The seven volumes of this series include (in the order finally preferred by the author) The Magician’s Nephew (1955), The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), The Horse and His Boy (1954), Prince Caspian (1951), The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), The Silver Chair (1953), and The Last Battle (1956). The books are examples of Christian allegory for young adult readers.
Although The Magician’s Nephew was not written first, it provides the “backstory” that prepares readers to better enjoy The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the most famous volume in the series. Instead of the four Pevensie children, readers are introduced to Polly Plummer and Digory Kirke, two children living in adjoining row houses in London.
One day, they enter an old door and find themselves in a nicely furnished study with Digory’s uncle, Andrew Ketterley. He is delighted to have visitors; Uncle Andrew, it turns out, is a magician. He inherited a box of magic from his dying godmother, and with it he has constructed yellow rings to take their bearers to another world and green rings to bring them back.
Digory and Polly travel through the Wood Between the Worlds, a kind of pleasant switching yard filled with trees and a pool for each of the innumerable worlds beyond the wood. From there, they begin exploring these other worlds, and in the very first one, through their curiosity, they awaken a spellbound witch-queen, Jadis. She wants a living world to rule, and so she follows them back to Uncle Andrew’s study.
C. S. Lewis
Digory realizes he has the power to get her away from this world by touching her as he puts on his yellow ring. Polly joins him, but when they leave through the power of the rings, they bring with them not only the witch but also the horse Strawberry she is riding, Uncle Andrew, and the cabby who owns the horse. In the wood again, they leap into another pool, planning to strand the witch in her old world.
They arrive instead in an empty world. The cabby sings a hymn to keep their spirits up, but soon it is eclipsed by a greater song, and the empty world is slowly transformed into Narnia. They are initially terrified to see that the singer who has brought about this transformation is a huge lion; as he keeps singing, however, more and more of the world comes to life, including a lamppost that grows from a piece of one the witch had brought along as a weapon. She runs away in terror, and the children see the lion select pairs of beasts, dwarves, satyrs, and other creatures as his followers. When all is ready he breathes over Narnia, endowing these beasts with the gift of speech.
Digory seeks out Aslan, as the lion is called, hoping that this lion can somehow save Digory’s mother, who is dying. Aslan charges Digory with the task of bringing a fruit from a distant garden so that the seed may be planted in Narnia to fend off the witch’s power. Digory succeeds in finding the garden and plucking the apple, but the witch is there as well, and she tempts him to eat the apple himself. The boy survives this temptation and takes the fruit to Aslan, who plants it. The tree grows up immediately, and Aslan gives Digory an apple from it for his mother.
Digory obeys Aslan’s instructions to dispose of the apple core and bury the magic rings. His mother recovers, and the seeds in the core grow into a fine tree that, many years later, provides the wood to build a wardrobe with the power to bring children to Narnia—the very wardrobe that first brings the Pevensie children to Narnia after Jadis has cast her frozen spell over the enchanted world of the Talking Beasts.
The pattern of the other books in the series is apparent in this volume: innocent curiosity or pressing need brings unwitting children into contact with some magical connection to Narnia, and there the children have wonderful heroic adventures. Along the way, Aslan, an allegorical symbol of Christ, enacts or brings about some element of Christian doctrine: the creation, Garden of Eden, and temptation of man in The Magician’s Nephew; the crucifixion and resurrection in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; punishment of sin in The Horse and His Boy; renewal of faith (or perhaps the second coming) and conquest of evil in Prince Caspian; baptism in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; rebirth in Christ in The Silver Chair; and the end of the world and final judgment in The Last Battle.
The main characters change slightly from story to story. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy Pevensie enter Narnia and stay for a lengthy adventure, ruling jointly as kings and queens, although no time has passed on Earth when they return. Then the action of The Horse and His Boy occurs entirely in Narnia, so no magic device is required to transport human children there; instead, the action restores Prince Cor to the royal family of Archenland with the help of Queen Susan, King Edmund, and Queen Lucy.
In Prince Caspian, the story opens one Earth year after the children discovered the wardrobe’s magic power, but this time they are at a train station when they are summoned back to Caer Paravel, their castle in Narnia, where so many years have passed that their kingdom has fallen into ruin and the true heir has been exiled.
A new protagonist is introduced in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: Eustace Clarence Scrubb, a cousin of the Pevensies. This time, while Edmund and Lucy are visiting Eustace (Peter and Susan having grown a bit too old to go to Narnia), a picture of a ship in the playroom draws the three children back to Narnia. While they are there helping Caspian search to the east for Aslan’s home, Eustace’s greed turns him into a dragon, and only Aslan can restore him.
Then in The Silver Chair, another new protagonist enters the story when Eustace, on his own, draws his schoolmate Jill Pole into Narnia as they pass through an ordinary door in the wall around their campus. They rescue Prince Rilian from his imprisonment in the chair of the title.
Finally, in The Last Battle, Eustace and Jill are summoned to Narnia by Prince Tirian, the seventh descendant of King Rilian, and at a climactic moment Digory, Polly, Peter, Edmund, and Lucy join them (but not Susan, who is “no longer a friend to Narnia”). In the very end, they learn that their lives on Earth have ended in a terrible railway accident and that now they will stay with Aslan forever.
In each story, the narrator relates the events from a third-person omniscient point of view, although the narrator occasionally uses a self-referential pronoun such as “I.” The tone of the narration is consistently friendly, seasoned with direct addresses to readers—using “you”—about how they would feel in a similar situation, for example.
The allegorical treatment of Christian concepts is accomplished without real-world references to churches or particular religions; the children are always at play, at school, or on the way to school when they enter Narnia, and they are always engaged in the exercise of their imaginations when they cross into this other world. Aslan is never described as a divinity, but clearly he possesses divine and redemptive powers, as well as near-infinite mercy, for those who have faith in him.
Taken as a whole, Lewis’s allegory expands somewhat on the biblical story of creation, since he is explaining how not just the world or the universe came into being but also how multiple universes coexist in space and time, all under the care of a divine creator.
Interestingly, artistic creativity plays a key role in Aslan’s powers: He sings Narnia into existence, shaping matter through his musical art, in a manner similar to the way J. R. R. Tolkien describes Eru composing the music that creates the realm of space and time in The Silmarillion. Lewis and Tolkien were both Inklings, and Tolkien was instrumental in reconverting Lewis to Christianity—a connection that may be apparent in their use of a similar literary metaphor.
Bibliography
Holbrook, David. The Skeleton in the Wardrobe: C. S. Lewis’s Fantasies: A Phenomenological Study. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1991.
Manlove, Colin. The Chronicles of Narnia. The Patterning of a Fantastic World. New York: Twayne, 1993.
Myers, Doris T. “Growing in Grace: The Anglican Spiritual Style in The Chronicles of Narnia.” In The Pilgrim’s Guide: C. S. Lewis and the Art of Witness. Edited by David Mills. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmanns, 1998, 185–202.
Schakel, Peter J. “The ‘Correct’ Order for Reading The Chronicles of Narnia,” Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 23 (Spring 2001): 53–64.
Categories: British Literature, Children's Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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