Chronicles Of Narnia, The

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The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven fantasy novels for children written by C. S. Lewis. It is considered a classic of children's literature and is the author's best-known work, having sold over 100 million copies in 41 languages. Written by Lewis between 1949 and 1954 and illustrated by Pauline Baynes, The Chronicles of Narnia have been adapted several times, complete or in part, for radio, television, stage, and cinema.

The series contains many allusions to traditional Christian ideas, presented in a format designed to make them easily accessible to younger readers; however, the books can also be read purely for their adventure, colour, and richness of ideas, and as a result have become favourites of children and adults, Christians and non-Christians alike. In addition to employing Christian themes, Lewis also borrows characters and ideas from Greek and Roman mythology, as well as from traditional British and Irish fairy tales].

The Chronicles of Narnia present the adventures of children who play central roles in the unfolding history of the fictional realm of Narnia, a place where animals talk, magic is common, and good battles evil. Each of the books (with the exception of The Horse and His Boy) feature as their protagonists children from our world who are magically transported to Narnia, where they are called upon to help the lion Aslan set some wrong to right.

1 The books
2 Christian parallels
3 Influences on Narnia
4 Criticism
5 The Narnian universe
6 Further reading
- 6.1 On the Philip Pullman versus Narnia controversy
7 References

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The books

The Chronicles of Narnia have been in continuous publication since 1954 and have sold over 100 million copies in 41 languages. Lewis was awarded the 1956 Carnegie Medal for The Last Battle, the final book in the series, and the series as a whole is considered a classic of children's literature. The books were written by Lewis between 1949 and 1954 but were not written entirely in either the order they were originally published or in the chronological order in which they currently appear. The original illustrator was Pauline Baynes and her simple pen and ink drawings are still used in publication today.

The Chronicles include:

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia
The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’
The Silver Chair
The Horse and His Boy
The Magician’s Nephew
The Last Battle

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Christian parallels

Specific Christian parallels may be found in the entries for individual books and characters.

Although he did not set out to do so, in the process of writing his fantasy works, Lewis (an adult convert to Christianity) found himself incorporating Christian theological concepts into his stories. As he wrote in Of Other Worlds:

“Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument, then collected information about child psychology and decided what age group I’d write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out ‘allegories’ to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way. It all began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord.”

Lewis, an expert on the subject of allegory, maintained that the books were not allegory, and preferred to call the Christian aspects of them "suppositional". This is similar to what we would now call fictional parallel universes. As Lewis wrote in a letter to a Mrs Hook in December of 1958:

“If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [a character in The Pilgrim's Progress] 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.”

The Narnia series is not an allegory, because allegories have an overarching figurative level of meaning tied to the literal level, and the Narnia series has a literal level of meaning without any overarching figurative level, though there are figurative elements. The misconception that the Narnia series is an allegory is the result of the disjunction caused by the narrative taking place across parallel universes. There are similarities between the world of Narnia and our own, but these are literal manifestations of the same phenomena in multiple worlds, not allegorical abstractions. For example, the character Aslan is not an allegorical representation of Christ, but a literal representation of Christ. Aslan is a literal rendering of Jesus Christ, only in another body, in another universe, and by another name. Aslan and Jesus are the same character in two different worlds. There is no allegory involved. As Lewis has Aslan say at the end of Dawn Treader, "There I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name."

With the release of the 2005 Disney film there has been renewed interest in the Christian parallels found in the books. Some find them distasteful, while noting that they are easy to miss if you are not familiar with Christianity. Alan Jacobs, author of The Narnian: The Life and Imaginaton of C.S. Lewis, says flatly that Lewis has become "a pawn in America's culture wars" . Some Christians see the chronicles as excellent tools for Christian evangelism. A multitude of books have been written that draw attention to the Chronicles' biblical parallels.

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Influences on Narnia

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Lewis' life

Lewis' early life has echoes within the Chronicles. Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1898, Lewis' family moved to a large house in the country when he was seven. The house contained long hallways and empty rooms, and Lewis and his brother invented make-believe worlds while exploring their home. Like Caspian and Tirian, Lewis lost his mother at an early age, and like Edmund, Jill, and Eustace, he spent a long, miserable time in English boarding schools. During World War II, many children were evacuated from London because of air raids. Some of these children stayed with Lewis at his home in Oxford.

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The Inklings

Lewis was the chief member of the Inklings, an informal literary discussion group in Oxford which at various times included the writers J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Lewis's brother W. H. Lewis, and Roger Lancelyn Green. Readings and discussions of the members' unfinished works were one of the main activities of the group when they met, usually on Thursday evenings, in C. S. Lewis's college rooms at Magdalen College. Some of the Narnia stories are thought to have been read to the Inklings for their appreciation and comment.

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Pagan influences

There are certain Christians and Christian organizations who feel that The Chronicles of Narnia promotes "soft sell paganism and occultism", because of the recurring pagan themes and the supposedly heretical depictions of Christ as an anthropomorphic lion. Satyrs, fauns, centaurs, dwarves, giants, and even the pagan god Bacchus and the Maenads are depicted in a positive light, when they are distinctly pagan motifs. Even an animistic "River god" is portrayed in a positive light. According to Josh Hurst from Christianity Today, "not only was Lewis hesitant to call his books Christian allegory, but the stories borrow just as much from pagan mythology as they do the Bible."

Drew Trotter, PhD, president of the Center for Christian Study, noted that the producers of the film version of The Chronicles of Narnia felt that The Chronicles of Narnia closely follows the archetypal pattern of the monomyth as detailed in Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell himself felt that the New Testament adhered to the archetypal monomyth and was but "one version of mythic stories that can be found in many cultures." Both The Chronicles of Narnia and the New Testament contain Jungian archetypal imagery.

CS Lewis himself stated in an essay called Is Theism Important?:

“When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, ‘Would that she were.’ For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads. If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our day differs from him as much as a divorcee differs from a virgin.”

In Lewis’ Space Trilogy the Christian God and Satan appear and take a large part in the plot (especially in Perelandra) but so do the Roman gods Mars and Venus. Lewis solves this apparent contradiction by making clear that these are not really gods but angels who have always been loyal servants of the real God, and it was only ignorant humans who mistook them for gods. As stated in his non-fiction book The Discarded Image, an Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964), this was not Lewis' invention but was derived from late medieval philosophers.

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Name

The origin of the name Narnia is uncertain. According to Paul Ford's Companion to Narnia, there is no indication that Lewis was alluding to the ancient Umbrian city Nequinium, renamed Narnia by the conquering Romans in 299 BC after the [river Nar, a tributary of the Tiber. However, since Lewis studied classics at Oxford, it is possible that he came across at least some of the seven or so references to Narnia in Latin literature.

There is no evidence of a link with Tolkien's Elvish (Sindarin) word narn, meaning a lay or poetic narrative, as in his posthumously published Narn i Chîn Húrin, though Lewis may have read or heard parts of this at meetings of the Inklings.

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Criticism

Philip Pullman, atheist and author of the children's series His Dark Materials, openly criticized The Chronicles of Narnia for the religious "propaganda" they contain. Speaking at the Guardian Hay Festival, Pullman said the Narnia stories were "blatantly racist" and "monumentally disparaging of women." In an interview with The Observer, Pullman criticized the film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by saying, "if the Disney corporation wants to market this film as a great Christian story, they'll just have to tell lies about it." He added, "it's not the presence of Christian doctrine I object to so much as the absence of Christian virtue," and that the books contained "a peevish blend of racist, misogynistic, and reactionary prejudice."

Part of the criticism that the novels have received over the years centers on the description of Susan Pevensie in The Last Battle. In the novel, the last of the series, Susan does not go to Narnia; other characters describe Susan as being "no longer a friend of Narnia," and as being interested "in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations." J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, while commenting on Lewis's sentimentality about children, has said:

“There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She’s become irreligious basically because she found sex. I have a big problem with that.”

Others read the passage more critically, including allegations of sexism. Pullman, who has has been quoted as saying, "I hate the Narnia books...with a passion...", interprets it this way:

“Susan, like Cinderella, is undergoing a transition from one phase of her life to another. Lewis didn't approve of that. He didn't like women in general, or sexuality at all, at least at the stage in his life when he wrote the Narnia books. He was frightened and appalled at the notion of wanting to grow up.”

It is claimed that the reference to "lipsticks, nylons, and invitations" were intended to represent temptations of the world. However, many oppose this view, arguing that the quote is taken out of context, and that Susan does not go back to Narnia in The Last Battle specifically because she no longer believes in it. It is not stated that Susan is permanently excluded: at the end of the story she is still alive in our world with her destiny not yet fully revealed. Moreover, in The Horse and His Boy, an earlier work, Susan's adulthood and sexual maturity is portrayed in a positive light. Defenders of Lewis also cite the positive roles of women in the series, like Lucy Pevensie and Aravis Tarkheena, who are main characters in the The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Horse and His Boy, respectively. It is asserted that Lucy is the most admirable of the human characters, and that in general the girls come off better than the boys through the stories.

In addition to the sexism accusation, Pullman has also implicated The Chronicles of Narnia series in fostering racism. He writes:

[For Lewis] “Death is better than life; boys are better than girls; light-coloured people are better than dark-coloured people; and so on. There is no shortage of such nauseating drivel in Narnia, if you can face it.”

The racism critique is based on a perceived negative representation of other races and religions, particularly the Calormenes, as enemies of Aslan and Narnia. The Calormenes are described as dark-skinned people with a garlic-scented breath, who wear turbans and pointy slippers, and are armed with scimitars. This depiction has been cited as a blatant comparison to the traditional attire of Islam and Sikhism. The Calormenes worship a main "false god" Tash, who is portrayed as a stereotypical Satanic being requiring evil deeds and sacrifices from his followers.

There are Calormene characters portrayed in a positive light throughout the series. In The Horse and His Boy, one of the main characters, Aravis, is a Calormene princess that ends up marrying an Archenlander prince of white ethnicity. In The Last Battle, the Calormene Emeth is accepted by Aslan, although he was a worshiper of Tash. Lewis supporters point to the fact that Lewis's writings have a particularly British Victorian era flavour that was much in fashion during his lifetime, but that may now be seen as politically incorrect. O'Connor writes: "In his time, people thought it was amusing to make fun of other cultures. We don't. Read the stories, ask questions, and remember that the person who wrote this story was altogether too human.".

In a 2005 article for The Guardian, Polly Toynbee also criticized the Narnia books, writing that "Lewis weaves his dreams to invade children's minds with Christian iconography that is part fairytale wonder and joy; but heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism." Toynbee also stated than Narnia is populated with "worlds of obedient plebs and inferior folk eager to bend at the knee to any passing superior white persons," and that "Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America; that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right."

The fact that Lewis and other similar-minded contemporaries such as J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams remained popular over such a long period of time suggests to some that many of the criticisms which have been voiced are minority views, not thought to be significant by the reading public. It is also noticed that the Calormenes’ religion is not particularly Islamic or Sikh in nature, as it is polytheistic, and that Lewis praises certain Islamic practices in the theological work "Mere Christianity."

Some of the criticism may be related to Narnia's Christian content. According to Jacobs, "Those who dislike Christianity itself can be far more harsh". Both Hensher and Pullman, whose criticism in regard to Narnia is expressed above, are atheists.

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The Narnian universe

Most of The Chronicles of Narnia take place in Lewis' world of Narnia. The Narnian world itself is one world in a multiverse of countless worlds including our own. Passage between these worlds is possible, though rare, and may be accomplished in various fashions. Visitors to Narnia observe that the passage of time while they are away is unpredictable. For example, if one year had passed since one left Narnia and returned, a whole century, or perhaps only a week, could have gone by in Narnia. Narnia itself is populated by a wide variety of creatures most of whom would be recognizable to those familiar with European mythologies and British fairy tales.

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