I came to Narnia as an adult. The Inkling of my childhood was Tolkien. In college I read Charles Williams—he’s the least known now, but in some ways the most complex and beautifully weird of all. With those two behind me, I found C.S. Lewis’ series, explicitly written for children and also explicit in its allegorical underpinnings, rather too simplistic to be satisfying.
And yet it stayed with me. It’s derivative, its voice is often condescending, and there is the Problem of Susan. Still. It has its own power.
Much of that is borrowed, but like Lewis (and Tolkien) I am a medievalist. In the Middle Ages, originality was not a virtue. The real genius was the author who, in a famous image, stood tall on the shoulders of the giants who came before. The greater the homage, the stronger the work.
Lewis’ Talking Animals owe a great deal to everything from the classical and medieval beast fable to The Wind in the Willows. They have, for him, a very specific purpose. In 1953, halfway through the Narnia series, he published a poem titled “Impenitence,” in which he said,
Why! they all cry out to be used as symbols,
Masks for Man, cartoons, parodies by Nature
Formed to reveal us
Each to each, not fiercely but in her gentlest
Vein of household laughter.
And he is proud of it. He wants to do it. He doesn’t care what the critics say.
Or so he says. It’s hard to be an academic who also writes fiction, especially fantasy fiction, and particularly if it’s for children. One risks being regarded as Not Serious.
Over seventy years later, Lewis’ academic works aren’t nearly as beloved, or even known, as these books he wrote for children. They speak to something deep in us. Literally, in the case of his Talking Animals.
The original beginning of the series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), introduces us to the world inside Uncle Digory’s wardrobe. It’s a world under siege, locked in ice and snow—forever winter, but never Christmas. Four children from our world, who have been sent away to the country in the middle of a terrible war, are called to save that world, and restore it to its green and pleasant self. They do this with the help of a large cast of mythological creatures and Talking Animals.
Who those animals are, where they come from, how they got there, wouldn’t be made clear to readers for a few years. Other volumes would be published first, with the exception of The Last Battle, which appeared in 1956, though it was completed before the origin story, The Magician’s Nephew (1955). There at last, Lewis spelled out exactly how Narnia was created, where the White Witch came from, and what the Talking Animals were and why.
Narnia’s animals for the most part are the same as ours—from the viewpoint of an Englishman born at the beginning of the twentieth century. They’re a lower order of creation than humans, without speech or understanding. But some of them have been lifted up by Narnia’s creator, who himself takes the form of a huge Lion.
When Aslan sings the dark and empty world into existence, he selects a pair from a number of species. The largest ones, such as elephants, he sizes down somewhat. The smaller ones—mice, rabbits, beavers, badgers—he sizes up, sometimes considerably. Hence, the mighty and indomitable Reepicheep, who is many times the size of an ordinary mouse.
These animals are his chosen. He grants them the power of speech and human levels of discernment. Like the children of Adam, which is what Aslan calls humans, they have a higher purpose. They ally with humans to serve and protect their world.
This gift is not irrevocable. If they turn to evil, they lose the gift. They return to their original state, without speech or understanding.
Loss of speech is a terrible thing in Narnia. It harks back to a profound Christian concept: In the beginning was the Word. Which, in the case of Narnia, was sung. It’s song that brings the world into existence, sung by the greatest of all the Talking Beasts, the creator himself, Aslan the Lion.
In The Last Battle, when Aslan submits himself to the final sacrifice, he’s robbed of all his dignity and strength and power. And, inevitably, his ability to speak. Speech is fundamental, and to lose it is in some ways worse than death.
I would rather live in Middle-earth than in Narnia. It’s so much bigger and deeper and higher. But the longer I live with Lewis’ series, the more it grows on me. It stays in my memory, and shows me new faces of itself with each rereading. I can see why it’s survived as long as it has, and been loved so much.
Greta Gerwig is working now on a film of The Magician’s Nephew, to be released next year—and from what I can gather, it’s the first of the full series, released in chronological rather than publication order. I’ll be there for it. I am so looking forward to the Creation of Narnia, the transformation of the cart horse into the glorious Fledge, and I hope she gives us the spectacle of Jadis, all seven feet of her, roaring down a London street on the roof of a hansom cab. That alone will be worth the price of admission.
I was lucky enough to read them in publication order. I was introduced to them when I was in 2nd grade? Around 7 or 8 anyway. Had a teacher (private school) who read to us after lunch. She read Lion to us and by the time she got to Prince Caspian I had already checked it out of the library and read it. Not that I objected to hearing it again. Read all the rest, too. My parents got me the box set for my birthday and I kept it until it disintegrated sometime in my 30s. Haven’t reread it nearly as often as LOtR, or even Dune, but I did reread it during the covid lockdown.
I didn’t have the boxed set, but I had all the volumes, labeled and numbered in publication order.
People I know who read it as children have a different sense of it. It goes deeper for them, I think.
RE: the film
More than the casting, more than the visual production values, more than the glorious sight of Jadis careering down the street in the middle of London—I am both fearful and expectant to hear Aslan’s song of creation. For me, this will be a “make it-or-break-it” moment.
I don’t even dare hope. Movie music is so hit or miss.
They will need to borrow Brahms or perhaps Beethoven (think 6th Symphony), I think
They should rather ask Meredith Monk to do it. That might actually be worth hearing.
Mr & Mrs Beaver always struck me as anomalous in LWW as it was a quintessentially English fairytale (more anomalous than Aslan, you ask? Sure, as a lion has represented England since the days of Richard the Lionheart*) but beavers were native to the UK at one point. They were hunted to extinction back in the middle-ages, a period with which Lewis would have been intimately familiar, given his area of expertise. They’ve since been reintroduced, due to their positive impact on the environment.
* I guess there are corollaries with Aslan and Richard the Lionheart, if you think about it, especially in the context of Robin Hood – a country labouring under an oppressive regime, a brave handful who resist, the return of the country’s rightful ruler to set things right etc, etc.
For Narnia, I am a publication order reader, if only to preserve the delightful mystery of the lamppost for a while.
I don’t know why Lewis chose a lion for the “son of the Emperor-Over-the-Sea,” Aslan, but lions used to to live in England; “panthrera spelaea” were apparently twice as large as modern lions.
I also don’t know if this was known in his time.
A minor correction. Aslan submits himself to the final sacrifice in TLWW. The author may be thinking of Ginger the cat in the Last Battle who does lose the ability to speak.
I was given The Horse and his Boy in 1978, when I was 8 years old, and read it before I got to Tolkien a few years later. I am still waiting for it to be filmed. Every other attempt at adaptation seems to fail before they get there. For once, can’t we just start there first?
I came to Narnia before Middle-Earth, but not by much; I was first introduced to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe at age seven, The Hobbit at eight, and The Lord of the Rings at nine. I subsequently read all of the remaining works in publication order. I continued reading Tolkien into adulthood, but left Narnia behind (although I may still have my childhood copies of the books).
When I first read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, my impression was that all of Narnia’s animals might talk, but the later books made it clear that the Talking Beasts were separate from ordinary animals. One place where this really comes home is in The Silver Chair, when Jane, Eustace, and Puddleglum, at a feast, discover that they have unknowingly been eating a Talking Stag; quoting from memory, the human children are horrified, “but Puddleglum, who was Narnian born and bred, felt sick and faint, as you or I might feel to find we had eaten a baby.”