A third of the way into The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the Pevensie children come across two friendly beavers named, appropriately enough, Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. Mr. Beaver is the first person to mention the only character to appear in all seven Narnia books: Aslan the Lion. Aslan won’t appear until the final third of the book, but he’s clearly the most important person in it. As Mr. Beaver says, Aslan—not the children—is the one who will fix what’s wrong with Narnia.
Lewis said he was struggling to find Narnia’s direction until, “…suddenly Aslan came bounding into it.” Aslan is, in many ways, the beating heart at the center of the Narnia stories, the literal deus who shows up ex machina in more than one tale, and he provides at some times a sort of safety net, or an introduction to greater danger, or words of affirmation or rebuke, depending on what a character needs at the moment.
So where did the great Lion come from?
(Lewis always capitalizes “Lion” when referring to Aslan as opposed to other large cats, because he’s something more than a lion.) “I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time,” Lewis wrote. “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 six other Narnian stories in after Him.”
There are a variety of likely influences. The fact that Lewis capitalizes “He” as well as “Lion” is a clear clue of how Lewis feels about this particular Lion. In Christian symbology, Jesus is said to be the “Lion of Judah.” If Lewis was looking for the best animal to represent Jesus in a world of talking animals, it would almost certainly be a lion or a lamb.
Lewis would make an important distinction here. He never thought of Aslan as symbolic of Jesus. Lewis had strong feelings about people calling Narnia an allegory (as someone whose scholastic career had been widely applauded because of a book about allegory, this is not surprising). For instance, he pointed out the difference between a character from The Pilgrim’s Progress (an actual allegory) and Aslan: “If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair represents despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality, however, he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia, and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’ This is not allegory at all.”
And, when a young mother wrote that her son Laurence was concerned that he “loved Aslan more than Jesus” Lewis didn’t respond by saying “oh it’s just a metaphor.” He said that Laurence, “can’t really love Aslan more than Jesus, even if he feels that’s what he is doing. For the things he loves Aslan for doing or saying are simply the things Jesus really did and said. So that when Laurence thinks he is loving Aslan, he is really loving Jesus: and perhaps loving Him more than he ever did before.”
More than once Lewis refers to his type of fiction as “supposal”…an early term not unlike what we say when we call science fiction and fantasy “speculative fiction.” He uses this term to talk about not only Narnia but the space trilogy as well. “The Incarnation of Christ in another world is mere supposal: but granted the supposition, He would really have been a physical object in that world as He was in Palestine and His death on the Stone Table would have been a physical event no less than his death on Calvary.”
The point being that Aslan is not representative of Jesus, and he’s not a metaphor or allegory for Jesus. For Lewis, Aslan is Jesus…the same God who incarnated in our world into the flesh-and-blood son of Mary incarnated in Narnia as a talking lion. We’re told Lewis sometimes prayed to Aslan. This will occasionally be important as we’re reading the Chronicles, to understand that Aslan’s actions are almost never some big symbolic thing we’re supposed to reflect on, but purely what Lewis thinks God would do if God had incarnated into Narnia as a great big magical Lion.
Lewis is not particularly interested in us knowing for sure that “Aslan equals Jesus.” He always plays it slant, and never once mentions Jesus by name. Lewis believed that myth prepares us for “true myth.” He loved the story of Balder, for instance, and believed that the love he had for that story, with the god’s death and resurrection, prepared him for the true and (by his estimation) historical myth of Jesus’s death and resurrection when he finally came to accept it. As he told his friend George Sayer, he wasn’t looking to convert people through Narnia so much as prepare them to meet Jesus in the real world. “I am aiming,” he said, “at a sort of pre-baptism of the child’s imagination.”
In fact, when a child wrote him saying that he couldn’t figure out what Aslan’s name must be here on this side of the wardrobe, rather than tell him plainly, Lewis wrote back, “I want you 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?”
Surely Lewis chose lion over lamb for a variety of reasons, one of which must be the regal history of the lion. As Michael Ward has convincingly argued in his book Planet Narnia, the Chronicles of Narnia is a seven-book tour through the seven planets of Medieval cosmology, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is our first stop at Jupiter, king of the gods (you’ll not find Zeus or Jupiter in the Chronicles, either…because Aslan is King of the gods as well as king of the beasts).
He also tells us that at the time of writing this book that he was “dreaming often of lions” and could not seem to keep them out of his life. And almost certainly his affection for the work of Charles Williams plays in as well. Williams’s Place of the Lion is a spiritual thriller about someone who unleashes the Platonic ideal of certain things into the world, and as those archetypes take shape, they pull their strength from the world around them. The first to materialize is the Platonic ideal of a lion… regal, powerful, unstoppable. As it moves around Britain buildings begin to collapse as the Lion grows in clarity and power.
After reading that book, Lewis immediately wrote to Williams to say, “I have just read your Place of the Lion and it is to me one of the major literary events of my life.” Certainly the great Lion Aslan reflects some of the Platonic Ideal of what a lion should be.
In our next post we’ll spend some time exploring the Stone Table and Aslan’s sacrifice, as we look at Lewis’s theological world and how it is revealed in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. For those who don’t know, though, one last piece of Aslan-related trivia: Lewis didn’t work particularly hard at finding a name. “Aslan” is the Turkish word for “lion.”
Matt Mikalatos is the author of the YA fantasy The Crescent Stone. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on Facebook.
It’s worth noting that Laurence (the boy who loved Aslan more than Jesus) was John W. Campbell’s nephew (Laura Philinda Campbell Krieg was Campbell’s sister).
Call it allegory or call it supposing, I find Aslan fascinating. He’s to be loved and feared at once. You can sometimes not see him at all, while the person next to you can. He doesn’t tell you what to do, but he confronts you when you knowingly do wrong. Many times he doesn’t intervene when you can’t understand what’s preventing him, and yet this doesn’t breed resentment in the characters or the reader; that alone is an awesome literary feat. Lewis really nailed it for creating an all-powerful character with unique characteristics and behaviours who at the same time doesn’t overwhelm the story he occupies.
So in modern terms, Lewis was writing a Jesus AU.
@3: A real-person fanfiction.
The Lamb does show up in Dawn Treader.
Reposting the Narnia related XKCD from last week.
“Aslan won’t appear until the final third of the book, but he’s clearly the most important person in it.”
But isn’t that sort of the problem? What are we reading here? Children are the most important characters in a children’s book, so I’m guessing the LWW has all the trappings of a children’s book, but – as the focus is on Aslan – is maybe something quite different.
‘If Lewis was looking for the best animal to represent Jesus in a world of talking animals, it would almost certainly be a lion or a lamb.’
Err…the peace-loving beatnik who preached that the meek would inherit the earth doesn’t strike me as being very like a lion. That’s just me. I’m picturing something small and unthreatening, but with a big heart – a squirrel maybe? Or a rabbit? That would be kind of cool.
How about the guy who said I come not to bring peace but a sword? That sound more lion-like? Jesus is a complex and multi-leveled character.
Of course a Jesus in a sapient-animal world would be a lion.
A Lamb, as such, is a sacrificial innocent infant.
Only one of Aslan’s acts, the original sacrifice, would fit at all.
In all other aspects, as He is built to have agency, usually more agency than everyone else (able to do everything but remove free will), He must be a relatively powerful Animal, and capable of hurting people.
PS. I’ve just suddenly realised, writing this, that the two Aslan expys in Lev Grossman’s The Magicians version of the Narnia books are rams. If you have an image of a Lamb and need to turn it into something physically powerful, that’s what to do. However, rams are still less physically powerful than a lion, and are domesticated animals: Lewis would not have been able to use “not a tame ram” in the same way, and it was an important part of the books, and his own tendency towards somewhat “muscular Christianity”.
7. I guess he was speaking metaphorically? I mean, there’s no mention in the gospels of Jesus actually being armed. Plus I imagine the roman soldiers would have taken a pretty dim view of anybody other than a soldier carrying a weapon at that time.
8. Interesting enough, Ember the Ram is the Aslan-type character in ‘The Magicians’.
Just to clarify, because I don’t think I said this clearly enough in the article, when I say Lewis would almost certainly choose a lion or a lamb, I’m suggesting that is true only if he’s sticking to Christian symbology. Certainly a ram (as in The Magicians) could be seen as typological (as in the Christian interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac) and is really the perfect choice for satirizing Aslan, or Johnny Cash might make mention of God as “Father Hen” (which is a pretty funny insistence on male-gendered language that’s extra-biblical in the scripture Cash is pointing to), but Jesus is most often spoken about as either the “Lion of Judah” or the “Lamb of God” in Christian scripture when animals are being trotted out.
And if you want to get all crazy about spiritual metaphors in the animal world, pick up a medieval bestiary. They’re loads of fun. :)
@1 I did not know that. That’s amazing. Thanks for sharing!
Jesus probably wasn’t armed. He did tell his disciples to buy swords if they didn’t own one. In Revelations, Jesus is called “The Lion of the tribe of Judah”. So that is where the lion comes from.
Jesus is likened to a lamb in the physical sense of his relations with other humans, but a lion in the spiritual sense of his power to conquer death and defeat Satan. I think in that context and Aslan’s role in the books, the lion is more appropriate.
@13 That’s an interesting way to look at it. I like that. Though in Wardrobe Aslan’s role is very closely associated with the “sacrificial lamb” who “takes away the sins of the world.” But we’ll be talking more about Lewis’s understanding of atonement theory in two weeks!
There’s a reference to “Christ the tiger” in Elliot’s “Gerontion”.
You never know with Elliot if he’s just made something up or if it’s some terrifically obscure classical reference that he’s just unearthed, so I’ve never been quite sure of what to make of this.
@9, Jesus certainly got violent with the moneychangers in the Temple.
@11: Glad you found it interesting.
@9, in Palestine, the Romans were facing significant opposition: it was far from well-pacified. Usually, Rome wasn’t conquering polities that had any idea of equal rights, democracy, or even justice systems, so there was huge income inequalities and weapons and, more importantly, weapons training were unaffordable. The Romans wouldn’t care about weapons owned by elites; if they hadn’t signed on with the Romans, well, they had probably been killed and had your children sold into slavery.
Things didn’t end well for the armed followers of Vercengitorix or Boudicca.
The composer Ola Gjeilo has a piece called Unicornis Captivator that is a pretty cool compilation of several of the ancient animal/Christ associations.
Speaking from personal experience,
Lamb
Lion
Pelican
in that order are the most common ones I’ve run across in churches.
I always just loved the characters ofAslan for himself. All the allegory that Lewis wove into his mane went over my head (and probably ever other kid’s head) which is why the books work. Aslan is a character first and a plot device long before we get to allegory. Honestly, it I don’t find it to be very good allegory anyway as much as filling an archetype. Of course, Lewis probably wouldn’t be a fan of Jesus being considered an archetype but he’s got my money a few times over with these books full of lovely archetypes that prepared me all sorts of books, the Bible included.
@20 I don’t know that Lewis would mind you thinking of Jesus as an archetype. Especially if you mean “the original that has been imitated” or something like that. Lewis often said that Jesus was a myth, but that he was “true myth.” He saw all those other stories as sort of copies of the true story (even those that came before, of course, the story of Jesus).
@18, You can say that again! The whole reason Jesus was executed was because Judea was a simmering mass of unrest which would explode into open revolution a few decades later.
But if Aslan functions as Jesus in the books, how much difference to their meaning for the reader (not a scholar) does terminology about that function make?
That letter was quoted in the essay I read which finally outlined to me what C. S. Lewis thought he was doing with the Narnia.
And it wasn’t convincing.
When Aslan lies down on the Stone Table and lets the Witch bind him and shave him and kill him, because otherwise she will claim Edmund and kill him, I see now that Lewis meant this as a variation – an AU, as someone says upthread – of Christ crucified.
But I loved Aslan because he’s a big cat. A cat big enough to ride on, able to talk – I loved the Talking Animals of Narnia. Aslan can purr, though actual lions can’t: Aslan as big and strong and powerful and dangerous and furry and cuddly. I love cats: I lost my first cat in a road accident before I was six: a cat that could die and come back to life and talk to you and fight for you and big enough to ride on, was like a dream come true.
Then it turns out, to a child’s comprehension, that Aslan tricked the White Witch into killing him because by killing him she broke her own power because Aslan wasn’t guilty and Edmund was. Again, I now understand the Christian-theology AU Lewis was writing: but to a child reader, it was just a clever trick that had worked because Aslan was able to die and come back to life, and clearly the Witch hadn’t known that.
I didn’t love Aslan because he was like Jesus. I loved Aslan because he was a big cat, and I love cats.
But the first point in particular really annoyed/irritated me and still does:
Arrived at the same time as Father Christmas
Jesus didn’t arrive in the world at the same time as Father Christmas. The English folkloric tradition of a personification representing Christmas is first named “Sir Christimas”, or “King of Christmas” in the fifteenth century CE. The Christ Mass, the midwinter celebration of the supposed birthday of Jesus, is very definitely – and I knew this as a child who was fond of reading mythology and history and legend – a Roman Christian adaptation of the midwinter Saturnalia. Crossfertilised with the pre-Christian solstice celebrations of Yule, in the Germanic tradition.
To lie to a child and say Jesus arrived at the same time as Father Christmas may have been, to Lewis, “breathing a lie through silver”, but to me it was just wrong – a patronising adult who undoubtedly knew better feeding a child misinformation because the misinformation was supposedly at the child’s level of comprehension. I thought this as a teenager: I think it now. Father Christmas’s appearance in Narnia was just wrong.
19: Also the white stag or the white hart as the personification of Jesus – also in mythology the symbolic animal of the otherworld, purity, the deer that you can only pursue, not catch. Which is, of course, how TWTWaTW ends – with the stag incarnation of Jesus – in Lewis’s mix-and-match mythology – leading the four adults out of Narnia to become children again in the other world.
I knew even a child about the associations of the white stag with Jesus Christ – our Scottish Parliament is named for Holy Rood, the place where St David was in legend saved by the miraculous appearance of a cross between the stag’s antlers – but it never occurred to me as a child to associate the arbitrary White Stag who ends the story by leading the four kings and queens of Narnia back through to warddrobe, with the White Stag of Christian mythology who is generally a lot more dangerous and unearthly than just finding a way to end a book back at the status quo it began with.
I hated Aslan when I read the books as a child. He made the story boring: he just came and solved all the problems, the Pevensie children didn’t do anything. And there was no answer to why, if he could solve it all, he hadn’t done so earlier.
@18 Small correction: you’re talking about the Province of Judea. It was not renamed ‘Palestine’ by the Romans until after the Temple was sacked and the Jews exiled. (Which happened because the Great Rebellion didn’t go well – as you point out, taking up arms against Rome was not a good idea.)
@25: I didn’t know that the White Stag is a symbol for Jesus, that’s interesting!
@24 Arriving at the same time as Father Christmas is pretty clearly referring to Christmas being the celebration of Jesus’s birth, not the specific date on which the idea of Father Christmas came about.
Father Christmas shows up in Narnia because you have to have Christmas before you can get to Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Saturnalia or Dionysus notwithstanding, and regardless of when the historical person called Jesus might have historically been born. or in what season, he had to be born before he could die or rise. Therefore, Christmas.
This story about the Lion known as Aslan is fiction. The Incarnation is the truth it’s intended to convey. Opinions vary as to whether the attempt is successful, but I don’t think that “he arrived at the same time as Father Christmas” was any kind of deliberate lie or misdirection. It means, “he came down from heaven and was made man [well, lion], an event that we call Christmas when we commemorate it.” That celebration might include elements of myth and metaphor and late-date silvery lies such as Father Christmas, but the event being celebrated is, to Lewis, the truth.
I always assumed Lewis meant “arrived at the same time of year as Father Christmas does (in our imaginative celebration of the season)” – it didn’t even remotely occur to me that he was telling any kind of lie, silvery or otherwise.
This is addressed to Mr Fallon, & others who seem to think of Jesus as ‘meek’ or ‘soft. We know he warned his followers he did not come to bring peace, but a sword. Elsewhere, he checked that some, at least, of his disciples were armed. He said, “If you have two mantles sell one & buy a sword.” Furthermore, He did not hold back from rebuking his closest disciples in the strongest language, as he told Peter, who was coming to the wrong conclusion, “Get thee behind me, Satan!…” He took a rope’s end to the merchants, the jobbers, & wheeler-dealers in the Holy Precincts of the Temple, & CLEARED THEM OUT. We know there were armed soldiers in that place, & there is no record of them dealing with him.
& at the last, he submitted to the meanest & weakest treachery & oppression, to be done to death in the nastiest way.
People, as everybody around him knew, a miracle-worker with absolute power & authority in the World (he brought the dead to life, he walked on water…), as he DEMONSTRATED. To go to his death without resistance. That was a MIGHTY surrender.
The Lion in His Might is an excellent representation of Jesus in Narnia.
Speaking as a lapsed Christian (Catholic specifically) who loved the Narnia books as a child and still has a lot of affection for them despite the shift in my relationship to Christianity (and religion in general), the story of Aslan’s resurrection feels – and has always felt – less dramatically satisfying to me (for want of a better term) than the story of Jesus.’ Leaving religious faith and arguments over historical accuracy at the door and judging the gospels on their merits as a story, we have a man who claims to be the Son of God, is believed by some, disbelieved by many and persecuted by authorities. His resurrection serves as the ultimate affirmation of his role/journey, displaying his divinity. It gives his followers hope, but by no means solves their problems as they remain (at that time at least) a persecuted minority. Having a character who directly claims divinity prove that divinity in direst need feels less like a deux es machina (although I suppose in the strictest sense, it may constitute just that) and more like it’s playing fair with the reader. It hangs together as a story in a general sense.
Aslan is a re-imagining of Christ, but isn’t as explicit in his claims to divinity. Nor is his main conflict centred on proving that divinity (and/or his enemies disputing it). We hear how he’ll restore hope and justice to Narnia, but that needn’t mean he’s divine. He’s more of a Messiah and less of a God, if you catch my meaning. When he does return, he trounces the Witch and restores order, leaving his followers (and our protagonists) with relatively little to do. Even as a child, that stuff about ‘deeper magic’ that caused his resurrection seemed intriguingly mystical to me but also frustratingly vague and abrupt. In the world we’re introduced to in Narnia, we have no idea of ‘deeper magic’ until it happens. In the ‘world’ of the Bible, the reader would have a general frame of reference to understand the idea of Gods not being bound by mortality.
On the specific issue of swords, it’s doubtful that Christ’s instruction to his followers to arm themselves was to be taken literally. As soon as Peter started using his, he was told to put it back, and that “those who use the sword will die by the sword”. This is a separate issue from that of war and pacifism in general. In LWW, another Peter is commissioned by Aslan to go and win his spurs.
@26: Because it was his will, of course.
This points to an important difference between myth and fiction: myths don’t have to make sense, fiction does.
29/30 : Snark aside, all of the specifically Christian mytology around the winter solstice is of Jesus becoming incarnate in the world as a baby.
Lewis could have written Aslan as an adorable little cub, with ears too big for his head and paws too big for his body, growling tiny feisty growls and practicing his pounce and stalking skills and of course, living on milk from his mother, not meat. In Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye, her painter protagonist creates an icon of Mary as a lion, with Jesus as a lion cub: the painter notes that the iconography of Christ as Lion is well-known, but she had never seen Mary the Lion, mother of the Cub Incarnate.
(We never, as far as I remember, see Aslan eat.) (We never, ever, see Aslan as anything but a mature male lion.)
Father Christmas did not come into the world at the same time as Jesus: Father Christmas is as far separated by time from Jesus as King Caspian is from King Peter.)
If we are using the Christian mythology of Christmas, Aslan comes into the world not as an adult lion but as a helpless cub.
TLWatW is properly a book about Easter, not about Christmas. (Maybe Lewis should have found some Talking Rabbits, though as C. S. Lewis died nine years before Watership Down was published, I’m afraid Lewis would probably have seen rabbits more as Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter than as the heroes and storytellers we know them as…)
(“Come back, you fools! Lions aren’t dangerous!”)
@36: Of course TLTWTW is a book about Easter. But you can’t get to Easter unless you have a Christmas first. “Always winter but never Christmas” is the un-redeemed Narnia.
The fictional “Father Christmas” came into our world long after Jesus, true. But Jesus is the Gift of which Father Christmas is one of the current symbols.
And yes, Lewis chose to elide the whole “infancy narrative” part of the story. (ETA: if it comes to that, only two of the four Gospels have anything to say about Jesus as a baby, and the don’t agree with each other.. We’re just used to smushing all the contradictory elements of each gospel into one storyline suitable for Sunday-school pageants.)
And yes, Aslan is incarnate as a Lion rather than as a human, although it’s a human that he sacrifices himself for– one of the reasons why Aslan-as-Jesus is not convincing to everyone. “We never see Aslan eat” — Jesus eats, even after his death. Another reason. But Father Christmas in Narnia is an understandable bit of imagery. Lewis is better with pictures than with one-to-one correspondences, if you ask me.
Lions eat animals. And there aren’t many animals around that aren’t Talking ones. So how would Lewis have shown Aslan eating?
38: same way he showed the humans and Dwarves eating? The Dwarf family who take in Shasta on his arrival in Narnia eat bacon: King Caspian’s court eats venison: While travelling upriver the four children and the dwarf eat bear meat: the Dwarves serve fried sausages in the meal in Narnia after the escape from the Underworld: and the feast on the island at the end of the voyage of the Dawn Treader references venison and boar’s heads. Although there are Talking Birds, turkey, chicken, and pigeons are eaten. There is no mention of Talking Fish, and fish are a staple.
As Talking Beasts are definitely described as looing somewhat different from non-talking animals, it’s clear no meat-eating Narnian – dwarf, human, Marshwiggle, or carnivorous Talking Beast – would kill a Talking Beast except in self-defence, and would never eat a Talking Beast.
37: “Of course TLTWTW is a book about Easter. But you can’t get to Easter unless you have a Christmas first. “Always winter but never Christmas” is the un-redeemed Narnia.”
Yes, I get that’s how C. S. Lewis was trying to fold Christianity into his Narnia narrative – I read the essay explaining that’s what he was intending to do many years ago, and I have re-read the Narnian novels several times since. My point is that as a narriative, it makes no sense. Narnians don’t celebrate Christmas – why would they? It’s the midwinter festival which has been tied into Jesus’s birth, and Aslan was born – if he was born and not created an adult male lion as he created other Talking Beasts – outside Narnia, before Narnia existed.
“Another reason. But Father Christmas in Narnia is an understandable bit of imagery. “
No, not really. Because Narnians don’t celebrate Christmas.
Who says Narnians don’t celebrate Christmas? All evidence in LWW says they do.
It’s an interesting question – Do Narnians celebrate Christmas? A Watsonian explanation of how they could have done so (before the White Witch took over) is that since (as we will learn 5 books hence) Narnia’s first human inhabitants were 19th century Britons, they brought the holiday with them.
Greg Egan’s Terenesia has a staunchly atheist Indian man detained by a Christian militia leader named “Colonel Aslan”. He doesn’t get the reference, and his companion just says it’s a popular new name for converts to Christianity. “Don’t admit to a fondness for Turkish Delight…”
The Narnians of LWW may not celebrate Christmas, what with the Witch’s eternal-winter thing, but the Beavers certainly seem to know about it; it’s Mr. Beaver who keeps repeating the “always winter and never Christmas” line, and who’s the first to recognize Father Christmas when he sees him.
In any case, whether or not anyone celebrates, or how they celebrate, Christmas is if Incarnation is. And when Lewis wanted a symbol or an image to convey a meaning, he used what he liked regardless of whether or not the literal object would be likely to be found in the Narnia he was describing.
“Narnia,” itself, isn’t consistent from book to book. I’ve always found it better to read the books as related but individual stories in different genres, and TLTWTW is myth, not SFF with consistent worldbuilding. So, import a Victorian Father Christmas into a Narnian landscape? Sure, why not, it illustrates the point to the Pevensies and to the readers with an image they’ll recognize.
40/43: References to Christmas in Narnia occur only in TLTWatW .
@44, So? The point is it is mentioned. I know it doesn’t make sense but I can roll with it.
@34 – Context matters here and I think the context is practical rather than spiritual. In the first case, Jesus is sending his followers out to travel and proselytize in an era where travel was slow and dangerous. Having the means to defend yourself on the road against beasts and bandits is just good sense. When he admonishes Peter for trying to fight the (armed!) Roman Guard when the guards come to arrest him, he’s already decided to give himself up and he doesn’t want others to shed blood on his account.
A thought occurred to me today, genuinely for the first time ever, in all my readings of Norse mythology and Narnia (I love these Tor readalong discussion threads, they’re inspiring!)
The ultimate source-myth for Father Christmas, Sir Christmas, Lord of Christmas, isn’t Christian at all – has no connection with fubsy little big-eared huge-pawed Lion Cub Jesus.
The first Lord of Yule is Odin Allfather.
Aslan’s father is the Emperor-Over-Sea, who never – apparently – actually appears in any of the Narnian books except by reference, but we are given to understand he is the lord of all the worlds, Earth as well as Narnia.
He’s Odin Allfather. He’s Father Christmas.
Aslan’s father entered Narnia before Aslan, appearing in human guise for the four children from Earth.
I love this idea and I am going to keep it as headcanon. Maybe the children from Earth “heard” Father Christmas as the most familiar incarnation, while Mr and Mrs Beaver and the teaparty of Talking Animals later, heard/said “Lord of Yule”… or “Allfather”.
The early Church did not have a specific date for Christmas; December 25 was settled on quite a few decades into the history of Christianity. The date of Easter was known as the Last Supper was strongly linked to Passover (and was quite possibly a Seder) s Jesus was the lamb to be sacrificed for Passover.
re: Christ as the stag. What is Harry Potter’s patronus again? ;)
I loved Aslan’s response to the witch, and I am sure it will be mentioned next time: “Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch. I was there when it was written.” Fits nicely with John 1:3.
And I have to add.. I think these are my favorite lines of the book (mentioned above):
“Ooh” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion”…
“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.”
@41: And as there’s very little that’s Christian about Christmas, we’d expect some kind of midwinter festival to arise regardless.
Besides, Narnia doesn’t feel like an actual place. Whether you prefer Tolkienian worldbuilding or Lewisian, it’s important to remain consistent when you critique the resulting worlds – if it was never meant to have verisimilitude, it’s unreasonable to analyze it as a realworld location.
@6 The sword-wielding mouse Reepicheep was small and big hearted, though far from unthreatening. In a way, Aslan is more Christ than Jesus, since he is incarnate in Narnia from its creation without changing his lion form.
Huh. Honestly, I don’t think I ever realized how truly ballsy Lewis was being, ha. I’m almost scandalized.
@2: “Many times [Aslan] doesn’t intervene when you can’t understand what’s preventing him, and yet this doesn’t breed resentment in the characters or the reader; that alone is an awesome literary feat.”
I know readers who volubly dislike this trait (and others) of Aslan’s, and the fact that all of the ‘good’ characters love him nonetheless.
“All the allegory that Lewis wove into his mane went over my head (and probably ever other kid’s head)”
Hardly. It was pretty obvious to me as an atheist kid, though I didn’t get *all* the parallels. (Stone Table/t, Deep Magic canceled by Aslan’s death, Peter’s name, white stag…) Aslan was Jesus, the Emperor was God, Aslan died and came back; big emphasis on faith in Prince Caspian; Apocalypse in Last Battle.
I loved the Narnia books as a child (and still do), but I will never forget my feelings of anger and betrayal upon reading the final paragraph in The Last Battle when Aslan changes into Jesus. I felt like I’d been evangelized and lied to. I didn’t want to read stories about Jesus — I wanted to read stories about freaking Aslan, the awesome, mysterious, magical, slightly scary Lion. (Not a tame Lion.)
So I definitely got the religious subtext (which, to paraphrase Giles from “Buffy”) rapidly became text as of The Last Battle, even as a kid. The realization marred the books for me (as did Lewis’s treatment of Susan), but I still loved them, and I’ve continued to reread the whole series every now and then even as an adult.
As far as all the “Christmas” stuff — it’s worth noting that a whole passel of divinities and godlike figures were said to be born at the winter’s solstice (for instance, another one that wasn’t mentioned, and that strongly influenced the Christ story presentation was Mithras). Basically, the whole Christmas/winter’s solstice bit served as a good catch-all date for gods (and celebrations of gods) because it tied neatly into pagan celebrations that had already been practiced at the Solstices for thousands of years, which also made people more likely to convert.
As others have noted, a lot of the Christ stories directly piggyback on far older myths and deity origin stories going back to ancient Greek, Norse, Celtic, Roman and Egyptian beliefs.
This is a great article! I was wondering if you would mind sharing some of your sources? I am working on a project that would really benefit from Lewis’s own commentary on the Chronicles of Narnia, but I am having a hard time finding much online.
Aslan does, in fact, fit the definition of an allegory. IMO this is the most important thing.