The Creation of the Narnia Tales:

CHAPTER TWO

"I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts." G. K. Chesterton-"The Ethics of Elfland"

It is interesting that Lewis's creativity started to flourish in earnest after his conversion. One important influence was undoubtedly that of a group of friends-his brother Warren, J. R. R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, and others-who gathered regularly to read their manuscripts aloud to each other, then criticize or debate.

But how did Lewis come to write his Narnia books? Were they simply written for his god-daughter Lucy Barfield, as he suggests in the dedication letter at the beginning of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? "I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again . . . ." Or was his purpose to entertain children, perhaps in the process teaching them subtle truths about Christianity and Christian virtues?

To begin with, Lewis had only one book in mind: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and he says he had no notion of writing any others. A "hazy sequel" only came to mind long after the idea for this book was conceived. In Autumn 1939, four schoolgirls -evacuees from London -came to spend some time with Mrs. Moore, Lewis's adopted mother, and Lewis entertained them. On the back of another book written by Lewis was found the original opening to The Lion: "This book is about four children whose names were Ann, Martin, Rose, and Peter. But it is most about Peter who was the youngest. They all had to go away from London suddenly because of the Air Raids, and because Father, who was in the army, had gone off to the War and Mother was doing some kind of war work. They were sent to stay with a relation of Mother's who was a very old Professor who lived by himself in the country."2 Thus we can see some similarities between the basic plot and events in Lewis's own life at the time.

Lewis says he is not positive what made him, "in a particular year of my life, feel that not only a fairy tale, but a fairy tale addressed to children, was exactly what I must write-or burst." Unsure of how he actually got his ideas, he is certain that all seven of his books began by "seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. The picture had been in my mind since I was about 16. Then one day when I was about 40, I said to myself: 'Let's try to make a story about it.' " Other pictures he had in his mind were a queen on a sledge, and a magnificent lion. Then he had to invent reasons why they should appear in those particular situations, and the ideas began to "bubble up" into story form.

Still, even after he had begun, Lewis says he was unsure of where the book was really going, and he turned to writing some of his theological books. The Lion sat thus for 10 years, uncompleted. Then from somewhere, "suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time. 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."

By the time Lewis's American friend Chad Walsh visited in the summer of 1948, Lewis spoke "vaguely of completing a children's book which he [had] begun 'in the tradition of E. Nesbit.' " By March 10, 1949, he read the first two chapters of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe to his friend Roger Lancelyn Green and completed this first book in the Narnia series by the end of the month. So Narnia had begun!

Unsure what should come next, Lewis decided to move on to explain how the lamp-post came to be in Narnia. Walter Hooper says that very few original manuscripts of the Narnia tales exist-only some fragments-but they do indicate that Lewis did work on ideas which later found their ways into some of the books or were tossed out with the trash. A good example is his story of Digory and his godmother, Mrs. LeFay, a magician. Then he got a better idea and wanted to see what it would be like to be pulled by magic into a new land. So what started as a book called Drawn into Narnia, then A Horn in Narnia, became what we know as Prince Caspian.

By the end of February 1950, the manuscript of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was ready, since Lewis liked his first draft of the story and it had come to him quickly and easily. He seems to have worked from a brief outline of the book, although it contains some plot fragments which Lewis never used or else incorporated into Prince Caspian. By July, a book first called Narnia and the North (then The Desert Road to Narnia, The Horse and the Boy, Cor of Archenland, The Horse Stole the Boy, Over the Border, The Horse Bree), and finally, as you must by now have guessed, The Horse and His Boy, was completed. As you can see, Lewis had difficulty deciding on titles, and many of them were suggested by his publisher.

The Silver Chair (originally Night Under Narnia, The Wild Waste Lands) soon followed. The Magician's Nephew came next, now with the characters of both Digory and Polly, and Mrs. LeFay transformed into Andrew's godmother. At last, two and one-half years later, came The Last Battle, finished by the end of May 1954. The books were published between 1950 and 1956, and when Roger Green suggested the name "The Chronicles of Narnia" for the series, it stuck. As a result of his series, Lewis, unlike many authors, seems to have achieved almost instant success. We can perhaps understand why his friend, J. R. R. Tolkien, who labored over The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion for %most of his life, was somewhat critical of the Narnia books; he also thought the religion too obvious. But Lewis received quantities of fan letters, especially from children who seemed to react naturally to the ideas in the books, but mainly to Aslan himself. In fact, they wanted more! Lewis, however, felt he had written enough: "There are only two times at which you can stop a thing: one is before everyone is tired of it, and the other is after!" As for the adult readers, Lewis was pleased with those who wanted to know the sources of his ideas. At first, a number of mothers and school mistresses felt the books might frighten children. "But," says Lewis, "the real children like it, and I am astonished how some very young ones seem to understand it. I think it frightens some adults, but very few children." Most parents read them to find out what all "the fuss" was about and, according to Walter Hooper, "became converted and pressed them on their friends." Now, over one million are sold yearly, half of them bought by college students.

Illustrations All the illustrations in every edition of the Narnia series were drawn by Pauline Baynes, who was commissioned to illustrate the books. Many letters were written from Lewis to Miss Baynes and demonstrate his approval of her pictures- with the exception of the "disproportion" of the children in The Lion: "could you possibly pretty them up a little?" Her pictures are based on Lewis's own sketches (of the map of Narnia, the monopods) or his answers to her questions (about Puddleglum, for example). In fact, Lewis attributed much of the success of his stories to her illustrations. Maps of the various lands and oceans are found on the end papers of the Geoffrey Bles and Puffin editions of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, and The Horse and His Boy. Macmillan paper back editions contain neither the maps nor all the illustrations.

Lewis's View of Fairy Stories In his letters, but especially in the essays collected in a book called Of Other Worlds, Lewis presents some of his views on fairy tales and writing for children. He says that when the imagination in him led him to write the Narnia tales, he did not begin by first "asking what children want and then endeavoring to adapt myself (this was not needed)." In Lewis's opinion, such an approach results in what he considered "bad" children's literature, the type that only attempts to dish up to them what they want or treats them like a distinct and inferior race. Instead, he decided that the fairy tale was the genre best fitted for what he wanted to say-the "ideal Form" which his ideas demanded. The only real effect this form had on his style was on the level of his vocabulary, lack of erotic love or analytical passages, and composition of chapters of almost equal length for reading aloud. But his style is remarkably clear and vivid, like that of many fairy stories. Who can forget the many, long- awaited meals the Pevensie children sit down to eat-the "nice brown eggs, lightly boiled . . . sardines on toast, and then buttered toast, and then toast with honey, and then a sugar topped cake" with Mr. Tumnus; or the freshly caught trout, boiled potatoes, and sticky marmalade rolls with the Beavers; or the turkeys, geese, peacocks, boar's heads, sides of venison, pies shaped like ships or dragons or elephants, ice puddings, bright lobsters, gleaming salmon, nuts, grapes, pineapples, peaches, pomegranates, melons, and tomatoes at Aslan's Table? Lewis gives us deep, unforgettable images like Eustace's undragoning and the tiniest details, down to the dead bluebottle on the window-sill or the slight blister on Susan's heel.

A good children's story, says Lewis, should not be written "down" as if told to a child. In fact, we are wrong in believing that children's stories are written just for children. Most great fantasy and fairy tales are addressed to everyone, and thus the author should speak to his reader simply as one person speaking to another. Only bad stories are enjoyed just by children: "No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty--except, of course, books of information." The only reason most fairy tales unfortunately "gravitated" to the nursery is because their elders ceased to like them. Lewis says when he was ten, "I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." In a sense, we grow through stages when we are first attracted to fairy tales, then ashamed of reading them, and finally perhaps return to them as adults. "Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again," Lewis wrote to Lucy Barfield.

Actually, according to G. K. Chesterton, it is really adults who need fairy tales, not children, for children still have a sense of awe and wonder at the world simply as it is. Lewis also agrees with Tolkien's assertions in his significant essay, "On Fairy Stories," that fantasy can give us "recovery"-a cleansing of our vision of the world, thereby strengthening our relish for real life. Thus, after reading, we return to the "real world" with renewed pleasure, awe, and satisfaction. "The boy does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods," writes Lewis; "the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted."

Certainly, no one of the children returns from Narnia to earth unchanged. Polly, for example, notes how the mysterious tunnels in her house seem tame after sojourning in Charn. Eustace, of course, is inwardly turned around. Through reading, we too learn not to treat things as mere objects, as Ramandu teaches: "even in your world that is not what a star is but only what it is made of." An interesting turnabout of this "renewed vision" comes about in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Caspian is amazed to hear that the children come from a round world. He had only read about them in fairy tales.

"But I've always wished there were and I've always longed to live in one, Oh, I'd give anything--I wonder why you can get into our world and we never get into yours? If only I had the chance! It must be exciting to live on a thing like a ball." "There's nothing particularly exciting about a round world when you're there," says Edmund.

Another result of fairy stories, in Tolkien's view, is the fulfillment of our desires: to communicate with other living beings and escape death. Certainly Narnia fulfills both these desires. Caspian, for example, says, "If I hadn't believed in him before now, I would now. Back there among the Humans the people who laughed at Aslan would have laughed at stories about talking beasts and Dwarfs. Sometimes I did wonder if there really was such a person as Aslan: but then I sometimes wondered if there were really people like you. Yet there you are." This, of course, is a quite common aspect of children's stories, though in not many stories are the children actually allowed to die in a railway accident. Yet escape from death is found in the glorious afterlife with Aslan in what Tolkien calls Eucatastrophe, or a truly happy ending. Are such stories merely escapism or wish fulfillment then? No, says Lewis.

Instead, their true significance lies in their ability to arouse in one's mind "a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth .... This is a special kind of longing." This longing, says Lewis, is "askesis," or a spiritual exercise. Since we long for another world, to see beauty and be united with it, "that is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves-that, though we cannot, yet these projections can, enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image." Furthermore, such stories not only present to us a whole spectrum of experiences in concrete form but, in giving us experiences we never had before, thus add to life. So although the tales may not be exactly like real life, they may show us what reality may be like "at some more central region." This leads us to one of the most important aspects of the Narnia tales: the quality of "joy" which Tolkien says results from good fantasy-a "sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth." For in every "eucatastrophe" we see a glimmer of an even deeper reality-the Christian story itself. The "fairy story" found in the gospels embraces the essence of all fairy stories, says Tolkien: "The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the 'inner consistency of reality.' There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true."