her "large cold finger and thumb," (Ibid., p. 61.) reiterations of snow and freezing, both used to grasp and control Polly and Digory, the children who, through a quarrel, have released her from her long self-chosen oblivion. At the climax of the book, Aslan creates Narnia, and the Witch Jadis takes up residence in this perfect creation through Digory's fault. Aslan sends Digory and Polly to get an apple in order to plant a tree in a garden "that she will not dare to approach," (Ibid., p. 127.) but when the children arrive, Jadis is there ahead of them.

Digory enters the gate of this holy place, and, with Aslan's permission, picks an apple. And "There, only a few yards away from him stood the Witch," (Ibid., p. 142.) and "her face was deadly white, white as salt," (Ibid., p. 144) white, that is, as Lot's wife, who became a pillar of salt through disobedience. She tempts Digory to join her in her disobedience, to steal an apple for his own use (to heal his dying mother) rather than take it to Aslan as he has been told to do. With a terrible effort, and putting right what he had previously put wrong, Digory resists. The apple is eventually planted, the protective tree of Narnia grows and bears yet more fruit. Digory is bidden by Aslan to pluck an new apple, and with this, his mother is indeed healed. What is more, its apple core, planted in England, grows to a great tree from which wood is taken to make the Wardrobe which forms the door "That was the beginning of going between Narnia and our world." (Ibid., p. 160.) Obedience brings joy and freedom, disobedience brings sorrow and enslavement, to the worst of all masters and mistresses, one's self.

Turning people to stone is the White Witch's forté, and stone, like ice, is a state of being frozen. The freeing of the Witch-enchanted persons (animals, giants, and longævi) by Aslan is a major event in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The intention of the Witch to thwart the onrunning movement of the year is most poignantly expressed when she turns to stone a charming little party of Narnians who have begun to celebrate Christmas with an outdoor feast.

The White Witch, Jadis, and the Green Witch are associated with a cold duration, a sterile fixity, and a lightless illusion. These figures of Hell, death, and evil, in the context of Time, are countered in the Narnian Chronicles by two images of Time as good. These are Father Christmas and Father Time. Before discussing these figures, a little analysis of their historic origins and development will be given, based upon the study of "the gods and patriarches who are or who have been personifications of time in the Western World,"¹⁴ by Samuel L. Macey. He calls Father Time and Father Christmas the "two 'sons'" of Saturn-Cronus.(Ibid.) Father Time "took over the sickle of Saturn-Cronus" and Father Christmas "took over his Saturnian aspects" as "a jovial gift-giving patriarch." (Ibid., p. 172.)

The character of Saturn-Cronus is "influenced … by the gods of the Indo-Iranian pantheons and in particular by their several twin gods, who represent benevolent infinite time and malevolent finite time." (Ibid., p. xi.) Saturn-Cronus "represents concurrently the Saturnalian values of past golden days but also the sickle of Time, the future destroyer." (Ibid., p. xii.) These are the twin roles played by Father Time in the Narnian Chronicles, where the giant Time is a king who sleeps after a long rule, only to awake at the end of the world, and, borrowing a symbol from Gabriel's tool for announcing the Last Judgement, blows his horn to announce the end of Narnia.

Like Father Time, Father Christmas is concerned with the annual cycle of time. But his iconography tallies the ongoing years "for a whole family or people": (Ibid., p. 135.)

… it is Father Christmas … who helps us to celebrate the regeneration of life and the continuation not only of the sun itself but more immediately of our family and our people.

                              (Ibid., p. 139.)

Macey speaks of "the English Father Christmas of the seventeenth century who is simultaneously lauded by Anglicans and damned by Puritans," (Ibid., p. 140) presumably the Father Christmas intended by the Anglican Lewis. This gift-bearing figure originally appeared as a precursor, harbinger, or herald of Christmas, still preserved in the Continental Saint Nicholas, who is "involved in the dualism of being both judge and benefactor" (Ibid.) and whose feat occurs early in December.

The English Father Christmas is essentially a "Rewarder" (Ibid.) and is "not concentrated on the feat of Saint Nicholas but rather derived from his role in the Mummers' Play, in which, in several versions, "'In comes I, Father Christmas', is the opening sentence." (Ibid., p. 145.) The Mummers' Play is a depiction of "the annual death of the year … and its annual resurrection in spring," (Ibid.) and this resurrection them, central to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which Aslan's arrival breaks the Witch's artificial winter with a sudden spring, makes the presence in that book of Father Christmas absolutely appropriate.

In announcing Aslan, Father Christmas is a kind of Elijah who heralds the return of the Creator to His own world. I said above that "parcels" are used as a figure for Christmas when Lewis first represents the Narnian situation. Father Christmas, the gift-bearer, arrives like the Witch on a sledge drawn by belled reindeer. True to his complex mythological sources, he makes the children and beavers feel "very glad, but also solemn." (Lewis, 1950, p. 86.) His first gift is an announcement about the Witch: "She has kept me out for a long time, but I have got in a last. Aslan is on the move. The Witch's magic is weakening." (Ibid., p. 87.) This passage makes Father Christmas's role as an annunciator perfectly explicit. His gifts are all practical—"tools not toys"—a sewing machine for Mrs. Beaver, a finished dam for Mr. Beaver, a shield and sword for Peter, a bow, quiver of arrows, and ivory horn for Susan, and for Lucy a bottle of healing cordial and "a small dagger," (Ibid., p. 88.) and, as a climax, "a large tray containing five cups and saucers, a bowl of lump sugar, a jug of cream, and a great big teapot all sizzling and piping hot." (Ibid.)

This jovial, practical figure of Father Christmas, whose arrival makes the recovery of cyclical time in Narnia, is joined in The Silver Chair by Father Time, whose role embodies the more absolute cycle of creation from beginning to end. In a cave "about the shape and size of a cathedral … filling almost the whole length of it, lay an enormous man fast asleep." Although he is large, "his face was not like a giant's, but noble and beautiful. His breast rose and fell gently under the snowy beard which covered him to the waist. A pure, silver light … rested upon him." When Puddleglum enquires about his name, the Warden (a gnome) replies, "This is old Father Time, who was once a King in Overland…. They say he will wake at the end of the world." (Lewis, 1953, p. 124.) The snowy beard images the sleep of vegetation and other life under the winter snow.

Katherine Briggs points out that "The throne of a sleeping champion in a cave under a hill is common through Europe"¹⁵ and she mentions Charlemagne, Barbarossa, Halgar the Dane, and King Arthur, among others, as examples of the type/motif "King Asleep in Mountain." Readers of Lewis will of course think of the sleeping Merlin, roused in That Hideous Strength to help put right an England gone wrong. The point is the return to the present of a good sleeper from the past, reawakened and renewed. True to his special role, it is Father Time who comes not to restore but to complete the world by heralding its "consummation."

In the chapter of The Last Battle appropriately entitled "Night Falls on Narnia,"¹⁶ this return is described. "Out on their left they saw … the shape of a man, the hugest of all giants." His position in the Narnian landscape causes Jill and Eustace to remember

how once long ago, in the deep caves beneath those moors, they had seen a large giant asleep and been told that his name was Father Time, and that he would wake on the day the world ended.

                              (Ibid., pp. 141-42.)

Aslan expresses their thoughts: "while he lay dreaming his name was Time. Now that he is awake he will have a new one." Perhaps, in this new role, his name is to be Eternity! Father Time blows his horn, and the end of Narnia begins, in a long panoply of last things. Finally, Aslan commands him to "make an end" and the giant, casting his horn into the sea, reaches out to the Sun and crushed it in his immortal hand.

The end of Narnia does not, however, signal an end to everything. The dead Narnia is replaced by a new, everlasting Narnia where "morning freshness was in the air." (Ibid., p. 159.) Aslan's country is perceived to include not only this "real" (Ibid., p. 160.) Narnia, but "the England within England," (Ibid., p. 172.) another idea repeated from That Hideous Strength, as well. The book concludes as the children and all their restored companions from their various visits to Narnia begin "Chapter One of the Great Story … which goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before," (Ibid., p. 179.) that story which all readers of the Narnian Chronicles would most like to read.

The combination of repeated cycles and the single cycle of beginning to end is found in myths because it is found, first, in the physical world. In his study of Time, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, Stephen Jay Gould surveys the Western understanding of Time: "Something deep in our tradition required, for intelligibility itself, both the arrow of historical uniqueness and the cycle of timeless immanence—and nature says yes to both."¹⁷ These two elements—cycle and arrow—he characterizes thus:

The metaphor of Time's cycle captures those aspects of nature that are either stable or else cycle in a simple repeating (or oscillating) series because they are direct products of nature's timeless laws,

                                (Ibid., p. 197.)

and "The essence of time's arrow lies in the irreversability of history, and the unrepeatable uniqueness of each step of a sequence of events." (Ibid., p. 144.)

The majestic and interlocking phenomena of the natural world, movements within the cosmos in general and the solar system in particular, create Time in both cycle and arrow. These phenomena, especially lunar and solar cycles, were observed and recorded by humankind as early as the Upper Paleolithic, and even in that early era served not only a notational but a symbolic role. In this paper we are concerned with Time as a figure for the divine order of Creation and as a metaphor for the human experience of life (which includes, in Christian thought, birth, death, and resurrection). The dialectic structure of birth, death, and resurrection is celebrated in the twin cycles of the Christian year—Advent, Christmas, Lent Easter, Ascension, Pentecost—and the Christian week, which begins with a celebration of the Resurrection on Sundays; and in the paired linearities of Christian life—birth/death/resurrection—and Christian Eschatology—Creation/Christ/Consummation.

It is in this context that the word anamnesis forms the interpretive key of my argument. E. L. Mascall in A Dictionary of Christian Theology says, "the Hebrew notion behind the Greek term signifies the bringing in the present of a chronologically past act with all its original efficacy."¹⁸ The anamnesis is "a literal 're-calling' in the sense of 'calling back.'" We see this in the recovery of cyclicality by Narnian time as Father Christmas arrives to herald the return to Narnia of its Creator, Aslan. The same motif in its more absolute or linear sense is expressed in the figure of Father Time, who at Aslan's command comes back to bring an end to Narnia, whereupon Aslan reveals that the real Narnia is now available.

In its specific Christian application, the Anamnesis is that segment of the Eucharist in which is recited the command of Jesus to "Do this in remembrance of me," with the word "remembrance" an inadequate rendering in English of the Greek (and Hebrew) meaning defined above. The Eucharist is for Christians—it was for Lewis—the foretaste of the Resurrection in the present. Its central feature, in sacramental theologies, is the making present again and again of what has been done once for all, by the One who says, "Behold, I make all things new." (Revelation 21:5)

If our present life is, as Lewis in his Platonic way called it, a Shadowlands, what is foreshadowed in the Eucharist, which is repeated in the cycles of the week and year? Exactly this: eternal renewal. Eternity is not, in this symbolic structure, an endless duration, but neither is it an infinite moment. Rather, it is an eternal renewal, an everlasting arrival at a place or time which is ever fresher, newer, more central, and more complete, not through novelty but through renewal of what is and always has been best. A profound understanding of Time (as both cycle and arrow) and Eternity (as neither infinite stasis nor utter timelessness but as eternal renewal) is vividly expressed in the Narnian Chronicles, as Lewis weaves together his symbols of time.

Notes

1. Clyde S. Kilby, The Christian World of C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1964), p. 145.

2. See Martha C. Sammons, A Guide through Narnia (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1979), "Time," pp. 63-64; Paul F. Ford, Companion to Narnia (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), "Time," pp. 414-415; and in most detail, Michael Murrin, "The Multiple Worlds of the Narnia Stories," Word and Story in C. S. Lewis, edited by Peter J. Shakel and Charles A. Huttar (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991), pp. 248-251, reprinted from VII: An Anglo-American Literary Review 3 (1982), pp. 93-112.

3. Nancy-Lou Patterson, "Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis: The Interplanetary Trilogy of C. S. Lewis," The New York C. S. Lewis Society Newsletter (June 1985), Vol. 16, No. 8, pp. 1-6.

4. Ford 1983: p. xxxiv.

5. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: The Macmillian Company, 1956 [1943]), p. 1312.

6. C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), p. 141.

7. Alan W. Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 225.

8. C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (New York: The Macmillian Company, 1950), p. 5.

9. I have discussed the relation of the White Witch to the Snow Queen, along with her relationship to Father Christmas, in my essay, "The Host of Heaven: Astrological and Other Images of Divinity in the Fantasies of C. S. Lewis," Part II, in Mythlore 26 (Winter 1981, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 17-18.

10. Hans Christian Andersen, "The Snow Queen," Andersen's Fairy Tales (New York: New American Library, 1966), p. 180.

11. C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (New York: Macmillian, 1953), p. 185.

12. For a detailed discussion of the symbolism of the Green Witch, see my essay "Halfe Like a Serpent: The Green Witch in The Silver Chair," Mythlore 40 (Autumn 1983), pp. 37-47.

13. C. S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew (New York: The Macmillian Company, 1955), p. 49.

14. Samuel L. Macey, Patriarches of Time: Dualism in Saturn-Cronus, Father Time, the Watchmaker God, and Father Christmas (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1987), p. xi.

15. Katherine Briggs, A Dictionary of Faeries (London: Allen Lane, 1976), p. 370.

16. C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle (New York: The Macmillian Company, 1956), p. 141.

17. Stephen Jay Gould, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987), P. 200.

18. E. L. Mascall, A Dictionary of Christian Theology, edited by Alan Richardson (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1969 [1972]), p. 7.

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Michael Nelson (essay date 25 February 2002)

SOURCE: Nelson, Michael. "The Gospel according to Lewis." American Prospect 13, no. 4 (25 February 2002): 29-32.

[In the following essay, Nelson highlights the religious elements of The Chronicles of Narnia, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, arguing that, although each series evinces certain Judeo-Christian themes, all three can still be enjoyed by secular audiences.]

Last June, before hobbits and Harry Potter began crowding out all other arts coverage, The New York Times ran a front-page story about The Chronicles of Narnia, the seven-volume series of children's fantasy books written by the English novelist C. S. Lewis in the 1950s. The article was called "Marketing 'Narnia' without a Christian Lion"—and apparently the head-line was as far as either Andrew Greeley or Charles Colson got before throwing down their newspapers in disgust. Greeley (who is a gadfly sociologist, priest, and romance novelist) and Colson (the famously born-again Watergate-era adviser to Richard Nixon) are widely published Christian commentators. Both took the Times headline to mean that, as Greeley huffed in a syndicated column, Lewis's publisher HarperCollins "intends to censor out of C. S. Lewis's masterpiece that which is most essential to it—its Christian imagery—because that imagery would be offensive to secularists." Readers who experience the bowdlerized versions of the stories, Colson complained in a radio commentary, "won't … really be experiencing Lewis at all." Moreover, "it won't do them any good," he asserted, as though literature were like vitamins or brussels sprouts. Urging his readers to boycott HarperCollins, Colson commended Zondervan Books for its plan "to continue publishing the Narnia books in their original form."

In truth, the dudgeon of Colson and Greeley was somewhat misdirected. HarperCollins is already republishing the Narnia series in its original format, both under its own imprint and under the Zondervan imprint, which is actually a HarperCollins subsidiary. And the Times story—which neither Colson nor Greeley took the time to read carefully—was not about publishing a new version of the Chronicles with the Christian elements excised but rather about the new strategy HarperCollins had launched to market Narnia.

Still, the publisher's new, three-part marketing scheme did raise hackles, particularly among Christian conservatives. The first element of the new strategy raised no objections: to publish several editions of the complete Chronicles, ranging from cheap to deluxe and from one volume to seven volumes, along with an audio edition read by famous actors. A second element—to create a line of Narnia toys—provoked alarums of tackiness, but not much more.

The final element of HarperCollins's campaign, however, aroused real concern: a new series of wholly secular Narnia novels and picture books that the publisher plans to commission for younger readers. Online Lewis discussion groups like MereLewis and alt.books.cs-lewis were flooded with angry and fearful comments about HarperCollins, mostly from Christian fans of Lewis. As Beliefnet.com columnist Frederica Mathewes-Green summarized their laments, "to many [conservative Christians], downplaying Lewis's faith seems like one more in a string of insults."

But whose agenda are C. S. Lewis's defenders pursuing? Not Lewis's. As Douglas Gresham, Lewis's adopted stepson and a non-denominational Christian preacher in Ireland, argues, "the surest way to prevent secularists and their children from reading [the Chronicles ] is to keep it in the 'Christian' or 'Religious' section of the bookstores." After all, the Narnia books have rarely been marketed as "Christian" literature; nor, surely, have they been read that way, especially by children. As Laura Winner recollected in Slate, when she and her non-Christian friends read the Chronicles in grammar school, "we just thought we were reading a riveting tale, one in which, as in so much children's literature, good triumphs over evil and a hero brings on a utopian reign of peace." That's the experience most young readers have, and it's the experience Lewis wanted them to have: "a pre-baptism of the child's imagination" that, years later, may draw them into faith.

This was the experience that Lewis himself had. Growing up in Belfast in the early 1900s, he felt that Christianity was boring; mythology, on the other hand, was interesting. Although Lewis was taken by his parents to the Anglican Church on Sunday mornings, worship there was as much a political act as a religious one, a way for Irish Protestants to let it be known that they were loyal subjects of the crown, not Roman papists. What Lewis found in church was arid, sterile, and cold—"the dry husks of religion," as he put it. In contrast, the Irish, Norse, and Greek myths he read in storybooks were filled with dash and color: gods, wars, exotic creatures, intrigue, and emotions. So taken was Lewis by mythology that as a child he created an imaginary country called Boxen and wrote stories about it. The stories "were an attempt to combine my two chief literary pleasures—'dressed animals' and 'knights in armour.' As a result, I wrote about chivalrous mice and rabbits who rode out in complete mail to kill not giants but cats."

Sent to England for his schooling, Lewis came under the influence of a tutor who was much enamored of The Golden Bough, a monumental new work about religion and mythology by Sir James Frazer. Frazer regarded religion as a human effort to make sense of the frightening and incomprehensible: thunder, pestilence, famine, death, and so on. In particular, Frazer found in human cultures a recurring story of a god whose death and resurrection saves his people. This god usually was associated with agriculture and fertility: Just as in the cycle of nature the plant is broken, the seed enters the ground, and life springs up, so was the god broken, buried, and restored.

The Greek myth of Persephone is a familiar example. Daughter of Zeus and Demeter, Persephone was kidnapped by Pluto and became his queen of the underworld. With help from the gods, Demeter managed to get her daughter back, but only for part of each year. The months when Persephone is in the underworld are cold and barren up here; the months when she's on earth bring warm weather and fertile fields.

Frazer was an atheist, and so, for many years, was Lewis. But Lewis never ceased to find the stories of dying and resurrected gods stirring. The thrill, he wrote, was akin to watching a diver "flashing for a moment in the air, and then down through the green, and warm, and sunlit water, into the pitch black, cold, freezing water, down into the mud and slime, then up again, his lungs almost bursting, back again to the green and warm and sunlit water, and then at last out into the sunshine, holding in his hand the dripping thing he went down to get."

Lewis's studies in English literature led to a faculty position at Oxford, where he quickly became close with the philologist and fantasy novelist J. R. R. Tolkien, who was a committed Christian. Whenever he encountered a story of a god dying to save his people in mythology, Lewis told Tolkien, he was "mysteriously moved, even though no one knows where [the mythological god] is supposed to have lived and died; he's not historical." Why, he wondered, was he not similarly moved by the Christian Gospel's avowedly historical accounts of Jesus' death and resurrection?

The answer, Tolkien told him, was to recognize that the Gospel story was mythic and should be appreciated as such—"but with this tremendous difference: that it really happened." Lewis later wrote: "By becoming fact [the dying-god story] does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle." But "it is God's myth where the others are men's myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we would call 'real things.'" The Christian dying-god story, Lewis came to believe, lay at the exact intersection of myth and history.

The Chronicles of Narnia was Lewis's attempt to bring children to that intersection in the hope that, with the passage of time, they would realize that Christianity stood there. The stale, stained-glass version of Jesus that churches typically presented was, Lewis believed, as much of a turnoff for other children as it had been for him. Instead of Bible stories, he'd give them adventure stories involving children and mythical creatures, including a powerful and tender lion named Aslan. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe featured a menagerie of familiar mythic characters, ranging from centaurs to Santa Claus. Indeed, it was this pastiche of mythologies that Tolkien most disliked about the Chronicles ; in his own Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien was fastidious about creating a world with no stray elements.

The Chronicles fulfilled Lewis's intention of telling the entire Christian story—from the Creation, to the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, to the end of time—without ever mentioning Christianity. For example, the climax of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe comes when Aslan voluntarily dies in order to spare one of the English children from the full consequences of his behavior, only to rise from death in triumph over the diabolical White Witch. In The Magician's Nephew, Aslan sings the world into creation and then watches as evil enters it. The Last Battle brings the end of the world and the Last Judgment. Summarizing the books makes them sound more formulaic than they are. The chief pleasure of reading the Chronicles lies not in the Christian elements but rather in the stories and characters that make these elements seem—in the course of things, and without bold allegorical labels—appealing and exciting.

Lewis's influence is strongly evident in our present cultural moment. J. K. Rowling, for instance, based her famous "platform nine and three-quarters"—the place at London's King's Cross station where young wizards enter the world of the Hogwarts School in her Harry Potter series—on the wardrobe through which English schoolchildren pass into the land of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (Rowling has also apparently based the scope of the Harry Potter series—a projected seven volumes—on Lewis's books as well.) And though Tolkien, for his part, said that he didn't especially like the Narnia books, he also took inspiration from Lewis, his close friend and colleague on the Oxford University English faculty during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Throughout the 12 years that Tolkien spent writing the Lord of the Rings trilogy, with no confidence that the books were any good or would ever find an audience, Lewis was his faithful reader, critic, and cheerleader. "The unpayable debt that I owe to him," Tolkien wrote, was "sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my 'stuff' could be more than a private hobby."

Given all this, what accounts for Lewis's relative eclipse—in the popular culture, anyway—by Tolkien and Rowling? Does Narnia speak less directly to our time, or to the children of our time, than Middle Earth or Hogwarts? Or is it simply the case that Lewis's world adapts less readily to our Hollywoodized, secularized sensibility?

More likely it's the latter—which makes it ironic that Rowling, like HarperCollins, has been pilloried recently by angry conservative Christians for writing playfully in the Harry Potter books about witchcraft and wizardry. Rowling doesn't understand the objections. Like the Chronicles, the Harry Potter books are infused with a Christian worldview: Both Lewis and Rowling celebrate courage, loyalty, friend-ship, compassion, forgiveness, persistence, and self-sacrifice with a compellingness that puts William Bennett's Book of Virtues to shame. Rowling is a member of the Church of Scotland and, whenever she's asked, says, "I believe in God, not magic." In fact, she initially was afraid that if people were aware of her Christian faith, she would give away too much of what's coming in the series. "If I talk too freely about that," she told a Canadian reporter, "I think the intelligent reader—whether ten [years old] or sixty—will be able to guess what is coming in the books." In truth, it's not much harder to find Gospel parallels in the Harry Potter stories than in the Chronicles. "Rejoice …," says a wizard on the occasion of Harry's birth. "Even Muggles like yourself should be celebrating this happy, happy day!" Shooting stars streak across the heavens to mark the baby Harry's coming. "I wouldn't be surprised if today was known as Harry Potter Day in the future," says one of the teachers at Hogwarts when she hears the news. Substitute "Gentiles" for Muggles, "star in the east" for "shooting stars," and "Christmas" for "Harry Potter Day" and you get the idea.

If any of this—good versus evil, appealing young heroes who prevail by developing Christian virtues—sounds like Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring and its successor books, well, it should. "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work," Tolkien wrote to a Jesuit friend; "unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision…. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism." Those who invent mythic worlds, Tolkien wrote in an essay called "On Fairy-Stories," serve as "subcreators" who "make … because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker."

Tolkien carefully avoided any hint of biblical allegory and injected no overtly religious elements into the Ring stories—they are devoid of temples, gods, and rituals. But what he did instead was even more deeply faithful. Tolkien created a world in which hope, the ultimate Christian virtue, is woven into the fundamental nature of reality—in which, as Frodo and Sam approach the end of all things, it makes sense for them to renounce the power that would enslave and instead submit to the power that frees. In doing so, Tolkien, like Lewis and Rowling, offers his young readers "a pre-baptism of the child's imagination."

Peter Hitchens (essay date 18 January 2003)

SOURCE: Hitchens, Peter. "A Labour for Loathing." Spectator 219, no. 9102 (18 January 2003): 18-19.

[In the following essay, Hitchens examines young adult author Philip Pullman's denouncement of The Chronicles of Narnia for its Christian overtones, emphasizing the differences between Narnia and Pullman's fantasy world in the His Dark Materials trilogy.]

Whatever the atheist equivalent of canonisation is, they are doing it to the children's author Philip Pullman. The full power of secular liberalism is being deployed to magnify his glorious name. Last year he won the Whitbread Prize, normally reserved for adult authors. Now Radio Four is handing over three of its precious Saturday afternoons for an adaptation of his trilogy, His Dark Materials. Nicholas Hytner is preparing Pullman's works for the stage of the National Theatre, and Hollywood is hoping to do for him what it did for Tolkien. In early March he will be beatified through an interview with Melvyn Bragg on the South Bank Show. Why is he suddenly so important?

Here is the reason: Philip Pullman is the man who may succeed in destroying a country that the liberal intelligentsia loathe even more than they despise Britain. That country is Narnia, discovered long ago by millions of English-speaking children, and still beloved by many of them. Narnia is a conservative sort of place—religious, undecimalised, unmetricated, patriotic and hierarchical. But Narnia cannot be corrected, modernised, devolved or forced to join the euro. As a country of the mind, it remains defiantly independent for as long as the books are sold and read and their stories remembered. The creator of Narnia, C. S. Lewis, though dead almost 40 years, is the most influential Christian in modern British cul-ture, not because of his faith but because his stories are so good. Parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts, seeking literate and well-crafted stories for their young, have been all but compelled to turn to this odd Ulsterman's works for the last half-century. They know that these gifts will actually be read, despite the archaic slang used by the 1940s children who are their heroes and heroines.

Most, regrettably, do not care or even notice that the seven Narnia books convey a Christian and conservative message, but among the enlightened classes many adults are unhappy about Lewis's confident and potent faith, unashamed and unfashionable, conveyed through parables and allegory and perhaps destined to stay with his readers all their lives. The cultural elite would like to wipe out this pocket of resistance. They have successfully expelled God from the schools, from the broadcast media and, for the most part, from the Church itself. They would much rather He was not sitting on the bookshelves of their offspring. Philip Pullman allows them to remove Him, and replace The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with Pullman's very different country of the mind—rebel angels, friendly daemons and witches who are not wicked but good (though Pullman also has a wardrobe).

Pullman's stories are crammed with the supernatural and the mystical, and take place mainly in alternative worlds, most captivatingly of all in an Oxford recognisably the same place while utterly different. But while Narnia is under the care of a benevolent, kindly creator, Pullman's chaotic universe has no ultimate good authority, controlling and redeeming all. God, or someone claiming to be God, dies meaninglessly in the third volume of his trilogy. There is life after death, but it is a dark, squalid misery from which oblivion is a welcome release. Pullman puts forward a complex theory of man's true destiny, and his stories are a powerful epic that everyone should read. But many who buy these books for children and grandchildren would be surprised, and even shocked, if they knew just how vehemently Pullman despises the Christian Church, and how much he loathes his dead rival, Lewis. He is, in fact, the Anti-Lewis.

He has described the Narnia Chronicles as grotesque, disgusting, ugly, poisonous and nauseating. Yet, as Michael Ward, an expert on Lewis, has pointed out, Pullman's saga begins just as Lewis's does with a girl hiding in a wardrobe and finding more than she bargained for. It is almost as if he wants to turn Narnia upside-down and then jump on it. While Lewis portrays rationalist atheists as comically ghastly and joyless, Pullman depicts priests as evil and murderous, drunk and probably perverted, and the Church as a conspiracy against happiness and kindness.

Challenged about his assault, Pullman professes enthusiasm for something called the Republic of Heaven, whatever that means. He also says that he draws many of his ideas from Milton's Paradise Lost. No doubt he does, but much of his thinking could also have been taken from the pages of the Guardian, or from politically correct staffroom conversation in a thousand state schools. Among the good characters in his trilogy are gypsies, an African prince, a homosexual angel and a renegade nun who abandons her faith but who willingly obeys orders from another angel (orientation unknown) who speaks to her through a computer screen.

The bad are to be found among the religious, the respectable and the well-off. A particular villain is discovered at his opulent home. Pullman writes with feeling, 'Everything Will could see spoke of wealth and power, the sort of informal settled superiority that some upper-class English people still took for granted.' Pullman has also assailed Lewis for being racist, a charge that simply doesn't stick. One of Lewis's noblest characters is the dark-skinned Calormene, Emeth, while the vilest is the White Witch. He also suggests that Lewis is monumentally disparaging of women. As Michael Ward points out, this, too, is absurd:

Lucy Pevensie is unquestionably the most prominent and morally mature character in the narrator's eyes. Lucy is the first of the children to discover Narnia, and is described as more reliable and more truthful than her brother Edmund. She is the one who most often sees Aslan, the Christ-figure.

His other angry charges against Lewis, that he sends Susan Pevensie to hell because she likes lipstick and nylons, and that he kills all the children because he prefers death to life, are equally questionable.

It is a sore pity that Lewis is not here to defend himself and Narnia against this angry foe and his supporters. In his absence, both sets of books will have to speak for their authors. In an age where most stories written for grown-ups are about nothing very much at all, Lewis and Pullman have addressed the great issues of this time and all time, and both deserve to be read by adults. But Pullman would have made better use of his dark materials if he had sought to co-exist with Lewis rather than to attack him. Narnia may have no weapons of mass destruction, but it has a powerful guardian, and I have a suspicion that it will find ways of defending itself.

Michael Ward (essay date 25 April 2003)

SOURCE: Ward, Michael. "Planet Narnia." Times Literary Supplement, no. 5221 (25 April 2003): 15.

[In the following essay, Ward asserts that, although The Chronicles of Narnia are widely regarded as Christian fairy tales, Lewis's series is actually heavily based on astrology and is filled with astrological references.]

In 1937, C. S. Lewis, reviewing Tolkien's The Hobbit for The Times Literary Supplement, noted how it resembled Alice in being the work of "a professor at play". Thirteen years later Lewis added his own contribution to the shelf of playful professorial tales when he published The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first of his seven Chronicles of Narnia. Their Christian symbolism has often been remarked on and sometimes objected to—most notably of late by Philip Pullman. What no one has noticed before is that Lewis intended the Chronicles as an embodiment of medieval astrology.

Lewis was a medieval specialist. His posthumous work, The Discarded Image, which presents an introduction to the medieval worldview, was the fruit of his many courses of lectures on the subject, first at Oxford, where he was Fellow and Tutor at Magdalen College for twenty-nine years, and then at Cambridge, where he was the first occupant of the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature. A central part of the medieval world-view (at least for Lewis) was an understanding of the heavens. The seven planets of their astrology (Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) were held to influence people and events and even the metals in the earth in seven distinct ways. Lewis wrote this about Jupiter:

Jupiter, the King…. The character he produces in men would now be very imperfectly expressed by the word "jovial", and is not very easy to grasp; it is no longer, like the saturnine character, one of our archetypes. We may say it is Kingly; but we must think of a King at peace, enthroned, taking his leisure, serene. The Jovial character is cheerful, festive, yet temperate, tranquil, magnanimous. When this planet dominates we may expect halcyon days and prosperity. In Dante wise and just princes go to his sphere when they die. He is the best planet, and is called The Greater Fortune, Fortuna Major.

                    (The Discarded Image, 1964.)

Lewis had not only an academic interest in this cosmology; he responded to it imaginatively and wove "baptised astrology", as he called it, into much of his fiction and poetry. Hence his chapter entitled "The Descent of the Gods" in That Hideous Strength (1945), in which five planetary intelligences (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter) come to Earth to help bring about the denouement of the story. Hence also his alliterative poem, "The Planets", published in 1935, which he introduced with these words:

the characters of the planets, as conceived by medieval astrology, seem to me to have a permanent value as spiritual symbols—to provide a Phänomenologie des Geistes which is specially worth while in our own generation. Of Saturn we know more than enough. But who does not need to be reminded of Jove?

  ("The Alliterative Metre", Selected Literary Essays, 1969.)

If we examine this poem with one eye on Lewis's most successful imaginative work—Narnia—we discover something very interesting. Take, for example, the lines dealing with Jove (or Jupiter):

                It is JOVE'S orbit,
     Filled and festal, faster turning
     With arc ampler….
                      Of wrath ended
     And woes mended, of winter passed
     And guilt forgiven, and good fortune
     Jove is master; and of jocund revel,
     Laughter of ladies. The lion-hearted,
     The myriad-minded, men like the gods,
     Helps and heroes, helms of nations
     Just and gentle, are Jove's children,
     Work his wonders. On his wide forehead
     Calm and kingly, no care darkens
     Nor wrath wrinkles …

What these lines contain, essentially, is a plot summary of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which is a tale of "winter passed / And guilt forgiven". In that story, the first of the Narnia Chronicles, we find a White Witch who is confronted by the "lion-hearted" Aslan, and witness the passing of her perpetual winter ("always winter but never Christmas"). The "guilt forgiven" is that of the traitorous Edmund whose dream of becoming King of Narnia is shipwrecked on the rocks of the primogenitive High Kingship of his brother, Peter, and on Aslan's pre-eminent and sacrificial kingliness. Upon his resurrection, Aslan romps with Susan and Lucy in "jocund revel, / Laughter of ladies". The four Pevensies ("Jove's children") show themselves to be "helps and heroes" in the final battle with the Witch, and are eventually crowned as joint sovereigns ("helms of nations"), with Edmund earning the title "King Edmund the Just" and Susan the title "Queen Susan the Gentle". Altogether, the story tells the tale "of wrath ended / And woes mended", for "Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight, / At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more". The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, we may safely conclude, is Lewis's Jupiter. The jovial influence permeating the story is an example of what Lewis called "the kappa element in Romance"—its hidden element, its quality or atmosphere—which is what Lewis chiefly valued in narrative fiction.

A brief summary follows of how the other six Narnia books embody the remaining medieval planets:

THE SILVER CHAIR—THE MOON

(The clue is in the title, for the Moon's metal is silver; Rilian and the Headmistress of Experiment House are both described as "lunatic"; the Moon gives rise to doubt—hence the Witch's attempt to persuade the adventurers that the Overworld does not exist.)

THE HORSE AND HIS BOY—MERCURY

(The reunited twins, Cor and Corin, are an example of what the 1935 poem calls "meeting selves, / Same but sundered"; mercurial, "rocket"-like Narnian poetry is opposed to slow-spoken Calormene "jargon"; Mercury is "patron of pilf'rers" and Shasta several times goes "raiding"; he is also the fleet-footed messenger to Archenland.)

THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW—VENUS

(Her beautiful and maternal influence is evident in the fecund birth of Narnia and in the story of Digory's revivified mother, Mrs Kirke; Venus's "breasts and brow, and her breath's sweetness / Bewitch the worlds", rather as Jadis does; Fledge's wings are "copper".)

THE VOYAGE OF THE "DAWN TREADER"—THE SUN

(The clue is again in the title—a story about a journey towards the sunrise; the Sun's metal, gold, tempts Eustace and he is transformed into a dragon, and on Deathwater Island Lord Restimar is turned into a golden statue.)

PRINCE CASPIAN—MARS

(Reepicheep is a "martial" mouse; Miraz frets over his "martial" policy; Caspian convenes a "Council of War"; events in Narnia are likened to "the Wars of the Roses".)

THE LAST BATTLE—SATURN

(Saturnine features here include ill-chance in Shift's discovery of the lionskin, treachery by the dwarfs, the appearance of Father Time who, according to The Discarded Image, is "derived from earlier pictures of Saturn"; and, ultimately, the death of Narnia, "a perilous draught / That the lip loves not".)

In his 1937 TLS review, Lewis concluded by saying that Tolkien's Hobbit "will be funniest to its youngest readers, and only years later, at a tenth or twentieth reading, will they begin to realise what deft scholarship and profound reflection have gone to make everything in it so ripe…." In a similar way, the Narnia Chronicles have yielded up their secret to this reader only after many years and many readings. The Narnian septet has often been criticized by those who object to its Christian symbolism. Now it may be the turn of the religious fundamentalists to raise their own cry of foul. Narnia is a work of astrology.

Joy Alexander (essay date summer 2003)

SOURCE: Alexander, Joy. "'The Whole Art and Joy of Words': Aslan's Speech in the Chronicles of Narnia." Mythlore 24, no. 1 (summer 2003): 37-48.

[In the following essay, Alexander analyzes Lewis's intent concerning the frequency, tone, and content of Aslan's spoken dialogue in The Chronicles of Narnia, arguing that Lewis "aims to write for Aslan the form of pure speech towards which all communication should aspire."]

There are many instances in literature of characters stepping out of the books which create them. What I mean is that many people recognise and know about Robinson Crusoe, Oliver Twist, or Peter Pan who have certainly never read the stories in which they feature. Another example is Aslan, who is widely known to be a lion and can perhaps be associated with Narnia even though little else about the Narnian Chronicles may be known. Nor is there likely to be much argument that he is the dominant character in the Narnian tales.

C. S. Lewis always resisted making any simple equation that Aslan is Jesus Christ. In his first novel, The Pilgrim's Regress, he came closest to allegory but he spent the remainder of his prolific career retreating from anything so explicit. He discussed the specific case of Narnia on several occasions in his letters. For example, on May 29, 1954, he wrote to some fifth-graders:

You are mistaken when you think that everything in the books 'represents' something in this world. Things do that in The Pilgrim's Progress but I'm not writing in that way. I did not say to myself 'Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia': I said 'Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would have happened.' If you think about it, you will see that it is quite a different thing.

                              (Hooper 425)

Although allegory is disavowed, Aslan is clearly a character redolent of divinity and with godlike connotations. This is explicitly reinforced by Lewis when, less than a month after writing to the fifth-graders, on June 19, he replied, when the idea of a cartoon version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was suggested to him: "I am sure you understand that Aslan is a divine figure, and anything remotely approaching the comic (above all anything in the Disney line) would be to me simple blasphemy" (438). It is obvious that C. S. Lewis took the character of Aslan very seriously and intended that he should be suggestive of the Christian Son of God. Consequently as a writer he placed himself under extraordinary constraints in depicting such a character when inappropriate treatment would apparently be construed by him as blasphemy. It is interesting therefore to study Aslan's appearance and speech in the Narnian Chronicles and to consider the special ways in which he is presented.

Given his dominance in the reader's memory of the tales, it may come as a surprise to realise that Aslan's appearances are actually strictly limited:¹

What is immediately evident is that Aslan is actually present in the stories relatively little—at most for one third of the novel, but more often for much less. Of course, for a number of these pages even though he is present, he may be taking little part in what is happening. On the other hand, during the substantial parts of the tales where he is not present, he is often referred to and spoken of, so that he is never forgotten about for long. However, what the table above also shows is that Aslan's appearances are, with one exception, reserved for the final stages of each story. The Chronicles have an essentially simple structure and Aslan is used right at the very end to sort things out and to bring closure, a deus ex excelsis rather than a deus ex machina. The sole exception is The Silver Chair, a quest story where Aslan sets the children off on their journey, giving Jill Pole four signs to guide them, their ultimate successful completion of the quest being rewarded by Aslan's re-appearance to provide some final assistance. For the most part, though, the children must manage for themselves because in this book Aslan's presence is at its most fleeting.

If Lewis maintained a divine aura around Aslan by limiting his appearances, he also seems to have kept to a minimum the words that he speaks:

The words noted in brackets refer in the case of The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" to words spoken by an Albatross (vide Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) and by a Lamb (vide the New Testament Revelation of St. John, chapter 5), which are personae of Aslan, and in the case of The Last Battle, to a conversation reported by Emeth in which he quotes what Aslan had said. It is surely worthy of note that the leading figure of Narnia speaks only some hundreds of words in each story. By not having Aslan speak much, Lewis avoided committing what by his own admission might be blasphemy.

The question that arises at this point is, how should a divine being speak? One possibility might have been to use a heightened, courtly style with archaic diction and elaborate formality. This would differentiate Aslan's speech from that of other characters and might fittingly recall the language of the King James Authorised Version of the Bible. It would extend Lewis's tribute to one of his favourite works, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, on which, as Doris T. Myers has convincingly argued, the Narnian Chronicles are patterned. C. S. Lewis uses just such language at various points in the tales to suggest royalty and wise courtesy. However, this is not the manner in which he chooses to have Aslan speak.

Before examining the way in which Lewis resolved this matter, it should be noted that this was not for him an incidental feature of his narrative. Myers' book, C. S. Lewis in Context, is a study of Lewis's interest in contemporary language theory and in the use of language, as manifested in his writing. In Out of the Silent Planet there is some exploration of the language of Malacandra, Old Solar, supposedly the language spoken before the Fall. In That Hideous Strength, language is again a central concern, but this time the focus is on the potential for the misuse and corruption of language, a theme George Orwell also scrutinised in Nineteen Eighty-Four, published four years later in 1949, a matter of months before the first of the Narnia stories appeared. We can be sure that Lewis the writer selected the appropriate form of speech for his characters with some deliberation, and particularly so for Aslan representing Christ, one of whose names is Logos, or "word."

The study of Aslan's direct speech does indeed reveal a consistent and distinctive style, unremarkable only because it is restrained and undemonstrative, but on closer inspection eloquent in its simplicity and transparency. In general terms Aslan's form of speech can be described as plain and direct, but heightened by a certain formality. There is a simple clause structure; sentences are non-adjectival; characteristically Aslan states what is the case. His words, though child-like, are authoritative; his tone, though gentle, is on the whole unemotional. As for the content of what he says, he takes the initiative in beginning action, he defines what is reality, and he apportions praise and blame. Taken as a body of prose, there are few lapses displayed in Aslan's form of speech, a difficult enough feat in such a lean, spare style especially when it is embedded in a narrative with a fairly informal, conversational tone. Even though it is only a crude measure, it is instructive to use SMOG grading to calculate the reading age for Aslan's speech as compared to the reading age for the entire book within which that speech occurs. (This is a formula for calculating the appropriate reading age for a piece of text by counting polysyllabic words.) Speech is of course commonly more simple then narrative prose, but even so, the results are a broad indicator of Aslan's directness. The reading age for Aslan's speech in all the novels is 11, except for The Horse and His Boy, where it is 10—possibly because in it Aslan is presented at his most gentle and simple. The reading age for The Magician's Nephew, The Horse and His Boy, The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader," and The Silver Chair is 14, for Prince Caspian and The Last Battle it is 13 and for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe it is 12, the latter being pre-eminently the tale of an easy, friendly storyteller talking straight to the reader.

Aslan is at his most anthropomorphic in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He functions much more than in the other novels as a participant in the plot, becoming at times a fellow actor alongside the other characters: "'Oh, children, catch me if you can!'" (148), and "'Look alive, everyone. Up stairs and down stairs and in my lady's chamber!'" (155). The revived stone lion takes great pride in Aslan's phrase, "us lions," but there are occasions when the close identification with the other dramatis personae results in Aslan sounding inappropriately colloquial: "'That'll be all right […] Hi! You up there […] What's your name?'" (156), and "'Look lively and sort yourselves'" (158). It could perhaps be argued that Aslan's chattiness is allowable in a novel which is representing Christ's incarnation—"down-to-earthness"—but it is probably more pertinent that this was the first of the Chronicles ; Aslan's speech undergoes development through the sequence of seven books, becoming virtually always more distanced and formal. It can be seen at its most developed in the final Chronicle, The Last Battle and in The Magician's Nephew, the last to be completed, although the first chronologically. As has been seen, in The Last Battle Aslan practically withdraws altogether as a voice in the text, whereas in The Magician's Nephew he has by far the greatest spoken involvement compared with all the other stories. Roger Lancelyn Green, who himself became a highly regarded children's writer and who read all the Narnia chronicles in manuscript, recorded in his diary that The Magician's Nephew "seems the best of the lot" (Hooper 405). More poignantly, nine years before his death C. S. Lewis finally confronts in it and fictionally reverses the most devastating event of his life, the death of his mother when he was nine years old. The Narnian apple, whose core when planted grew into the tree from the wood of which the Wardrobe was made, accomplished a more wonderful feat in restoring Digory's mother to health when she ate it. For all these reasons, the depiction and speech of Aslan is in this novel at its richest and most assured.

However, if we turn to The Horse and His Boy we can see exemplified some of the most notable features of Aslan's style of speech. Most characteristic of all is his preference for plain, unadorned statement. He states what is or will be the case; he names things as they are; he is the one who defines reality. In a typical exchange, he leads Shasta through a process of understanding: not giant—not ghost—was lion—I was lion:

"But I am not like the creatures you call giants."

[….]

"There […] that is not the breath of a ghost."

[…]

"There was only one lion."

[….]

"I was the lion."

                                       (Horse 129)

Over and over again Aslan gives straightforward explanations—this is that—frequently built around some form of the verb "to be." Many of his conversations with individuals aim to assist them to recognise and know him, playing with the name with which God revealed himself in the Old Testament, "I am," and taken up by Christ in the New Testament, "I am the Way, the Door": "I am the great Bridge-builder" (Voyage 188). Aslan also often issues commands, usually in a natural, matter-of-fact tone rather than in a peremptory or imperative manner:

"Bring out that creature."

[….]

"Sleep."

[….]

"Carry him aside […]"

[….]

"Rise up [….] Be just and merciful and brave."

[….]

"Look!"

[….]

"Go. Pluck her an apple from the Tree."

                             (Magician's 157-63)

Aslan's role within the Chronicles could be described as tying the narrative together. Though there are occasions when he plays a more active role, Aslan is more narrator than actor. That is why he always makes his appearance towards the end of each book and is often associated with set-piece scenes in which he is the focal character. He tells individual characters what their story has been and he also fulfils a prophetic function, foretelling what will happen or dispensing judgement: "'You and your brother will never come back to Narnia'" (Voyage 188). He is, in fact, the great story-teller who, like Prospero, seems like a covert stage-manager. This is entirely appropriate for a series of tales which reveals to us at the very end that life and story are indistinguishable:

And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

                                     (Last 171-72)

In Aslan's form of speech there is also at times something suggestive of Biblical language, the words of a higher being with divine wisdom. He says to Shasta, "'Tell me your sorrows'" (Horse 129), and later to Hwin, "'Joy shall be yours'" (158), and to Rabadash, "'Justice shall be mixed with mercy'" (171). The forms of address Aslan uses also distinguish his style from that of any other character: Creatures, Little friend, Child, Dear Heart, Human Child, Son of Adam, Daughter of Eve, Son of Earth, Little ones. Most noteworthy of all are the questions Aslan asks. As the omniscient Storyteller, he never asks questions which imply that he does not know the answer. The purpose of his questions is not his need to know but the respondent's need to frame the answer. When he questions Jill Pole about Eustace Scrubb at the beginning of The Silver Chair, it is clear that although he knows what happened he is drawing Jill into a confession about her own behaviour:

"Human Child […] Where is the Boy?"

"He fell over the cliff." [….]

"How did he come to do that, Human Child?"

"He was trying to stop me from falling, Sir."

"Why were you so near the edge, Human Child?"

"I was showing off, Sir."

"That is a very good answer, Human Child. Do so no more. And now […] the Boy is safe."

                                        (24)

At other times questions are used to catechise or to encourage others to discover their better selves, as in The Magician's Nephew, first in Aslan's conversation with Digory:

[….] "I think I was a bit enchanted by the writing under the bell."

"Do you?" asked Aslan; still speaking very low and deep.

"No," said Digory. "I see now I wasn't. I was only pretending."

                                        (126)

or again in the series of questions to Frank the Cabby which culminate in Aslan anointing him as the first King of Narnia:

"And you wouldn't have favourites either among your own children or among the other creatures or let any hold another under or use it hardly?"

[….]

"And if enemies came against the land (for enemies will arise) and there was war, would you be the first in the charge and the last in the retreat?"

                                      (129-30)

In finding an appropriate style for Aslan's speech, Lewis had of course the model of Christ in the New Testament. He especially draws on the last two chapters of the Gospel of John which cover the period between the Resurrection and Ascension, when Jesus is presented as God-man, in the same way that Aslan is a lion but also the Lion. The breakfast on the beach at the end of The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" is taken directly from this source. Aslan's words to Bree in The Horse and His Boy —"'Touch me. Smell me. Here are my paws, here is my tail, these are my whiskers'" (158)—recall the invitation of Jesus to doubting Thomas in John 20 to touch his hands and side. The repeated advice that no-one is told any story other than their own is based on Jesus's conversation with Peter in John 21. Such indirect echoes of the words of Jesus can be heard in what Aslan says.

Another influence on Aslan's form of speech is rhetoric, in the art of which Lewis with his classical knowledge was of course very well versed. Doris Myers says that "Aslan's ordinary English is heightened by rhetorical figures at times of extreme emotion" (Myers 164). The examples she gives are of antimetabole—"Do not dare not to dare"—in The Horse and His Boy (158) and the memorable use of anaphora, i.e. a repeated opening phrase, when Aslan is speaking to Shasta in the same story:

I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.

                                      (129-30)

Doris Myers is right to draw attention to the use of rhetoric by Aslan, but she is less accurate in speaking of "Aslan's ordinary English." That ordinariness is deceptive, for Aslan's speech is uncommon not because of its imagery but because it is enhanced by the colours of rhetoric, with cadence and balance in the shape of its sentences. A passage such as the following from The Magician's Nephew is not everyday English though it is typical of the simple grandeur with which Aslan speaks:

"Creatures, I give you yourselves," said the strong, happy voice of Aslan. "I give to you forever this land of Narnia. I give you the woods, the fruits, the rivers. I give you the stars and I give you myself. The Dumb Beasts whom I have not chosen are yours also. Treat them gently and cherish them but do not go back to their ways lest you cease to be Talking Beasts. For out of them you were taken and into them you can return. Do not so."

                                        (109)

Both the content and the manner of speech here are startlingly unusual. As Lewis himself wrote, if the speaker does not have the sovereignty and authority he claims, he must be bad or mad (Mere Christianity 43). This is the language of someone who takes it for granted that the kingdom, the power, and the glory are his. The voice in which Aslan speaks is appropriate to the eloquence he utters. His voice is described as "deep and rich" (Lion 117); "not loud, but very large and deep" (Horse 128); "the voice was not like a man's. It was deeper, wilder, and stronger; a sort of heavy, golden voice" (Silver 23).

In narratives the first and last words of a character are often accorded special significance and in the case of Lewis's construction of Aslan's character this is particularly so since, as has been seen, the chronologically first and last books in the sequence were written last when Lewis's crafting of Aslan was at its most complete and accomplished. Aslan's earliest words, chronologically, call Narnia into being. They come at the end of two chapters in The Magician's Nephew in which Aslan's song creates a world, an example of Lewis's writing at its finest, and one of the set-piece scenes featuring Aslan which can be found in each of the Chronicles : "'Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters'" (108). This is characteristic of Aslan's speech: the musicality, the commands, the use of the verb "to be," the rhetorical use of repetition, the sense of living nature, the unadorned spareness, the power of naming, and the primacy of love.

Aslan's last words come at the end of The Last Battle : "'There was a real railway accident […] Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning'" (171). The final paragraph of the novel, which follows these words, functions as a coda; it is full of the conventions which signal the wrapping up of a story. This direct speech is the true climax of the Chronicles. Aslan is given the last word in these quiet but emphatic lines. He is the ultimate arbiter of reality: "'There was a real railway accident.'" Plato, in addition to the Christian tradition, lies behind the closing chapters of The Last Battle. The references here to the Shadowlands and to the dream refer back to an earlier explanation by Digory, now the Lord Digory:

[…] that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia, which has always been here and always will be here: just as our world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan's real world. [….] [O]f course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream. […] It's all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!

                                       (159-60)

From beginning-end we move in Aslan's final words to end-beginning: "'The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning'" (171). The punctuation is careful, with colons and not semi-colons, so that the second half of each sentence is not equivalent to, but is an antithetical confirmation of, the first half. "Dream" is set in opposition to "morning"; we might have expected "nighttime" or "shadows" to be opposed to "morning," but instead we are given "dream," whose opposite, "reality," is therefore equated with "morning." This is the ultimate in plain words, in straight speaking. These are to be understood as definitive statements of fact, built around the verb "to be." Beyond such bare articulation you pass beyond speech altogether. It takes a reading of all the Narnian stories to hear the eloquent grandeur in the utter truth of "this is the morning." The very greatest scenes in Narnia take place in the morning—Aslan singing Narnia into existence in The Magician's Nephew or the Resurrection romp in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Just before speaking these final words, as "the light ahead was growing stronger," Aslan arrived, "leaping down from cliff to cliff like a living cataract of power and beauty" (Last 171). Similarly in John 21.4—that seminal passage again—Jesus is associated with morning light: "when the morning was now come, Jesus stood on the shore." The simile of the "living cataract" recalls John 4.10, 6.35, and 7.10, where Jesus presents himself as living water, an image developed by John in Revelation 22.1, where the Lamb is connected with "a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal."

This view of these lines is not shared by Philip Pullman, the children's author, who, in a newspaper article during Lewis's centenary year, describes them as "one of the most vile moments in the whole of children's literature." His reason for this opinion is as follows: "To solve a narrative problem by killing one of your characters is something many authors have done at one time or another. To slaughter the lot of them, and then claim they're better off, is not honest story-telling: it's propaganda in the service of a life-hating ideology." Pullman's basic objection here is that it is dishonest to smuggle "life-hating" Christianity into the story and certainly, from that perspective, the entire Chronicles lose their right to exist, along with much else in the corpus of English literature. It brings to mind Lewis's own comment in A Preface to "Paradise Lost" that "many of those who say they dislike Milton's God only mean that they dislike God" (126). The rather petulant exaggeration that Aslan's words are "most vile" and "nauseating drivel" ignores the immediate context of the novel's last chapter which is all about life rather than death but also overlooks the child-like style of Aslan's speech which points to artful simplicity rather than to a simpleton's babble, two very different things.

John Goldthwaite in The Natural History of Make-Believe acknowledges Lewis's difficulty in depicting Aslan:

His central problem in building the parable had always been the difficulty of portraying his Lion of Judah, Aslan, in such a way that the Christ figure would speak with the needed authority yet without intimidating the tale back into those stained-glass and Sunday School associations Lewis wished to avoid. The odds against him were long, and he did not really surmount them—or, rather, he surmounted them and toppled over onto the other side of good judgement.

                                      (222-23)

The one example Goldthwaite cites at this point to support his claim is: "'Wow!' roared Aslan half rising from his throne […] ,"² of which he rightly says: "Even a child might question the 'real potency' of a Christ given to yelling 'Wow!'" Goldthwaite has a tendency to take a small point and build a very elaborate case out of it, but he does not do so here, going on to present a reasonably balanced point of view: "His reason had seemed clear enough—to portray Christ so vividly in make-believe terms that children would know him as 'bright and real and strong'—and there are moments when he does approach this end. There are many more, however, when the Lion of Judah simply looks goofy." The one example Goldthwaite gives of incongruity in portraying Aslan is taken from the American edition. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when Aslan comes to a private agreement with the White Witch and she asks how she can be sure that the promise he has given her will be kept, the original (British) version reads: "'Haa-a-arrh!'" roared Aslan, half rising from his throne […]" (131). Since 1994 all editions have been standardised according to the original British edition. In adjudicating between "Wow!" and "Haaa-a-arrh!," I think it has to be conceded that Lewis's first thoughts were best. Nevertheless, it is the only instance Goldthwaite gives of Aslan appearing to be "goofy." I agree with him that the odds against Lewis successfully depicting Aslan were long, but the conclusion I have come to is the exact opposite of Goldthwaite's. I find Lewis's portrayal remarkably successful, increasingly so through the series of chronicles, and the slips, of which there are certainly some, are surprisingly few. My chief evidence for this is Aslan's speech, which is easy to pass over because it seems unremarkable, but a closer look reveals it to be thoughtfully and meaningfully constructed.

As has been seen, the style in which Aslan speaks throughout the Narnia Chronicles is deliberately crafted. It is straightforward, direct, declarative, and definite. Rhetoric and transparency underpin its credal affirmation; clarity and profundity are combined. In the year after completing the seven Narnia novels, Lewis wrote his last work of imaginative fiction, Till We Have Faces, which he thought "much my best book," his "favourite of all my books," and "far and away the best I have written" (Hooper 243). Doris Myers shows how the narrative voice of the central character, Orual, is purposefully constructed. Orual uses "semiobsolete, dialectal, and marginally standard words"; she uses "functional shift in a way that gives an Elizabethan flavour"; she uses "the schemes of classical rhetoric" (199-200). Even so, her style "seems sparse and plain overall," and the deliberate use of language is "unnoticed in a first reading" (202-03). It seems that Lewis may have learned from his shaping of Aslan's speech and was applying his experience to suit this later novel. Orual at the end of the story recalls what her tutor used to tell her: "'Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words'" (Till We Have Faces 305). It is this art that Lewis enters into when creating an appropriate style for Aslan. He aims to write for Aslan the form of pure speech towards which all communication should aspire. His success in this reveals C. S. Lewis as a greater stylist in the Chronicles of Narnia than he is often given credit for.

Notes

1. Note: In this article I have followed the ordering of the books in the 1980 Collins edition. Whether or not this is the best/correct order is not of great relevance to the issues the article addresses.

2. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1970): 141. This is the American printing to which Goldthwaite refers.

Works Cited

Goldthwaite, John. The Natural History of Make-Believe. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

Hooper, Walter. C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996.

Lewis, C. S. The Chronicles of Narnia (The Magician's Nephew, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader," The Silver Chair, The Last Battle). London: Collins, 1980.

―――――――. The Cosmic Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength). London: Bodley Head, 1990.

―――――――. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1970.

―――――――. Mere Christianity. London: Fount, 1997.

―――――――. The Pilgrim's Regress. London: Fount, 1977.

―――――――. A Preface to "Paradise Lost. " Oxford: Oxford UP, 1960.

―――――――. Till We Have Faces. London: Fount, 1978.

McLaughlin, H. "Smog Grading—A New Readability Formula." Journal of Reading 22 (1969): 639-46.

Myers, Doris T. C. S. Lewis in Context. Kent: Kent State UP, 1994.

Pullman, Philip. "The Dark Side of Narnia." The Guardian October 1, 1998. http://web.archive.org/web/20010628221443/http://riff.hiof.no/∼steinabl/pullmanlew.html

Jeffrey L. Morrow (essay date spring 2004)

SOURCE: Morrow, Jeffrey L. "J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis in Light of Hans Urs von Balthasar¹." Renascence 56, no. 3 (spring 2004): 181-96.

[In the following excerpt, Morrow discusses Lewis's use of fantasy in The Chronicles of Narnia within the context of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien and literary theorist Hans Urs von Balthasar, arguing that Lewis's texts reinforce realism and act as a logical extension of religious literature.]

Lewis recognizes the creative beauty of myth-making in many of his writings. Known primarily for his Christian apologetics as well as his fantasy literature, Lewis had an implicit theology of fantasy which was shaped by his elder friend and colleague J. R. R. Tolkien's own theology of fantasy. Lewis, like Tolkien and von Balthasar, views human creativity as a cooperating with God. As Clyde Kilby explains, Lewis "regards myth-making as one of man's deepest needs and highest accomplishments, and he has written hardly a single book in which he does not, in one way or another, discuss and illustrate this subject" (80).

For Lewis, true myth inspires awe, and, to borrow Rudolf Otto's phrase, is a numinous experience (Kilby 80-81; Duriez 41). In Surprised by Joy Lewis describes his first reading of "Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods." He writes:

And with that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss, which suddenly became one with the loss of the whole experience, which, as I now stared round that dusty schoolroom like a man recovering from unconsciousness, had already vanished, had eluded me at the very moment when I could first say It is.

                                        (72-73)

Kilby notes that, according to Lewis,

There is a great, sovereign, uncreated, unconditional Reality at the core of things, and myth is on the one hand a kind of picturemaking which helps man to understand this Reality and on the other hand the result of a deep call from that Reality.

                                        (81)

Lewis incorporates these ideas in his own writings. It has been noted that, "The novels Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra are among Lewis's own myths to suggest worlds in which the unity of being so sweetly and desperately longed for are in some measure attained" (82).

In this context, and quite in line with Tolkien, Lewis defends fantasy literature against those who would claim that such tales are merely false pictures of reality (Kilby 116). According to Lewis, if we claim something akin to this idea, then we have things backwards. Lewis maintains that, "The fairy tale, like the myth, on the one hand arouses longing for more ideal worlds and on the other gives the real world a new dimension of depth" (Kilby 116). These forms of story point one in the direction of the Divine. As Stratford Caldecott makes clear, "Traditional folk and fairy tales, hero stories and legends can help in preparing someone for what C. S. Lewis refers to as the 'baptism' of the imagination" ("Reflection" 75). With his conversion, Lewis himself had undergone a shift in his views of myth and Christianity. He originally viewed Christianity negatively as mere fairy tale. However, J. R. R. Tolkien explained to him that the gospel was a fairy tale which had in fact entered history (Hooper 185; Pearce, "True Myth" 88; Schall 70; Caldecott, "Reflection" 77; Gunton 138-139; Duriez 42; Knickerbocker 101; Kelly 12-14), and that deepened both Lewis's view of Christianity and of fairy tale.² These ideas eventually combined to form Lewis's theology of fantasy, as reflected in his own writings.

Fairy tales played an important role for Lewis within his lived experience. In 1963, the summer before Lewis died, he spent a few days disoriented after recovering from a coma. His friend Maureen Moore Blake had inherited a castle, as well as an estate, in Scotland. The inheritance was a very unexpected event, and one she was eager to share with Lewis, whom she called Jack. Their dialogue was recorded as follows:

"Jack, it is Maureen."

"No," he replied, "it is Lady Dunbar of Hempriggs."

"Oh Jack, how could you remember that?" she asked.

"On the contrary," he said, "how could I forget a fairy tale?"

                    (Lewis, Weight of Glory, xiii)

Like the gospel stories about Jesus, in Lewis's mind, the story of Maureen Moore Blake's title and castle was a fairy tale come true. Lewis saw such real life fairy tales as stories about other worlds. It was through these "fairy tales, the carriers of myths, that mediated the world of the spirit, [that] Lewis began to experience joy, that bittersweet longing for he knew not what" (Knickerbocker 102). Lewis believes that one of our contemporary problems is that "we have lost an ancient unity between the poetic and the prosaic, the symbolic and the literal" (Duriez 36).

The important aspect of fantasy literature, for Lewis, was the fact that it was "imaginative invention" (Duriez 37). For Lewis, the imagination is involved in grasping reality, rather than merely understanding concepts. Colin Duriez notes that, "Fantasy is a power and product of the imagination, as thought is a power and product of the intellect … and fiction, for C. S. Lewis, was the making of meaning rather than the literal restating of truths" (37-38). This is, in itself, a reflection of God's initial creativity in the creation of the universe. Lewis views the relationship as follows: "good imagining is as vital as good thinking, and each is impoverished without the other. This is as true in the natural sciences as it is in the arts. We actually win truth by employing metaphors, or models" (Duriez 38).

Lewis believed in an objective dimension to the imagination and fantasy. Like Tolkien, he held that, "Great stories take us outside the prison of our own selves and our presuppositions about reality. Insofar as stories reflect the divine maker in doing this, they help us face the ultimate Other—God himself, distinct as creator from all else, including ourselves." For Lewis, longing is one of fantasy's defining traits (Duriez 40-41). It follows from this that, "The creation of Another World is an attempt to reconcile human beings and the world, to embody the fulfilment [sic] of our imaginative longing. Imaginative worlds, wonderlands, are 'regions of the spirit'" (Duriez 42). As with von Balthasar's views on beauty, "For Lewis, joy was a foretaste of ultimate reality, heaven itself, or, the same thing, our world as it was meant to be, unspoilt by the fall of mankind, and one day to be remade" (Duriez 42). The imaginative longing of Lewis is also parallel to von Balthasar's sehnsucht, both of which point to the greater reality.

A corollary observation to the co-creational work of the imagination is the role of the artist. A key function of myth or fantasy, in Lewis's thought, as for Tolkien, is the idea that we are co-creators with God. Thus, "to an extent, [for] Lewis … imagination can show genuine insight into God and reality independently of the specific revelation of Scripture" (Duriez 45). Lewis is in line with Tolkien, von Balthasar, and Chesterton, in his views on the imagination, and fantasy literature. This idea of co-creators, or "subcreators" as Tolkien will call it, is an intriguing idea fitting within the Pauline notion of Christians as "God's fellow workers."³

Notes

1. This is a revision of a paper presented at the Mideast Conference on Christianity and Literature, October 19, 2002. I am grateful to Biff Rocha for his editorial assistance.

2. See especially Tolkien's discussion of the gospel as a fairy story which has entered reality ("On Fairy-Stories" 155-157).

3. We see this thought clearly illustrated in the writings of a number of saints as well, most notably St. Patrick, as has been noted elsewhere: "This belief that literary creation was a reflection of God's creative action was common to both biblical and classical writers" (de Paor 16).

Works Cited

Caldecott, Stratford. "The Reflection of Christian Truth in the Mythopoetic Imagination of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien." Epiphany Journal 14.4 (1994): 74-86.

Duriez, Colin. "The Theology of Fantasy in Lewis and Tolkien." Themelios 23 (1998): 35-51.

Gunton, Colin. "A Far-Off Gleam of the Gospel: Salvation in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings." Tolkien: A Celebration: Collected Writings on a Literary Legacy. Ed. Joseph Pearce. San Francisco: Ignatius P, 2000.

Hooper, Walter. "The Other Oxford Movement: Tolkien and the Inklings." Tolkien: A Celebration: Collected Writings on a Literary Legacy. Ed. Joseph Pearce. San Francisco: Ignatius P, 2000.

Kilby, Clyde S. The Christian World of C. S. Lewis. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964.

Knickerbocker, W. E., Jr. "From Fairy Tales to Fairy Tale: The Spiritual Pilgrimage of C. S. Lewis." Essays on C. S. Lewis and George MacDonald: Truth, Fiction, and the Power of Imagination. Studies in British Literature. Volume 11. Ed. Cynthia Marshall. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen P, 1991.

Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt, 1955.

―――――――. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949.

Pearce, Joseph. "True Myth: The Catholicism of The Lord of the Rings." Celebrating Middle-Earth: The Lord of the Rings as a Defense of Western Civilization. Ed. John G. West, Jr. Seattle: Inkling, 2002.

Schall, James V., S.J. "On the Reality of Fantasy." Tolkien: A Celebration: Collected Writings on a Literary Legacy. Ed. Joseph Pearce. San Francisco: Ignatius P, 2000.

TITLE COMMENTARY

THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE (1950)

Donald E. Glover (review date 1981)

SOURCE: Glover, Donald E. "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 1950." In C. S. Lewis: The Art of Enchantment, pp. 133-43. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1981.

[In the following review, Glover presents a critical overview of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, praising the novel, but noting that the appearance of the mundane Father Christmas in the text has a jarring effect on readers who have become emerged in the fantastical world of Narnia.]

As Lewis paused on the verge of a new creative adventure in the use of the imagination, the form he had chosen for what he had to say must have presented certain problems. In his earlier fiction, we have noted his use of traditional forms and the growing skill he displayed in adapting them to his particular purposes. Lewis was not a technical innovator, the creator of new forms. In fact, his belief in God's unique role as creator rather denied that possibility to him.¹ Authors never originate anything in the sense of creating it; they rearrange the pieces in new kaleidoscopic combinations. Bunyan stands behind The Pilgrim's Regress, Wells and Lindsay behind the space trilogy, and Milton lurks behind Perelandra. There are sources, if we want them, for everything Lewis wrote. So with fairy tales, there were daunting examples before Lewis as he began, tales he had admired as child and man; and his challenge was to offer something distinctly new, something imaginatively fresh. There were the problems of keeping the story simple without juvenilizing it; of treating his readers with respect without giving them analysis, digression, reflection, and "gas."

The form he chose was conventional: four children, an adventure in an old and mysterious house, and an unexpected journey to another world. There are echoes, as critics have noted, of E. Nesbit and others, but once the adventure begins, we start to see Lewis's distinctive quality.

One striking feature of his prose throughout the [Chronicles of Narnia ] is its consistent simpleness and evenness. There is a reasonableness and steadiness about the measured and balanced sentences which reassure us of the reality of whatever Lewis narrates or describes, whether it is the cold white arm of Jadis revealed to Edmund or the whiskery face of a beaver which greets Lucy upon her waking. Lewis evidently enjoyed the discipline which helped to maintain this basic tone because he repeatedly mentions it as a positive feature of writing these books. The calm, measured movement of the story, eminently readable by children and adults, moves the narrative along at a steady pace and provides that solid basis, the created reality, from which Lewis can depart on occasion without shaking our belief in his manufactured fantasy. The sentences are simple and short, the language carefully chosen to be expressive but not showy or eccentric. It never draws attention to itself, which is a great credit in a genre where some authors depend for the effect of their tale on the uniqueness of their descriptive language.

The descriptive technique used by Lewis here and throughout the Chronicles is worth studying at the outset since it carries the burden of convincing us of the reality of these adventures and is the heart of Lewis's technique for touching our deeper imagination. To say that the whole thing "began with a picture" may seem trite and repetitious, but it is the key to Lewis's method. We know that the whole process of creation of these stories was the accretion of pictures and their coalescence into thematic unity—a moving and evolving picture. This is much more an organic method than most critics are willing to allow Lewis, but we must, I think, accept his honest statement that he began not with a full-blown chronicle of Christian themes for children in mind but with pictures which formed a pattern and were fitted to a theme which had run through all of his earlier fiction. The technique depends on appealing to the reader's feelings through descriptions and thus moving him to thought by use of sublimity, as described by Longinus rather than by dialogue, as used by Socrates. The dialogue in all the stories is less effective generally than the descriptive sections, especially where the children are first introduced in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and we sense that Lewis had never listened closely to how children say things though he caught what they would talk about. Later when they become kings and queens, their courtly language strikes a strange note, but by then we are so deep in the fantasy, the "as if," that we are hardly bothered by that incongruity. When the Witch, Aslan, and all the created world of Narnia appear, Lewis is on new ground and makes the speech of his creatures believable and appropriate.

John Haigh has pointed out the fact that images of sound and color predominate in Lewis's descriptions of Narnia; the aural and visual are used to present us, especially young readers, with the series of sensations which Haigh feels are characteristic of Lewis's method here.² He suggests that children respond to the narrative and descriptive interest; whereas, adults prefer the moral and spiritual vision.³ On the contrary, it seems clear that you cannot have one without the other, and that in fact the strength of the method lies in the embodiment of meaning in imaginative description that is clear, moving, and credible.

Lewis's method parallels the already discussed organic creative process of the novels in a now more condensed and organized fashion. We are presented with pictures which create the most memorable and effective impression of Narnia; Edmund meeting Jadis, the children confronted by Aslan, Aslan being comforted by Lucy and Susan, and his death on the stone table. The pictures are drawn together by a slowly evolving theme which only at the climax reveals its central significance. The organic process works to draw us into Lewis's vision naturally, and it is the aptness of the pictures and the appropriateness of their prose description that does what Lewis wants, drawing us further in and higher up.

The plot structure follow that of Lewis's earlier fiction: a straight line, single thread development of tensions centering on a journey into the unknown, on tasks and choices which determine the outcome and establish turning points thematically, and on the lives of certain characters. A simple paralleling of two characters develops through reciprocating scenes where analogous actions serve as ironic commentary on the choices of these characters. The climax is a battle setting to rights the near catastrophe which precedes it, and the story ends in Tolkien's words, "eucatastrophically" or happily, sliding gradually off the tension of epic acts to the low normalcy of real childhood games in an old house, and thus coming full circle. This pattern is used with slight variations—the journey to Narnia is always managed in a different fashion each time—in each novel as it had been in The Pilgrim's Regress and the space trilogy and to an extent in The Great Divorce. The Screwtape Letters is the only work which lacks it. The plot pattern is hardly unique and shares such diverse probable sources as epic, and Arthurian legend, and medieval romance, as well as the romantic novel. The basic pattern of journey, perilous choice, battle, and victory are not new, but Lewis molds them to his purpose with great skill. Balance is one key feature of his method. Chapters are carefully balanced for length and ease in reading. Scenes are given equivalent scope so that there is little lingering over particular scenes of the sort that retard the movement of Perelandra. The movement is consistently forward with few episodic interruptions, the only serious one being the appearance of Father Christmas, who nearly jolts us back to London and whose intrusion may or may not improve with additional readings.

Turning to the book, Lewis shows us his considerable skill in opening the story. From the altogether understated beginning, "once there were four children whose names were…." through their stilted initial dialogue, he quickly and expertly draws us into Narnia with Lucy, the sweetest and most susceptible, youngest of the Pevensie children with whom we identify and through whose eyes we judge what we see.⁴ Her innocence and trust are the spectacles through which we see the unfolding action. Lewis could hardly have been more clever in disarming an adult's skepticism and disbelief. The wardrobe is a master stroke though it was to cause Lewis some worry resulting in the humorously overstated warning that it is very silly to shut yourself in a wardrobe, even if it is not a magic one. The genius of Lewis's choice of event and description lies in their appropriateness. Perhaps because he knew the archetypal state of childhood so well, though he knew little about children from firsthand experience such as one has as a parent, he invariably chose the appropriate image, action, or response for his children. Lucy's response to finding Narnia rather than the back of the wardrobe is the most natural thing in the book, and though she is surprised by Tumnus, she is not frightened but rather intrigued, and so she goes further in. The progress of the story and of the Chronicles as a whole is "further in," a phrase repeated in "She took a step further in" (p. 6), "Further in, come further in. Right in here" (p. 62), and symbolized in many ways by Edmund's descent into misery and Lucy's ascent to Aslan, and by the physical movement into Narnia and to Cair Paravel on the eastern shore from the western wilds; and finally by the spiritual penetration into the mystery of the incarnation and crucifixion.

Lucy, after a meeting with the faun reminiscent of that of Alice with the White Rabbit, returns to the "real" world, and Lewis cleverly plays off our budding allegiance to Lucy and Narnia, of which we have had just the taste to whet our appetite, against the disbelief of the other children, especially Edmund. Her adventure sets up theirs, and the questioning of her honesty firmly establishes us on her side and certifies Narnia's reality. The parallel scene done with such effect is Edmund's antithetical meeting with Jadis. Lewis uses the children's reaction to climate and food as a barometer of their spiritual condition, most obviously seen later in Eustace who is seasick and then dragonish. Lucy, without a coat, does not react to the cold and is treated to a lovely English tea and chat by the fire. Edmund, who went wrong by going to a "horrid school," finds himself in a strange, cold, quiet place, and throughout his adventures in Narnia he suffers from the cold. His alienation from his brother and sisters is reflected in his lonely rationalizing while awaiting the Witch. Their interview, ironically and almost humorously in contrast to Lucy's with Tumnus, sets up the basic antithesis between greed and pity, egotism and self-sacrifice, which governs the thematic development of the book. Food becomes the principal symbol of the difference between Edmund and Lucy.

The Turkish Delight is another master stroke. Whatever it was in Lewis's childhood, it is in fact now a highly overrated sweet, in my opinion. The name, with its Oriental and romantic overtones, suggests more than the product gives, and Lewis uses this idea simply but with great force in making the Witch appeal first to Edmund's greed and then to his desire for power. "I want a nice boy whom I could bring up as a Prince and who would be King of Narnia when I am gone…. I think I would like to make you the Prince—some day…. You are to be the Prince and—later on—the King; …" (p. 34). The meeting which parallels Lucy's first encounter with Tumnus where he admits his temptation to do her harm and is forgiven, discloses Edmund's ready acceptance of betrayal in order to gain self-satisfaction and power. And with the advent of the Witch, we have Lewis's first maleficent fairy tale creation, caught in the phrase, "You shall know us better hereafter" (p. 28).

In the chapter, "Back on This Side of the Door," Lewis gives us further preparation for the final plunge of all four into the other world and allows Edmund to clinch his horridness and the Professor to prove logically that Narnia is a possibility. The third return is to a landscape now familiar to the reader, and Lewis cleverly shifts the basis of suspense to a larger arena: the Witch versus Aslan, Winter versus Spring, Old Law versus New Law. The children are immediately caught up in a momentous action, an epic struggle beyond their small sphere. Though they have roles to play: Edmund the betrayer, a Judas; Peter the Knight, a St. George against the Dragon; Lucy and Susan as the two Marys; the action has swept them up into great events, the significance of which they can hardly realize. Lewis had used the same technique in all three of the planetary novels, perhaps with greatest success in Perelandra. Here he gains the advantage of deepening and heightening the meaning of the adventure by suiting the tasks more judiciously to the capacities of those on whom they fall. Unlike our reaction to Ransom, who must be canonized and Weston who is dehumanized, with these children, we can place ourselves in the Beavers' paws and see if we can "get through."

The devastation of Tumnus's cave puts the homeliness of the Beavers' den in the delicious peril of the Witch's wrath; and the dinner, a classic in Lewis's fiction and children's fiction at large, is too long to quote but stands as an example of the effective reinforcement of meaning by description. The simple, domestic, homey fare echoes the mood and emphasizes the trust Lewis places at the center of his fellowship of animals and men. Edmund significantly trusts the Witch who appears human but is clearly unnatural ("Her face was white—not merely pale, but white like snow or paper or icing sugar, except for her very red mouth" p. 27). The Beavers reveal that she is nonhuman, suggesting that there isn't a drop of real human blood in her (p. 77). Beaver advises "when you meet anything that's going to be Human and isn't yet, or used to be Human once and isn't now, or ought to be Human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet" (p. 78). The robin which Edmund suggests is a false guide, is true to nature and leads the children to safety. Nature is to be trusted, and it is the unnatural distortion of seasons which symbolizes the Witch's desire to destroy humanity. Freezing represents death and cold represents the inhibition of natural joy.

The choice on Edmund's part to defect initiates his journey to the Witch, paralleled by the children's journey into spring, and the ironic reversal of his expectations of a reward. He gets dry, stale bread instead of Turkish Delight, and his "reward" is played off against the Beavers' true meal. Edmund's policy and guile are appropriately rewarded as is the trust the children place in the Beavers.

The mention of Aslan's name, which has such a pronounced effect on all children, initiates the suspense with which Lewis prepares for his later appearance. By using this device, the mysterious effect of a "sacred" name, Lewis produces an aura of meaning around Aslan which is reinforced by the Beavers' explanation of what he is: "'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you" (p. 76). As the antagonist of the Witch, the savior of Narnia, son of the Emperor beyond the sea, the King of the Beasts, he becomes the focus of our anticipation, as he is for the children, and ultimately the ruling symbol of the Chronicles of Narnia.

It is not for me to try to explain why Aslan works. An individual reader's reaction to an animal figure endowed with human and symbolic qualities is a very personal thing. Who would try to explain why we feel so drawn to Pooh, Tigger, Piglet, Toad, Mole, or even Badger? The essence of their ultimate appeal very probably springs from that personal response lying beyond the reach of analysis or critical dissection and examination. By the time the children hear Aslan's name, we are comfortably settled in a world of talking animals and a maleficent witch. We simply take it on faith that Aslan's very name has the power to affect the children, and even though we may not feel it, Lewis invites us to associate that feeling with one he knows we have all had.

Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don't understand but in the dream it feels as if it had some enormous meaning—either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a night-mare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into the dream again. It was like that now.

                                        (p. 64)

Thus Aslan becomes the embodiment of longing. He is the satisfaction of all longing, the source of all longing. He is good and terrible, huge, solemn, playful, golden, king, son, sun, beast, god, and father. He is nothing other than Lewis's Joy incarnate in a concrete form. And although Lucy and Susan can clutch at and romp with him on his reappearance, he disappears at the end before the festivities at Cair Paravel.

It is Lewis's craftsmanship in molding Aslan to his purpose more than any sources he may have drawn upon, like the Lion of Judah, which produces this astonishing and compelling centerpiece for the Chronicles. We are two thirds of the way through the book before we come face to face, and the extended preparation is justified by the effect of that meeting. Unlike the Witch who appears unannounced and is then described, we find Lewis first describing Aslan's effect and then showing him in fact. This preparation, perhaps symbolizing the praeparatio evangelicum which the book witnesses, is carefully keyed to the shifting balance of power reflected in climatic change. Edmund's cold and lonely journey to the Witch's house, his disfiguring of the stone lion, and his "reward" are placed in contrast to the coming of Father Christmas with rewards for trust in the particular form of utilitarian implements such as, sewing machine and sluice gate for the Beavers and sword, dagger, horn, and potion for the children's use in the coming battle.

Frankly, Father Christmas, for all Lewis's attempts at his rehabilitation as a Christian figure, strikes the wrong note, reminding us all too forcefully of childish pleasures and frivolous fantasies. In the freshly created newness of Narnia, he brings us with a shock back to reality, breaking the spell, if only momentarily.⁵ It may be our fault as modern readers who associate St. Nicholas with the commercial Santa, but the fact remains that there is a momentary bump even though Lewis makes the occasion rather solemn and the gifts useful.

Lewis's descriptive power is at its height in the noises and sights of spring. Symbolically the turning point, the thematic shift of power from the Witch to Aslan, it is the heart of the book's beauty, and significantly it is Edmund who, tied to the dwarf and driven along, first sees it.

In the wide glades there were primroses. A light breeze sprang up which scattered drops of moisture from the swaying branches and carried cool, delicious scents against the faces of the travellers. The trees began to come fully alive.

                                        (p. 118)

Then the others feel it, too.

They walked on in silence drinking it all in, passing through patches of warm sunlight into cool, green thickets and out again into wide mossy glades where tall elms raised the leafy roof far overhead, and then into dense masses of flowering currant and among hawthorn bushes where the sweet smell was almost overpowering.

                                   (pp. 119-120)

Edmund, having experienced the silence of the stone courtyard with its immobilized creatures, is first to hear the change.

A strange, sweet, rustling, chattering noise—and yet not so strange, for he knew he'd heard it before—if only he could remember where! Then all at once he did remember. It was the noise of running water. All round them, though out of sight, there were streams chattering, murmuring, bubbling, splashing and even (in the distance) roaring. And his heart gave a great leap (though he hardly knew why) when he realized that the frost was over.

                                      (p. 114)

Edmund's rebirth, kindled on the spark of his pity for the stone figures who had recently been celebrating Christmas, moves through the rebirth ritual to his near death and rescue, twice repeated. Aslan saves his soul, Lucy heals his body.

The other children reach Aslan, portrayed as a medieval king in his cloth of gold pavilion and surrounded by his courtiers, in this instance, centaurs, dryads, unicorns, and the like. Battle is joined, Peter winning his knighthood by killing the wolf Maugrim. As we move further in, the conflict takes on deeper and more clearly spiritual significance. This point is a crucial one, for here the message is closest to the surface and most nearly at the center of focus. Often before when Lewis reached his point as in Out of the Silent Planet at Meldilorn or the debate of Weston with the Lady and Ransom in Perelandra and later the apocalyptic conclusion of That Hideous Strength, the message eluded his control and declaiming itself, seized the lead, and the delicate balance of the creative structure wavered. Here, by keeping the theme firmly grounded in the children, who are our link with deeper meaning and our window on inner truth, he keeps the significance of Aslan's action in perspective. It is for Edmund's sake that Aslan suffers, and Edmund, barely deserving such sacrifice, makes Lewis's point absolutely clear. It is Susan's and Lucy's grief we feel, and their joy when Aslan appears transformed. It is the understatement which Lewis achieves here in his picture of sacrifice and redemption which affects us so keenly. The Deeper Magic of mercy triumphs over the Deep Magic of the law of justice. But solemn as the outcome is, it follows explanation with a celestial romp. Lewis thus preserves the special quality of Aslan: playful but solemn.

There are only a few passages in Lewis's fiction such as the creation of Narnia in The Magician's Nephew and the apocalypse of The Last Battle, which equal the organic sanctity of meaning of the chapter titled "Deeper Magic from before the Dawn of Time." By organic sanctity of meaning, I refer to the fusion of meaning with structure which makes the implicit deeper significance an inescapable reality in the experience of reading such passages. The form and meaning are so organically fused that our inhibitions are dispelled and the clamor for rational proof by the intellect totally quieted. The meaning sanctifies the form and the form the meaning, lifting the whole experience beyond pleasing instruction to belief. It is here that Lewis achieves the enviable result of making the reader feel the Joy, the sublimely indefinable exaltation of the spirit, which he sought throughout his life.

From Aslan's transformation to the end, the tension is released, and we move back gradually to the bare room with the wardrobe. The Witch's death, now a foregone expectation, is followed by the release of the captives, containing one of Lewis's finest descriptive touches, the description of the stone lion's release. "Then a tiny streak of gold began to run along his white marble back—then it spread—then the colour seemed to lick all over him as the flame licks all over a bit of paper—then, while his hind-quarters were still obviously stone the lion shook his mane and all the heavy, stony folds rippled into living hair" (p. 165). We meet the giant Rumblebuffin, one of Lewis's more original creations, a giant with character, and we see the children safely enthroned. The anticlimax lets us gently back to earth and leaves us with the expectation of further adventures.

Notes

1. Letters, p. 203, February 20, 1943, to Sister Penelope.

2. Haigh, pp. 250, 255.

3. Haigh, Chapter IV, "The Children's Fantasy."

4. C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (New York: Macmillan, 1974). All references to the Chronicles in the text are to Macmillan editions.

5. Letters, p. 279, September 2, 1957, to Jane Gaskell. Lewis counsels her to do nothing which would wake the reader or bring him back with a 'bump' to the common reality.

Kenneth Marantz (review date 5 January 1984)

SOURCE: Marantz, Kenneth. Review of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis, illustrated by Michael Hague. School Library Journal 30, no. 5 (5 January 1984): 79.

Gr. 3-Up—This first volume [The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ], originally published in 1950, of the seven-book Chronicles of Narnia, should serve admirably to introduce the four children who find refuge from mundane existence in the make-believe land of Narnia. The quartet of pre-adolescents face both physical dangers and ethical quagmires as they assist the Great Lion Aslan in overcoming the White Witch and her demons. The believability of the children in action and speech makes the magic of the story real and the telling is compelling, even on rereading. So why a fresh edition? Obviously to capitalize on Michael Hague's popularity as an illustrator. He contributes 13 paintings that provide glimpses of some of the juicier pieces of action. His work is puzzling: he can create a gnarled tree trunk that Rack-ham would be proud of, but he seems unable to instill character into his children. His reindeer and beavers are convincing in anatomy and animation; but he is unconvincing, for the most part, in setting characters into the landscape. The heavy black lines which surround most of the figures make them seem two-dimensional, posed in isolation and then stuck into the scene. But the design of this edition is elegant. Wide margins, large type face and fine line ornaments top and bottom of pages make the story flow even smoother. The gold-stamped red cloth binding and pumpkin colored endpapers provide a regal setting for this contemporary classic.

Additional coverage of Lewis's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vols. 3, 39; Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography & Resources, Vol. 2; Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vols. 15, 16; British Writers Supplement, Vol. 3; Children's Literature Review, Vols. 3, 27; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1945-1960; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 81-84; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 33, 71, 132; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 1, 3, 6, 14, 27, 124; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 15, 100, 160, 255; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British Edition; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors, Novelists, Popular Fiction and Genre Authors; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Junior DISCovering Authors; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 2; Literature Resource Center; Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, Eds. 1, 2; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Major 21st-Century Writers, Ed. 2005; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Children's Writers, Vol. 5; St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers; St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, Ed. 4; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers; Science Fiction Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Something about the Author, Vols. 13, 100; Supernatural Fiction Writers, Vol. 1; Twayne's English Authors; World Literature Criticism; Writers for Children; and Writers for Young Adults.

FURTHER READING

Bibliography

Walsh, Chad. "Bibliography." In The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis, pp. 253-61. New York, N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

Presents a comprehensive index of Lewis's works and supplies secondary resources concerning his life and career.

Criticism

Elick, Catherine L. "Animal Carnivals: A Bakhtinian Reading of C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew and P. L. Travers's Mary Poppins." Style 35, no. 3 (fall 2001): 454-71.

Explores Lewis's The Magician's Nephew and Travers's Mary Poppins with regard to Mikhail Bakhtin's literary theories of insurrection and the carnival-like atmosphere in fiction novels.

Howard, Thomas. "Narnia: The Forgotten Country." In The Achievement of C. S. Lewis, pp. 21-52. Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1980.

Makes correlations between faith and acceptance in Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia and examines the realistic elements of Lewis's fantasy tales.

Matheson, Sue. "C. S. Lewis and the Lion: Primitivism and Archetype in the Chronicles of Narnia." Mythlore 15, no. 1 (autumn 1988): 13-18.

Analyzes the symbolic and allegorical aspects of The Chronicles of Narnia.

Patterson, Nancy-Lou. "The Bolt of Tash: The Figure of Satan in C. S. Lewis's The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle." Mythlore 16, no. 4 (summer 1990): 23-6.

Studies Aslan's role as a deity in The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle, based on the diverse nature of the biblical Old and New Testaments.