Notes
Introduction
1. Walter Hooper, “C. S. Lewis,” The Franciscan, 9 (September 1967), 173.
2. C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 3rd ed. (New York: Odyssey,
1972), p. 13.
3. “On Stories,” in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, ed. Walter Hooper (London:
Bles, 1966), p. 19.
4. “Psycho-Analysis
and Literary Criticism,” in Selected
Literary Essays, ed. Walter
Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1969), p. 286.
5. See
Lewis’s Preface to Mere Christianity,
pp. 5-6. The radio talks, delivered on the
BBC in 1941, 1942, and 1944, were published in three volumes: Broadcast Talks [in America The Case for Christianity] (London:
Bles, 1942); Christian Behaviour
(London: Bles, 1943); Beyond Personality
(London: Bless, 1944).
6. As for example, this use of the Bible by
Kathryn A. Lindskoog in commenting on the adventures of Shasta in The Horse and His Boy: “Aslan deals with
each individual in a unique way to bring him to the same place. But he does not
give an account of his relationship with any one person to any other person.
When asked, he always answers, ‘I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell
no-one any story but his own.’ As Christ said when asked ‘What about this
man?’, ‘. . . what is that to you? Follow me!’ (John 21:22, RSV)”—The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973), pp. 65-66. [ß p. 137]
Chapter 1—Reading with the
Heart
1. A
Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 1.
2. See especially Of Other Worlds, pp. 24-28, 36-37.
3. Lee T. Lemon, A Glossary for the Study of English (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1971), p. 4.
4. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams
(London: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 43. Lewis cites this essay approvingly
in “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” in Of Other Worlds, pp. 26-27.
5. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” pp. 43, 71.
6. Holman, A
Handbook to Literature, p. 219.
7. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” p. 60.
8. George MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination,”
in A Dish of Orts: Chiefly Papers on the
Imagination, and on Shakespeare, Enlarged Edition (London: Sampson Low
Martson and Company, 1893), p. 314. Thus the spell in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” is broken momentarily when Lewis
forgets his rule about invisibility. Spears in the hands of the Dufflepuds are
invisible—“They get visible when they leave us” (p. 120). Three pages later,
however, plates and dishes in their hands are not invisible: “It was very funny
to see the plates and dishes coming to the table and not to see anyone carrying
them” (p. 123).
9. Charles A. Brady, “Finding God in Narnia,” America, 27 October 1956, p. 104.
10. John W. Montgomery, “The Chronicles of
Narnia and the Adolescent Reader,” Journal
of Religious Education, 54 (September-October 1959), 423 [reprinted in Myth, Allegory and Gospel, ed. John W.
Montgomery (Minneapolis: Bethany Fellowship, 1974)]. Similarly, M. S. Crouch,
“The Chronicles of Narnia,” The Junior
Bookshelf, 20 (November 1956), 246.
11. MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination,” p.
317.
12. See An
Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp.
41-44 and Miracles (London: Bles,
1947), p. 161n [Ch. 15].
13. Preface to The Pilgrim’s Regress, 3rd ed. (London: Bles, 1943), p.
13.
14.
Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. W. H. Lewis (London: Bles, 1966), p.
283.
15. MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination,” pp.
321-22.
16. I have found the writings of Leland Ryken on
archetypal criticism very helpful. See especially the third chapter of his
forthcoming book, Triumphs of the
Imagination: Literature in Christian Perspective (Downers Grove, Ill.:
InterVarsity Press).
17. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1957), p. 99. Lewis often [ß p. 138]
gives attention to archetypes in his own criticism, especially in A Preface to Paradise Lost and Spenser’s Images of Life, ed. Alastair
Fowler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).
18. Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), p. 15; The
Educated Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), p. 55.
One scholar suggests that the monomyth is “the center of reality as perceived
by creative men in all ages and nations and under a number of forms of
expression—ritual, myth, scripture, dream, even history. . . . There is little
doubt that the myth pattern does embody, in a simple and usable form, a
principle of reality so vast as to have implications for nearly every area of
life”—Charles Moorman, A Knyght There
Was: The Evolution of the Knight in Literature (Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1967), p. 33. Frye sees the identity theme as more inclusive
than, even as encompassing, the two other well-known versions of the
“monomyth,” that of the earth mother, as proposed by Robert Graves—The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of
Poetic Myth (London: Faber and Faber, 1948)—and that of the hero, as
advocated by Joseph Campbell in The Hero
with a Thousand Faces, Bollingen Series XVII (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1949). Frye’s literary approach to archetypes would also, I
think, be more acceptable to Lewis than the more psychological approaches of
Graves and Campbell.
19. See “Myth Became Fact,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and
Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), pp. 66-67. Lewis
mentions in several places his belief that God used the myths of the pagans as
a prefiguring of or preparation for Christianity—see especially “Religion without
Dogma?” in God in the Dock, p. 132,
and Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My
Early Life (London: Bles, 1955), pp. 64-65, 221-22 [Chs. 4, 15].
Archetypes, then, as the building blocks out of which myths are constructed,
are very important because they may have been implanted within us by God: Lewis
speculates, in commenting on Jung’s theories about a universal subconscious,
that “the mystery of primordial images is deeper, their origin more remote,
their cave more hid, their fountain less accessible than those suspect who have
yet dug deepest” (“Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism,” in Selected Literary Essays, p. 300).
20. Thus the index prepared for the book in the
Marion E. Wade Collection at Wheaton College includes an entry for “Satan”
which lists the various appearances of the White Witch.
21. According to Jewish legend, Lilith was the
first wife of Adam, created with him from the dust of the earth. As Adam’s
apparent coequal, Lilith refused to be subordinate and obedient to Adam or to
bear children for him. Eventually she ran away [ß p. 139]
and became the enemy and oppressor of men, children, and women who accept their
“proper” role. For a good summary, see Glen GoodKnight, “Lilith in Narnia,” in Narnia Conference Proceedings (Maywood,
Calif.: The Mythopoetic Society, 1970), pp. 15-19.
22. In The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Aslan attacks the Witch on page 174; page
175 says specifically that the Witch is dead. In Prince Caspian, on the other hand, the Hag argues she is still
alive—not, however, because she is the Devil but because she is a witch: “Who
ever heard of a witch that really died? You can always get them back” (p. 165).
The account of the Witch in The
Magician’s Nephew (where her origin in Charn does not mention Lilithian
ancestry and where she is said to have gained immortality by eating one of the
silver apples) does not correspond with the details in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
23. From an unpublished letter to Mr. Kinter, 30
July 1954, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. I am grateful to the trustees
of the estate of C. S. Lewis for permission to quote from this letter.
24. Some readers of the Chronicles have objected
to the inclusion of Father Christmas in the story. Roger Lancelyn Green, for
example, urged Lewis to omit him as somehow “breaking the magic for a moment:
he still does not seem to fit quite comfortably into his place” (Roger Lancelyn
Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A
Biography [London: Collins, 1974], p. 241; similarly, Clyde S. Kilby, The Christian World of C. S. Lewis
[Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964], p. 145). The inclusion of Christmas itself,
however, would seem to be the more basic inconsistency. Christmas celebrates
the birth of Christ in his early incarnation. To be true to his fantasy world, Lewis
should perhaps have created a Narnian equivalent to our Christmas instead of
taking it into Narnia.
25. M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 3rd ed. (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 22, and Holman, A Handbook to Literature, p. 309.
26. John Alexander, “What is Narnia Teaching My
Kids?”, The Other Side, July 1977,
pp. 38-42.
1. “It All Began with a Picture . . . ,” in Of Other Worlds, p. 42. See also Of Other Worlds, pp. 32 and 36. A useful,
authoritative account of the composition and publication of the Chronicles can
be found in Green and Hooper, C. S.
Lewis: A Biography, pp. 236-56. [ß p. 140]
2.
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, Volume
III of the Oxford History of English
Literature, ed. F. P. Wilson and Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1954), p. 8.
3. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” pp. 70-71.
4. Out
of the Silent Planet (London: John Lane, 1938), p. 157 [Ch. 20].
5.
That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (London:
John Lane, 1945), p. 177 [Ch. 7].
6. The
Abolition of Man (New York:
Macmillan, 1947), p. 12.
7. “The Poison of Subjectivism,” in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), p. 75.
8. Ibid., p. 73.
Chapter 3—“Finding Out by
Experience”
1. “Note” added to the American edition of Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956;
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1957), p. 313.
2. Edith Hamilton, Mythology (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1942), pp. 73-74.
Chapter 4—“Putting the Clock
Back”
1. For several details in this paragraph, see
Howard R. Patch, The Other World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1950).
2. Cf. also, “We are like eggs at present. And
we cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be
hatched or go bad” (Mere Christianity,
p. 169).
3. Lewis made the same point in his first prose
work, The Pilgrim’s Regress (London:
J. M. Dent, 1933). The title is a play on The
Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (1678). Achievement of Bunyan’s spiritual
“progress,” Lewis is suggesting, first requires a “regress,” doing an about
turn and returning to the right road.
4. See The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, pp. 102-3, and Prince Caspian, pp. 152-54, 192-98, and 205-6, respectively.
5. There are also myths about round worlds in
Narnia (The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,”
p. 201) and, before the appearance of the four children, myths about humans (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
p.12). [ß p. 141]
6. Further confirmation that the story Lucy read
in the Magician’s Book is the story of Christ is the similarity of this line to
the concluding lines of Chapter 10, where Aslan says to Lucy about the story,
“I will tell it to you for years and years.”
7. Surprised
by Joy, pp. 23-24 [Ch. 1]. Longing in the Chronicles is discussed at
greater length in an essay by Eliane Tixier, “Imagination Baptized, or
‘Holiness’ in the Chronicles of Narnia,” in The
Longing for a Form: Essays on the Fiction of C. S. Lewis, ed. Peter J.
Schakel (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1977), pp. 136-58. The
fullest discussion of Longing, or Sehnsucht,
is by Corbin Scott Carnell, Bright Shadow
of Reality: C. S. Lewis and the Feeling Intellect (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1974).
8. “Is Progress Possible?”, in God in the Dock, pp. 311-16.
Chapter 5—“You Must Use the
Map”
1. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 97.
2. See also p. 200. In a paper suggesting
several sources for The Silver Chair
and relating them to the theme of knowledge, John D. Cox finds an important
antecedent for the Witch in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene
(“Epistemological Release in The Silver
Chair,” in The Longing for a Form,
pp. 161-62).
3. See The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, p. 77, and The Magician’s Nephew, pp. 100-1 and 174-75.
Chapter 6—“Throwing Up the
Sponge”
1. “The
Weight of Glory” and Other Addresses (New York: Macmillan, 1949), p. 4.
2. Surprised
by Joy, pp. 74-75 [Ch. 5].
Chapter 7—“Putting the Human
Machine Right”
1. Adapted from Leland Ryken, The Literature of the Bible (Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 1974), p. 23.
2. Lewis seems to have had in mind intemperate
curiosity of the type discussed by Howard Schultz in Milton and Forbidden [ß p. 142] Knowledge (New York: Modern Language
Association of America, 1955), pp. 1-10. Digory was “wild with curiosity” (p.
49) and apparently he should have realized that his desire to ring the bell was
wrong. There would seem, however, to be a very thin line dividing such
irresponsible inquisitiveness from Reepicheep’s desire to enter the blackness
surrounding the Dark Island. I cannot help thinking that if Reepicheep had come
upon the golden bell in The Voyage of the
“Dawn Treader,” he would have said, and seemed right in saying, “Here is as
great an adventure as ever I heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little
impeachment of all our honours” (p. 152).
3. In one of the most interesting sections of his
essay “C. S. Lewis’s Narnia and the ‘Grand Design’” (in The Longing for a Form, pp. 119-35), Charles A. Huttar compares
Lewis’s creation story to the accounts in Genesis, Paradise Lost, Lucretius, and Ovid.
4. The lion’s song also reflects the biblical
idea of creation by the Word (see John 1: 1-3).
5. The “Outline of Narnian History” was drawn
up by Lewis after he completed the seven stories. He gave it in manuscript form
to Walter Hooper, who has included it in his essay, “Past Watchful Dragons: The
Fairy Tales of C. S. Lewis,” a valuable and informative essay on the
composition and meaning of the Chronicles—in Imagination and the Spirit: Essays
in Literature and the Christian Faith Presented to Clyde S. Kilby, ed.
Charles A. Huttar (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), pp. 298-301.
6. There is some debate over the “correct”
order for reading the Chronicles. Some readers of Lewis prefer that The Magician’s Nephew be read before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so
that the reader may become familiar with the origins of Narnia and of the
wardrobe. Clyde S. Kilby treats them in that order in The Christian World of C. S. Lewis, p. 117, and Anne Arnott
suggests it in The Secret Country of C.
S. Lewis (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), p. 125. Lewis himself gave
qualified approval to it in an unpublished letter (to Laurence Krieg, 22 April
1957). The only reason for reading The
Magician’s Nephew first, however, is for the chronological sequence of
events, and that, as every storyteller knows, is quite unimportant as a reason.
Often the early events in a sequence have a greater impact or effect as a
flashback, told after later events which provide background and establish
perspective. So it is, I believe, with the Chronicles. The artistry, the
archetypes, and the pattern of Christian thought all make it preferable to read
the books in the order of their publication.
Several artistic effects in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are undercut when one
of
the other books is read before it. [ß p. 143]
The careful use of details to enable readers to share Lucy’s initial experience
in Narnia and the equally careful buildup before Aslan’s name is mentioned work
best and have their fullest impact if this book is one’s introduction to
Narnia. The first reference to Aslan is by Mr. Beaver, when he meets the
children in the woods: “They say Aslan is on the move—perhaps has already
landed.” The passage, significantly, assumes that the readers have not already
read other books about Narnia: “And now a very curious thing happened. None of
the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver
had spoken these words everyone felt quite different” (p. 64). Of course no
other books were written—or even planned, apparently—when these words were
written. But the fact that other books came later, filling in previous events,
does not alter the artistry of the first book.
The introduction to the lion is not at all the same,
artistically or emotionally, in The
Magician’s Nephew: it assumes, on the
contrary, that readers do have prior knowledge of him. When the voice first
begins to sing on page 98, Lewis emphasizes the beauty, not the mysteriousness,
of it. And when the sun rises and the singer becomes visible, the story says
simply, “It was a Lion. Huge, shaggy, and bright it stood facing the risen sun”
(p. 102). There is no buildup like “Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts?
Aslan is a lion—the Lion, the great
Lion” and no introduction to him as “the son of the great
Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea” as there is in The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (p. 75); the narrator seems to assume
that readers already know who the lion
is. Indeed, Lewis never does bother to identify him until the animals, as soon
as they are given the gift of speech, say his name—they simply know it.
Artistically, then, The Magician’s Nephew
fits in better as a flashback, filling in the background of places and people
already known, than as a first book introducing those places and people.
The archetypal pattern of The Magician’s Nephew also fits better as sixth than as first in
the
series. The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle together depict through
interlocking images a complete seasonal cycle which mirrors the full cycle of
Narnian history. The autumn/spring story of The
Magician’s Nephew complements the winter/summer story of The Last Battle; the symbolism
reinforces the plot detail in unifying the beginning of Narnia with the end.
This archetypal pattern is most effective if The Magician’s Nephew and The
Last Battle are read together: the immediate juxtaposition of the two books
brings out well the completeness and unity of Narnian history. And that
completeness, the point that the Narnian world has a beginning and an ending,
along with a creator who existed before the beginning and will continue to
exist after the ending, is a central part of [ß p. 144]
the meaning of the stories, a part that is more easily missed is five other
books separate The Magician’s Nephew
from The Last Battle.
Finally, the order in which the Christian ideas are presented is
most effective if the
Chronicles are read in the
order of publication. The situation is parallel to that of Mere Christianity. The discussion of “Christian Behaviour” could
not have the same meaning it has now if it were the opening section of Mere Christianity. Coming as it does
after the sections on “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the
Universe” and “What Christians Believe,” it grows out of the premises about
law, grace, and faith laid out in the earlier sections. So it is, in a less
tightly logical way, for the Chronicles of Narnia. When The Magician’s Nephew is read first, the theme of morality loses
the context the earlier books established. The themes of law, faith, growth,
and divine guidance and care in the earlier books provide a Christian basis for
the moral instruction; the morality grows out of faith, not just out of a
desire to “do better.”
Chapter
8—“My True Country”
1. “Is Progress Possible?”, in God in the Dock, p. 314.
2. Ibid.,
p. 313.
3. “Cross-Examination,” in God in the Dock, p. 265.
4. “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Dock, p. 89.
5. Although Lewis’s judgment scene resembles
that of Mathew 25, it may have had another source as well. Professor Kirke
says, late in the book, “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato” (p. 170), and the
judgment scene, at least, is in Plato. In the Phaedo (113) Plato writes that “when the dead come to the place
whither the spirit conveys each, first the judges divide them into those who
have lived well and piously, and those who have not.” And in The Republic (Book X) the judges, as
they divided the dead, “gave judgment, and, according to the judgment, they
commanded the just men to proceed to the right and upwards through heaven . . .
; the unjust they sent down to the left.” See Great Dialogues of Plato, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, ed. Eric
Warmington and Philip G. Rouse (New York: The New American Library, 1956), pp.
517 and 415. The parallels to Plato were first pointed out by Nathan C. Starr
in a paper, “Eschatology in C. S. Lewis’s The
Last Battle,” presented at the convention of the Modern Language
Association of America, December, 1975.
6. Jadis’s description of the fall of Charnian
civilization in The Magician’s Nephew
is a story of autumn—the ultimate [ß p. 145]
dissolution of that world occurs while the children are in Narnia and is not
actually a part of the story. The Last
Battle goes further, to depict the total destruction of the Narnian world,
thus a story of winter.
7. The
Last Battle has been compared to the prophecies regarding the end times in
the Bible. “In The Last Battle the
Biblical story of the end of human history is graphically portrayed: the
Antichrist, the battle of Armegeddon, death . . . , the General Resurrection,
and the consummation of the Plan of Redemption in a New Heaven and a New Earth”
(Montgomery, “The Chronicles of Narnia and the Adolescent Reader,” p. 424). The Last Battle is an apocalyptic story,
one that deals with end times, and that, even without Lewis’s familiarity with
the Bible, would give it resemblances to the biblical account. The story draws
upon Matthew 24 and 25, with their warnings of false Christs who will deceive
many, false prophets, war and tribulation, the darkening of the sun, moon, and
stars, the coming of Christ, and the final judgment. But there is no Antichrist
figure in The Last Battle: Shift is
not powerful enough and Tash does not lead the opposition to Aslan or
participate as leader of the evil forces in the final battle. Tash is opposite
to Aslan (p. 165) but he does not oppose Aslan: the Calormenes invade Narnia
out of their own selfish desires, not at Tash’s urgings. The Last Battle, one should conclude, does not portray the end of
human history: it portrays the end of Narnian history. It speaks to our world,
as any apocalyptic myth does; but to look for parallels and allegories is to
raise the wrong questions about it. (See Walter Hooper, “Narnia: The Author,
the Critics, and the Tale,” in The
Longing for a Form, pp. 113-18.)
8. Tash does not seem to be the Devil, but a
pagan god, like Baal in the Old Testament or Ungit in Till We Have Faces. The worship of Tash, therefore, includes what
Lewis in his essay “Religion without Dogma?” calls “the obscenities and
cruelties of paganism” (God in the Dock,
p. 143). In our world such gods are not real, and even in Narnia the Lamb says,
“I don’t believe there’s any such person as Tash” (p. 31). But in Narnia other
mythical figures have turned out to be real, and so does Tash (pp. 81-83).
9. Hooper, “Narnia: The Author, the Critics,
and the Tale,” pp. 117-18.
1. Walter Hooper, Preface to God in the Dock, p. 12.
2. In a footnote to The Abolition of Man, Lewis mentions that the Hebrew word emeth means “truth” or “faithfulness”: “Emeth [ß p. 146]
is that which does not deceive, does not ‘give,’ does not change, that which
holds water” (pp. 11-12n).
3. Work on this book was completed before
publication of Gilbert Meilaender’s fine study The Taste for the Other: The Social and Ethical Thought of C. S. Lewis
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), so that I was not able to profit from his
consideration of Lewis’s views of faith and grace on pages 36-38. He shows that
the lack of emphasis on the means of salvation is consistent with Lewis’s
Anglo-Catholic theology: “It is the vision of God, not justification by faith,
which is the cornerstone of his theological system” (p. 38). Meilaender’s
discussion of “pilgrimage” and morality also covers in a valuable way themes
examined in this book.
4. Montgomery, “The Chronicles of Narnia and
the Adolescent Reader,” pp. 423, 427. [ß p. 147]