Narnia: World-Building Your Allegory

Narnia Recap: The four Pevensie children have moved away from London to escape the bombing out to a country house where Lucy -- the youngest -- has made a strange discovery by looking into an old wardrobe.

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Chapter 2: What Lucy Found There

When Lucy steps into the wardrobe, she finds a winter wonderland on the other side: an entire forest carpeted in a thick blanket of snow, and an actual honest-to-goodness faun in the middle of the forest, complete with shopping packages and a cheery little umbrella. The faun greets Lucy pleasantly, takes her to his home for tea, provides some essential world-building, and then urges her to flee back to England before danger can befall her in Narnia.

   "GOOD EVENING," SAID LUCY. BUT THE Faun was so busy picking up its parcels that at first it did not reply. When it had finished it made her a little bow.
   "Good evening, good evening," said the Faun. "Excuse me -- I don't want to be inquisitive -- but should I be right in thinking that you are a Daughter of Eve?"

The Chronicles of Narnia in general and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe in particular draw heavily on Christian and Arthurian legends, particularly those involving the coming -- or, rather, returning -- of a true kingdom, one sanctioned by God and governed by God's representatives on earth. And while none of the books could be called a true allegory, there are many allegorical elements within the books: Aslan is quite clearly an allegory for Jesus, his father The Emperor is the Father God of the Christian Trinity, and a very good case could be made for Peter Pevensie as the boy Arthur come to rise from obscurity to claim a bitterly divided kingdom as his own.

Chapter 2 is, in many ways, about laying the world-building foundations for this new world, and indeed almost everything we will learn about Narnia in TLWW will either be laid out in plain English here in Chapter 2 or foreshadowed here and then expanded upon in Chapter 8, so let's go ahead and combine the two a bit and discuss some of the world-building implications here.

The first thing you need to know about Narnia is that it's currently under the oppressive rule of a woman called the White Witch. The White Witch is not the legitimate ruler of Narnia -- she wrested control of the country through her magic and her evil allies a hundred years before -- and she has been using her magic to torment the populace with a 100-year-long winter. The inhabitants of Narnia, however, have taken cold comfort in a prophecy that her reign will come to an end when Aslan returns and four humans sit upon the ancient thrones of Cair Paravel. Because of this prophecy, the White Witch has ordered that any and all humans are to be brought to her immediately for instant removal from the running, so to speak.

Most of this will not be outright explained until Chapter 8, but almost all of it is heavily foreshadowed in the world-building of Chapter 2 as Mr. Tumnus the Faun describes the magical beauty and Grecian creatures (fauns, river gods, naiads, and so forth) of Narnia to the spell-bound Lucy, so I'd like to go ahead and talk about it here.

   "My name's Lucy," said she, not quite understanding him. [...]
   "You are in fact Human?"
   "Of course I'm human," said Lucy, still a little puzzled.
   "To be sure, to be sure," said the Faun. "How stupid of me! But I've never seen a Son of Adam or a Daughter of Eve before."

Mr. Tumnus the Faun has never seen a human being before in his lifetime. This is probably partly because the White Witch has been carefully removing competition for her throne in the last 100 years or so that she's been the ruling power in Narnia, but it's also very clearly because, in Narnia, humans -- true Daughter-of-Eve/Son-of-Adam humans -- are actually quite rare. They are also, in Lewis' imagining, automatically a sort of royal class or ruling party, by virtue of their descent from the "royal" line of Adam and Eve. What's puzzling to me, though, is why no one ever questions this.

Now, I don't mean that in the sense that I expect hereditary ruler-ship to be questioned, although that in itself would be a valid point: why should a handful of foreign kids be better suited to rule than, say, an adult animal or faun or centaur or river god who has lived their entire life in Narnia and might perhaps be a little wiser, a little more in touch with local feelings and customs, and not -- you know -- eight years old. No, those are good and valid questions, but there's certainly more than enough precedent for people of young ages, foreign inclinations, and zero experience whatsoever being given thrones merely through an accident of birth, and so I'll give Narnia a pass on that one.

No, what I find interesting is why the Adam/Eve lineage is considered royal at all in a world full of talking animals and nature goddesses.

In classic Christian mythology, God created the world in seven days, starting with light and water and land and plants, working his way up to animals, and then capping off his grand creation with the invention of humans. These humans are given dominion over the earth and the animals, because they are implied to be very different from the animals. The thrust of the story is ultimately that the animals were given instincts, but that humans alone were made in a godly image: they have intelligence, understanding, and free will. They have, in essence, an inner spirit that sets them apart from the cats and dogs and elephants and squirrels and mice.

This is why Adam and Eve are important: they have intelligence and language and philosophy and free will and permanency. Their souls live on after them in the afterlife; their legacy lives after them in the things they are able to create and leave behind. They don't just eat and sleep and live and die; they make and create and learn and play. And whether or not you agree with the implications of this myth, that mankind is somehow more special than the other animals on this planet, it is at least fairly easy to understand how our ancestors might have thought so.

But Narnia is a world where that humanness -- language, intelligence, philosophy, free will, and the creation of legacies -- is extended to every imaginable type of animal and hybrid. There are talking beavers, fencing mice, dancing fauns, philosophical centaurs, sea-faring minotaurs, and nature deities whose lifespans far exceed our own. In a world filled with animals and hybrids who are essentially "human" in every way except physically, humans no longer have a monopoly on being made in the divine image. So why, I wonder, would a legacy reaching to Adam and Eve be any more important in this world than one reaching to Brenda and Brice, the first intelligent beavers, or Mickey and Minnie, the mice who first walked the earth and laughed in delight at its wonders?

Of course, later books in the series will try to retcon this problem a bit, but the question of why the Pevensies are more legitimate as rulers than anyone else in the land of Narnia is never fully answered to my satisfaction. It's a common issue with allegories: when starting out with the end in mind -- that the Pevensies are the Chosen Ones to rule Narnia based on their biological lineage -- the author must remember to fully justify their ending along the way. A handwave in the direction of Adam and Eve only really makes sense in a world where Adam and Eve can justifiably said to be essentially different from all the other living creatures. In Narnia, the only thing that sets humans truly apart from the animals is that there aren't very many of them around -- and rarity isn't necessarily a good justification for regal legitimacy.

   "This is the land of Narnia," said the Faun, "where we are now; all that lies between the lamppost and the great castle of Cair Paravel on the eastern sea. And you -- you have come from the wild woods of the west?" [...]
   "Meanwhile," said Mr. Tumnus, "it is winter in Narnia, and has been for ever so long, and we shall both catch cold if we stand here talking in the snow. Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me?"
   "Thank you very much, Mr. Tumnus," said Lucy. "But I was wondering whether I ought to be getting back."
   "It's only just round the corner," said the Faun, "and there'll be a roaring fire -- and toast -- and sardines -- and cake."

The White Witch is painted very clearly throughout the book as an illegitimate ruler in two essential ways: her biological illegitimacy and her tyrannical tendencies. The biological issue is relatively simple -- though she claims to be a "Daughter of Eve", she is really descended from Adam and Lilith, not Eve -- but the cruelties of her rule are somewhat more... problematic.

For reasons that are never really developed in the book, the White Witch has chosen to use her magic to blanket all of Narnia in a perpetual winter. It is implied that this winter began at the beginning of her reign, 100 years ago, and the worst part is that though it is always winter, it is never Christmas -- there hasn't been a Christmas in Narnia for the last hundred years.

As far as evil acts go, mucking with the weather to make everyone cold and wet and miserable is, I suppose, pretty darn mean, but it's not an act that makes sense within the narrative. Lucy will go back with Mr. Tumnus to his house for tea, and the two of them will have butter and toast and sardines and more toast and boiled eggs and cake and presumably even tea for tea, with no mention of how these things could be procured in a world where it has been winter and nothing else for the last hundred years.

Throughout this novel, the fact that it has been winter for as long as anyone in the book has been alive (which the exception of Aslan and perhaps a few of the longer-lived mystical creatures) is repeated again and again without any real understanding of what that might mean. Food is procured without there ever once being any kind of shortage on any wanted item; the frozen rivers team with fresh fish that can be easily caught once a nice hole has been cut in the ice. Spring, when it comes halfway through the novel, should in itself be an existential crisis for the bulk of the characters -- the Beavers, in particular, have never seen anything but winter in their lifetime -- but it's accepted with laughter and happiness all around, like any normal spring thaw would be to us.

And never is it explained why the White Witch -- whose defining characteristic is lust for power -- would expend so much energy on something so strange as a perpetual winter. In an agrarian country like Narnia, it can only impoverish her as a ruler and weaken her country to external invasion. Even if she doesn't care about her subjects starving to death, she has to eat, and so do her loyal minions that form her army -- why would they export money and jewels for food rather than relax the frost a bit and grow their own?

I'm not about to suggest an alternate character interpretation of the White Witch where she's really a decent ruler doing her best in a tough situation (though I do like the Eragon fanfics that do basically just that very thing with Galbatorix); any system of government where the opposition is summarily turned into stone statues is not a healthy system of government. However, I'm also not ready to just throw up my hands and assume that the White Witch is an idiot. If she's willing to impoverish and weaken her lands by plaguing them with a perpetual winter, I've got to assume she's getting something more in return than just EVIL LOLZ.

Look at the map of Narnia, and what do you see? The only possible threats to Narnia can come from the north, the south, and the sea to the east. The north is populated by giants, loyal allies to the White Witch. The eastern seaboard, after a 100-year frost, must be completely frosted over at this point and unapproachable by any ships not equipped with ice cutters. That leaves the only threat to the south -- the Archenlands and the Calormen, both of which are used to temperatures far higher than freezing and who would be ill-equipped to invade the snow-blanketed land of Narnia. Narnia under the rule of the White Witch has essentially become Russia circa 1800s: cold, impoverished, and not worth trying to invade. 

The thing is, the true ruler of Narnia isn't the Pevensie children any more than it is the White Witch -- the true king of Narnia is Aslan the lion. But Aslan has been gone for the last century; he left one day and never came back, and no one has seen him since.

   "Aslan?" said Mr. Beaver. "Why, don't you know? He's the King. He's the Lord of the whole wood, but not often here, you understand. Never in my time or my father's time. But the word has reached us that he has come back. He is in Narnia at this moment. He'll settle the White Queen all right. It is he, not you, that will save Mr. Tumnus." -- Chapter 8

Because Aslan left, Narnia was left vulnerable to hostile takeover. The White Witch claimed Narnia for her own, ascended the throne, and magically petrified any and all who opposed her. But in the time since she took the throne, the politics of Narnia have at least been stable. The icy winter that the White Witch has imposed on the country has impoverished Narnia and hurt the spirit of the land, but somehow the inhabitants still find a way to grow or import wheat, honey, and tea, and somehow fish still frolic and play in the frozen rivers. In the meantime, the White Witch has established peace treaties with those who would threaten Narnia to the north and her magical winter has made Narnia unapproachable and uninteresting to those in the east and the south.

The White Witch, for all her evilness and illegitimacy, is taking care of Narnia. She's doing it in the most selfish, evil manner possible, but she is keeping the inhabitants free, safe, and mostly alive. Aslan, on the other hand, couldn't even be bothered to do that when he left Narnia vulnerable to invaders a century ago.

In the allegory of TLWW, if Aslan is Jesus, the White Witch must be Satan. And yet, in order for this allegory to work, the White Witch's rule needs to be marginally worse than Aslan's rule. So far, I'm not sure I'm confident giving a gold star to either ruler right now.

46 comments:

Personal Failure said...

Actually, the White Witch as Satan and Aslan as Jesus makes sense in this allegory. Add up the killings directly ordered by God in the Bible with the killings done by Satan for his own purposes. God's killings add up to the millions, depending upon how large the tribes the Israelites killed really were, as for Satan, the number is a big, fat zero. Even the relatives of Job that Satan killed were killed at the behest of God.

So, yeah, even reading the Bible, it's not hard to see Satan as a much maligned, but ultimately kinder autocrat.

Dav said...

It's also interesting to compare Narnia under the rule of the White Witch to England at the time.  We know the kids have been evacuated, and the house they're in seems to be pretty nice, but there's still rationing and blackouts and air raids.  (Did the country folk blackout their windows the way London did?  I can't remember.)  The kids very well might have been eating better in Narnia after a hundred year winter than they do in England; they're almost certainly not eating cake at home.

I really like the Darkness is Rising series, which plays with some of the same themes of legend and the return of Arthur, but I'm not such a fan of it here.  Even less because the bits where the kids actually rule are completely redacted.  Ruling a magical country is so easy that any human can do it?  And nothing really remarkable or worth exploring happens in that time?  That focus on the difference between the worlds, and the travel back and forth has always seemed a bit strange to me. 

Kit Whitfield said...

...Yeah. Here's Lewis showing one of my least favourite qualities: he's relentlessly, brutally cosy. 

Things don't have consequences in Narnia - or rather, religiously neutral things don't have consequences. Pick a side and you're pretty much done: if you obey the rules you're golden, if you disobey the rules you'll get punished and humbled and then probably move on to cheerful submissiveness to the rules later ... but he isn't prepared to forego the pleasures of food porn and status porn in the interests of story. Winter doesn't affect the food supplies (okay, maybe you can go ice fishing, but where on earth are they growing the wheat to make flour?); being white - excuse me, being human - automatically gives you rank over the natives. What we never seen is someone being lost, being insignificant, being what you normally would be if you walked into a foreign country. Nope, you walk right into the centre of the the country's history and tiffin is laid on.

And this isn't just a literary demerit, though it is that too. It's an aversion to the uncomfortable that sits extremely ill in a book that's supposed to be a religious allegory. 'I'm not going to think about that' is no way to address difficult questions when you're talking religion, but it's the basis for the book's entire aesthetic. And this extends to his theological reasoning as well as his worldbuilding: the abominable liar-lunatic-or-lord piece of tripe he trots out later in the story, for instance, is entirely founded on not thinking about more uncomfortable possibilities. (That someone may be mentally ill but morally convincing, that a self-proclaimed Messiah can be honestly mistaken, that the Gospels might not be accurate reportage, that things are, y'know, not usually simple enough to break down into that few categories, especially when he clearly doesn't know what 'lunatic' actually means...) 

So yeah, cosiness. He doesn't want to think about how reality would work in the physical world, and he doesn't want to think about it when considering history either. And yet he considers himself entitled to be an educator of children. It's the same entitlement that he grants the Pevensie children: you get to walk into a situation and rule it without having to suffer any serious steps out of your comfort zone.

Plus, 'Tumnus' is a yuckily cutesy name, even if it wasn't being applied to a supposedly fearful mythical beast who's been reduced to a cuddly little duffer. Just, ugh

Ana Mardoll said...

Plus, 'Tumnus' is a yuckily cutesy name, even if it wasn't being applied
to a supposedly fearful mythical beast who's been reduced to a cuddly
little duffer. Just, ugh.


As an adult, Mr. Tumnus creeps me out. He's a faun, as in a mythical goat-creature highly associated with virility. He has books in his house with titles like "Nymphs and Their Ways". He drugs Lucy and when she comes to, he's crying and saying he's done something awful. Was Lewis' England so much more innocent that no parent reading TLWW wouldn't think that this had some unfortunate implications? As a modern American, am I just hard-wired by society to see everything in highly sexualized terms? I don't know the answer to that.

Timothy (TRiG) said...

I'm sort-of prepared to give Lewis a pass on the magical winter, accepting that it may be derived from King Lear. When a country doesn't have proper stewardship, because the ruler has abdicated his responsibilities, the weather goes awry. It's a side-effect, rather than an intentional act.

Actually, I'm not sure whether that interpretation puts the blame for eternal winter back on Aslan.

TRiG.

Ana Mardoll said...

Timothy (TRiG)   It does seem sometimes like the magical winter is due to the illegitimacy of the ruler rather than the Witch's magic itself. Several characters do blame the Witch in text, saying that the winter is caused by her magic, but they could easily be mistaken.

Father Christmas DOES lay the blame at being "kept out" at the Witch's feet, but I'm not sure what he expected otherwise. Perpetual-winter-with-Christmas-every-day? After 100 years, he'd be begging for a break, I'd think.

Dav said...

That . . . never even occurred to me.  D:

Kit Whitfield said...

 As a modern American, am I just hard-wired by society to see everything in highly sexualized terms?

Well, you might be, but given that Lewis specifically chose a creature associated with potency and lust, I don't think it's conditioning that's calling it to your attention, I think it's a basic degree of education. 

I don't think the scene is actually sexual - but that in itself is part of the sticky, all-pervasive cosiness. What we're seeing is, essentially, a castrated faun: he speaks in baby-talk (all that Spare Oom business), his sensuality is entirely focused around food, and all in all he's a kind of child-adult hybrid from whom the sexuality has been deliberately removed. Lewis deliberately chose to use a faun and then censored it, because it was so much cosier that way.

Just, ugh.  

Ana Mardoll said...

That . . . never even occurred to me.  D:

Whoops. Sorry. :(

What we're seeing is, essentially, a castrated faun: he speaks in
baby-talk (all that Spare Oom business), his sensuality is entirely
focused around food, and all in all he's a kind of child-adult hybrid
from whom the sexuality has been deliberately removed.


The Spare Oom shtick is kind of strange. No one else who meets the children blink at their "other world" story, although of course we really only see them talking to the Beavers who are sensible working-class folk. One wonders if the baby talk was part of Tumnus' "luring the child to the trap" master plan or if he's really just...that...whimsical.

LGregg said...

This is fascinating and I love it.

When I read these books as a child, I did not even stop to think, "Hey, how does everyone have bread and jam if there is no growing season?" I did think it was strange that all these pagan wood-creatures were so interested in Christmas. From this, and from other hints, I had a general sense that Narnia wasn't a real place at all, but was a game that sufficiently absorbed the children's attention and acted as an allegory for something in their life, and that a savvy adult reader was supposed to notice this and chuckle knowingly about The Wonders of the Imagination and Those Were the Days When Anything Could Happen and A Cardboard Box Could Be A Castle, etc.. As a child, I resented this approach to storytelling a great deal and disliked The LIon, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for that reason. Now, without the book in front of me, I can't tell if that is what Lewis intended or not. 

"Narnia isn't real," would explain how cuddly Tumnus is, and the food supply problem and the problem of how a  couple of schoolkids are able to successfully fight wolves and whatnot, and also why it turns out they are exactly the people everyone has been waiting for and they all get to be kings and queens together with no fighting except that obviously Peter gets to be High King because he's the eldest, I mean, you're eight, Lucy; you're a baby. Remember when Lucy was a baby, Susan?

If the White Witch had some political arrangement with Calormen (which is supposed to be some vaguely Mediterranean country, IIRC,) there might be some benefit to her in keeping Narnia dependent on foreign trade, though whether she would manage to maintain a trade network without mass emigration to the fertile lands to the south (vulture god or no vulture god) is another story. Does anyone leave Narnia for warmer climes? I don't remember if this is ever addressed.   

Loquat said...

Calormen, IIRC, is vaguely Arabian - Book 6, The Horse and His Boy, spends almost all its time there, and the characters, scenery, and cultural details are all very reminiscent of an old translation of the Thousand and One Nights minus the sex. 

That book also lends credence to the theory that the White Witch instituted perpetual winter in order to discourage potential invaders, as one of the major plot points is that Calormen is planning a surprise invasion of Narnia. The ostensible driver of the invasion plot is that the Sultan's son wants to make now-adult Queen Susan reconsider her refusal of his marriage proposal, but it's made clear that the Sultan would really like to acquire Narnia (and Archenland, which seems to be largely an afterthought - very similar to Narnia in culture, but apparently with more humans?) and is only pretending to be unaware of the invasion so he can maintain plausible deniability in case it turns into a clusterf**k.

Which leads to another worldbuilding question. Narnia is apparently very short on proper humans, to the point that many inhabitants in TLWW have never seen one before, but Narnia's southern neighbors, Archenland and Calormen, are chock-full of them. Calormen, in fact, seems to be almost the inverse of Narnia; loads of proper humans, and virtually no talking animals or mythical creatures. Archenland's demographics are a bit harder to pin down, but we're told they have a human royal family that's lasted at least a couple of generations, human knights in service to the crown, humans filling all ranks in the army, and in fact I can't recall seeing a mention of any thinking non-humans in relation to Archenland at all. Not to mention wherever the Telmarines came from - and how else did the Telmarines conquer Narnia, but by exploiting the chaos that would have been the likely result of the 4 monarchs suddenly vanishing without a trace?

The entirety of The Horse and His Boy, of course, throws a gigantic monkey wrench into the "Narnia isn't real" theory, since it takes place during the "lost time" at the end of TLWW, when the Pevensies are adults ruling Narnia, and the Penvensies themselves are minor characters, completely unaware of pretty much the entire plot until someone presumably heads up to Caer Paravel to let them know that the Archenlander army has repelled an invasion headed their way, so perhaps they should reconsider those trade concessions Archenland was asking for. 

So what would have happened if the invasion had succeeded? The Calormene prince was, IIRC, planning to kill Peter and Edmund to forestall revolts backing the "rightful kings", and I doubt he would have let Susan go out on country rides unsupervised (or Lucy, for that matter). Would the Pevensies have permanently vanished from England, leaving the Professor with a lot of explaining to do? Or what if one or more of them, having reached adulthood in Narnia, decided to accept a foreign royal's proposal, or otherwise engaged in some kind of romantic and/or sexual relationship? Imagine twenty-something Edmund, debating whether to marry his pregnant dryad girlfriend and facing up to the reality of impending father hood - and then he stumbles back through the wardrobe and he's 9 again. The more you think about it, the worse it gets, and I'm frankly amazed none of them go crazy afterwards.

Ana Mardoll said...

This is, quite frankly, one of the main reasons I wanted to do a Narnia decon in the first place -- the whole Susan thing never sat right with me in the first place, but when I hit my late twenties and realized what had happened to her... imagine walking through a Walmart one day and then BAM you're 10 years old again, and everyone you ever knew and loved, you'll never meet again... My god.

And then, a year later, they get yanked back and everyone they ever knew is long dead... they can't even cling to the idea that they'll meet everyone again later someday through another world-passage because of the time difference.

Lewis... doesn't even seem to realize this. I don't even know how he doesn't, but he doesn't. The only way the children wouldn't go completely mad with grief, imho, would be if they formed NO emotional attachments at all while in Narnia. And for an author to assume that about his characters... it's either extreme authorial neglect (i.e., just not caring about your characters) or it seemed natural to him. I'm really not sure what to think of that.

Amaranth said...

One of the reasons I really liked the Prince Caspian movie was that they attempted to deal with some of those issues that the books ignore. The kids *aren't* really dealing too well with being "just kids" again. Some of the Narnians are actually resentful about the Pevensies' sudden disappearance. High King Peter is not all noble and completely okay with being replaced by Caspian, and there is actual strain between the two.

But yeah, I think Lewis really wanted to write a kid story, and so proper worldbuilding just wasn't very high on his priorities. Most of the gaps are not things I noticed until I was much older and went, "Wait...how exactly does that work?" (Although I can remember wondering even as a kid why the Pevensies weren't absolutely *heartbroken* over accidentally leaving Narnia, and how exactly the kingdom was going to manage without their monarchs.)

Ana Mardoll said...

Yeah, we spent a whole three weeks on Ransom theory in Christian college.

I think that will be an interesting chapter, though I do want to treat it tactfully.

Loquat said...

TLWW, on its own, seems to me to take the view that the children's adventures in Narnia aren't really real - they have fun and learn important life lessons, but their decade-plus reign isn't really much more than an extended make-believe session where they're still the same kids underneath. The next three books more or less support this* - you'll notice that in those books the kids who visit Narnia stay for months at the longest, and never bring back any evidence that it was real.

And then The Horse and His Boy comes along and shows us grown-up Pevensie monarchs discussing a marriage between Susan and a foreign prince like it's a serious option - one Susan might even have accepted if the prince had done a better job of hiding his true jerkass nature.

And The Magician's Nephew adds both the possibility that Earth humans can, under the right circumstances, stay in Narnia for the rest of their lives, and the first instance of something tangible (the magic apple) coming from Narnia to Earth. I'm not sure yet what it signifies that the only humans to cross over permanently are adults with no apparent imagination or interest in fairy tale make-believe, though as someone's mentioned in these threads Lewis liked obedience and the cabbie and his wife are nothing if not immediately respectful and obedient to Aslan.

*After typing this, I realize it's not quite true. The very next book, Prince Caspian, has a tossed-off line where Aslan puts the Telmarines in their place by telling them their ancestors were Earth pirates or something who found an entrance to Narnia in some random island cave and decided to move in, and any of them who don't wish to live under Aslan's rules are welcome to go back. He says this in front of the Pevensies, IIRC on the same day he tells Peter and Susan they won't be coming back to Narnia again because they're too old.

And now I want to write a fanfic where grown-up Susan meets the Telmarines who went back to Earth.

Ana Mardoll said...

I'm gobsmacked. I'd forgotten all about that throw away line, and I agree that would make a wonderful fanfic.

I think you really eloquently described that aspect of the evolution of seriousness of tone within the series. :)

Kadia said...

I feel really bad for thinking that "faun" was some kind of young deer for so many years. Am I correct in thinking that it's closer to a satyr?

Inquisitive Raven said...

"Faun" is Latin where "satyr" is Greek.  Also, I believe that the Roman equivalent of Pan is named Faunus.

Kit Whitfield said...

"Fawn" is a young deer; "faun" is an associate of the satyrs. A bit confusing, really, especially when spoken aloud.


But yeah, I think Lewis really wanted to write a kid story, and so proper worldbuilding just wasn't very high on his priorities. 
A lot of it, I think, comes down to his idea of what children are or should be like - which was not, at the time in his life when he wrote Narnia, based on very much experience of children. Obedience to the right authorities, whom one perceives instinctively if one's a good person, was an idea that appears to be genuinely beloved in Lewis's world. He described his own conversion as a form of being overpowered, and so to him, submission of the will against one's desires, and even against one's own reason, is an essential part of religion. 

For such an conservative and authoritarian man, that may feel comfortable. But he presumably wasn't stupid enough to think it would be cosy for everyone, and he did love his cosiness. Transferring his attentions to children makes sense: he could posit the kind of cheerfully obedient little scouts who would feel secure under the dominance of an appropriate authority. And because they were fantasy children, he wouldn't have to take them too seriously: they're cheerfully obedient and cope with thing by being cheerful and obedient, and those are really the only qualities he values in them. (Well, bravery too, but a lot of that seems to boil down to staying cheerful while doing what you're supposed to do.) 

Focusing on children allows him to limit the respect he has for their emotional needs: he could simply fall comfortably back on the conservative assumption that all children really need is discipline, and if they don't seem happy about that, you discipline them some more. (As witness Eustace again: a progressive upbringing makes him loathsome, some nice stern punishment makes him good.) 

And by having his characters be unquestioning as the highest virtue, by implication he can demand it of his readers as well. You don't want to be like Eustace, do you? He called Narnia sentimental, and look what happened to him! 

Marie Brennan said...

You might be interested in Carpetbaggers, a fanfic that picks up with the Pevensies being made rulers of Narnia, and following them through the process of turning that idea into reality.  It addresses all the kinds of worldbuilding questions you're bringing up here, from a much more realistic angle than Lewis himself was interested in; the answers are political and economic and not at all cosy.  (Black market for food, Narnians collaborating with the White Witch to get by, most of the Talking Animals and so on not being thrilled by four kids being their supposed monarchs, etc.)  I haven't finished reading it myself, but I've been enjoying it a lot.

Marie Brennan said...

Correction to what I posted -- only the very beginning of the story is up on that site.  More of it is here (scroll down and page back to find older entries), but it's presently incomplete.

LGregg said...

Poor Eustace. There was no real need for him to have to have such a bad time of it. So much of his characterization is tied up in the author's poor opinion of his parents (who are just being faddish and contrary anyway) that it completely fails to have the intended effect. Instead of being a bully who learns a lesson, he comes off like an ordinary kid who might have any number of flaws but is being bullied unconscionably by the narrator.

But I guess that's a topic for another time. . .

Joshua said...

OK, how on earth can you find three weeks' worth of material on the ransom theory? I have a degree in theology, with a major and paper choices aimed at specifically this kind of stuff, and I can recall two and a half lecture hours spent on it. Some of which was devoted to a guest speaker, a young girl, recapping the plot of this book. Then we moved on to other, slightly more relevant theories of Jesus' atonement.

I'm surprised someone would give it three weeks worth of priority.

LGregg said...

"But I'm not sure these books were intended to hang together, as it were;
or at least, consistent worldbuilding wasn't high on the list of
priorities. . . I  think that Lewis was writing a library, and moreover, now that I think of it, a library based on the Biblical bookshelves. "

That's a very interesting take on the Narnia books. I guess it's equally fair whether Lewis intended it from the beginning or not. Not that I have any clear theory about what he intended; I haven't even read the middle books after Dawn Treader-- I guess I should read them all before I go running around in here.

 

Ana Mardoll said...

@sandeagozu:disqus  That's really a very fascinating theory; I've not seen that before, but I kind of like it!

@5f7481cca0d7c88db06c70cd039006af:disqus  Well, the professor really liked class discussion... :D

In all seriousness, the particular Protestant denomination I was going to heavily favored a flavor of Ransom/Substitution. (Frankly, I don't see a difference beyond who is *technically* being satisfied, Satan or God. Even in TLWW, it's made clear that The Rules were laid down by The Emperor, so it hardly seems to matter to *me* whether Satan is being tricked into taking Jesus or whether God is taking Jesus as a debt payment.)

To fuel the discussion, the professor preferred what Wiki is calling "Moral Influence" and he called...something else. Can't remember now, to be honest. This caused conflicts in class as well as with the parents/alumni/administration. I don't know if this is true for ALL denominations, but in my childhood church it did seem that the theologians were more liberal than the laity.

I do think, though, that the "conservative laity" issue is seen in a lot of Christian pop culture. I could name a dozen Christian songs from my youth that endorsed Ransom/Substitution. (Heck, I could probably find you a few country songs, too!) Make it hard on me and tell me I can't use Carmen and I STILL think I could get you a good 9 or 10. In contrast, I can't think of a single song that went the Moral Influence direction -- it's so much less sexeh and adventurous and dramatic.

I mean, which is cooler when you're a teenager? That Jesus loved you so much that he died SO YOU WOULDN'T HAVE TO or that Jesus loved you so much that he died so that you could learn an important moral lesson. :P

(Incidentally, for what it's worth, Wiki says that Moral Influence is the oldest atonement theory. It may well depend on who is being asked the question, seeing as how quite a few of the "oldest" documents out there are considerably tricky to date and are open to interpretation about which "atonement theory" they're explicitly endorsing...)

Loquat said...

Paul had the scales removed from his eyes; Eustace did him one better and had scales removed from his whole body.

This line is made of win. :D

Many thanks to Marie Brennan for that Carpetbaggers link. I never gave much thought, as a child, to where exactly all the Narnians were getting their food during the hundred-year winter; having the White Witch import food and use it to bribe people into collaboration makes perfect sense. The part where the kids start wondering just how Tumnus and the Beavers came to have such cosy little houses with plenty of food and supplies... yeah.

Dav said...

Marie, thanks for the Carpetbaggers link.  It is indeed made of win.  And The Cave in the Deerfield is fantastic.

Cupcakedoll said...

I wonder if Mr. Lewis just... watched what the characters did and then wrote about it.  He didn't wonder where the bread came from, he just saw them eating it and described the scene.  Saw the winter and never figured out why the witch decided that would be a good idea.  A sort of  zen answerless fairytale writing style that depends on the audience suspending enough disbelief that they don't ask questions about things the writer doesn't know.  And which you have to be either a good writer or very in tune with reader expectations to pull off.

The white witch is probably inspired by the Snow Queen fairytale.

Kit Whitfield said...

I wonder if Mr. Lewis just... watched what the characters did and then wrote about it.  He didn't wonder where the bread came from, he just saw them eating it and described the scene.  Saw the winter and never figured out why the witch decided that would be a good idea.  A sort of  zen answerless fairytale writing style that depends on the audience suspending enough disbelief that they don't ask questions about things the writer doesn't know.

You can do that if your aim is portray an impressionistic mood. You're on thin ice if you're also trying to play logician with that trilemma nonsense. Can't have it both ways. 

Timothy (TRiG) said...

Well, he did say that all his storied came to him as pictures, so that's probably what he was doing. Bolting on an allegory on top was a mistake.

TRiG.

Amaryllis said...

I rather doubt he did, but I don't really know what he intended.. And so I've decided that The Silver Chair, although I still say it bears some thematic comparison with the prophets-- all that business with the Signs, and if you follow them you'll do well, but if not, there'll be trouble-- but story-wise, it also reminds me of the Book of Tobit. There's the serpentine demon, the quest , the giants, the dying patriarch, the generally fishy odor hanging about the whole thing...yes, I know that quests and demons and giants can be found in any number of tales, but I'm too taken with the notion of Puddleglum as the archangel Rafael  to dismiss the idea easily.

This kind of thing can be dangerous, though. I had to forcibly stop myself from thinking too tortuously about Dawn Treader: "seven great lords"? Look how they embody the Seven Deadly Sins! Stages of a journey? Can we map them to Seven Virtues? But enough is enough.

Nick the Australian said...

On a lighter note:

I don't know if this has occurred to anyone else, but re-reading this chapter it seems to me that, for a girl who is supposed to be bright and with good instincts, Lucy can be... well... incredibly dim?

I mean, look at this bit when Mr Tumnus tells her about his intention to kidnap her. (I wrote this when I was planning to do my own "Nick Reads Narnia" dissection thing, but I couldn't be bothered going much further.)




















“I’m a kidnapper
for her, that’s what I am. Look at me, Daughter of Eve. Would you believe that
I’m the sort of Faun to meet a poor innocent child in the wood, one that had
never done me any harm, and pretend to be friendly with it, and invite it home
to my cave, all for the sake of lulling it asleep and then handing it over to
the White Witch?”


 


[Without another word, Lucy fled
from the cave and ran back to the lamp-post as fast as her legs could carry
her.


 


Except not. This happens instead:]


 


“No,”
said Lucy. “I’m sure you wouldn’t do anything of the sort.”


 


[*facepalm* HE JUST TOLD YOU HE
WAS A KIDNAPPER.]


 


“But I have,” said
the Faun.


 


[Without another word, Lucy fled
from the cave and ran back to the lamp-post as fast as her legs could carry
her.


 


Except not. Again. This happens
instead:]


 


“Well,” said Lucy
rather slowly (for she wanted to be truthful and yet not be too hard on him),
“well, that was pretty bad. But you’re so sorry for it that I’m sure you will
never do it again.”


 


[*headdesk* THIS IS NOT THE RIGHT
COURSE OF ACTION TO TAKE.


 


It is completely obvious that he’s talking about Lucy. I first read this
book when I was about Lucy’s age and even then I could tell right away he was
referring to kidnapping her. And when someone is talking about kidnapping you
and they’re in a moment of weakness (e.g. sitting down and bawling), you don’t
try to be friends with them, YOU RUN AWAY. And you know what? Even if their
intentions towards you are completely innocent, but they reveal to you in a
moment of weakness that they are a kidnapper of children by trade, YOU STILL
RUN AWAY.]


 


“Daughter of Eve,
don’t you understand?” said the Faun. “It isn’t something I have done. I’m doing it now, this very
moment.”


“What do you mean?”
cried Lucy, turning very white.


 


[*headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*


 


HE MEANS HE’S KIDNAPPING YOU, YOU IDIOT!]


 


“You are the
child,” said Tumnus. “I had orders form the White Witch that if ever I saw a
Son of Adam or a Daughter of Eve in the wood, I was to catch them and hand them
over to her. And you are the first I ever met. And I’ve pretended to be your
friend and asked you to tea, and all the time I’ve been meaning to wait till
you were asleep and then go and tell Her.”


 


[DO YOU GET IT NOW? HIM. YOU. KIDNAP!]




He has to tell her "I'm in the process of kidnapping you right now" FOUR TIMES before she gets it.

Nick the Australian said...

Oh, crap. Sorry about the formatting mess-up. I copied that directly from a Word document.

Ana Mardoll said...

@2764d0c0cc0bde8908dc7ff9d6a4e08b:disqus

No worries about the formatting -- Disqus acts up sometimes, so I removed the extra line breaks. :)

I remember -- like you -- catching on way faster as a child and not fully understanding why Lucy was being so dim. I'm not sure if Lewis was trying to be extra sugary sweet or if he really thought a child would be that dim or what...???

Angelia Sparrow said...

You're not far off. The book skeeved me. The cartoon really skeeved me. I had to turn off the live action movie at this point.  I could not handle the implications. Or the fact Tumnus was hot.

Ellen said...

I don't see the events of THAHB being inconsistent with a make-believe Narnia. After all, when I was a kid and roleplaying in my fantasy world with my siblings, we were grown ups with a long reign. We got married -- that's what the people in books did, that's what our parents did, of course we did. We negotiated international treaties and fought wars and were great and just rulers. And then at some point we grew up and left that behind and had different fantasy worlds, until now we're all so grown up we don't generally play those games.

HelenLouise said...

Actually, I can sort of understand why Lucy is so dim here.  She's wandered into this mystical fairy tale land that is covered in snow.  A magical creature has taken her in and given her a lovely tea and told her stories.  She's wandered into some lovely dream world where normal rules do not apply... it's winter and not summer, there is a creature from the Greek myths and probably it's entirely safe to go back to stranger's houses and eat their tea.

And she likes Mr Tumnus...  there are a disturbing number of actual real life cases where an evil murderer/rapist/whoever is let off because he just doesn't seem like a nasty man.  If he's telling her the truth, then she's in terrible danger, but if she's misunderstood somehow, she can just pop home.  Staying in denial seems like the safest option - it's often a very natural reaction to danger.

It occurs to me that Lewis probably didn't think that for Edmund it was natural to think the best of the Witch even though it was natural for Lucy to think the best of Mr Tumnus, even though his kindness was really just a trap.  Hmmm.

Julie paradox said...

I suspect Lewis was attempting to show us how Lucy was absolute rock-solid Good  - not obedient, but pure - by pointing out that it was difficult for her to imagine an actual someone in front of her doing something so awful.

I can't remember how I read it as a child.  I do know that Lucy being pure-hearted was a concept that rooted itself firmly in my mind (I think it gets expressed rather more obviously later on).

Caravelle said...

This may be nitpicking, but what I'd heard is that Lewis didn't consider Narnia an allegory, or more specifically that he didn't consider Aslan an allegory for Jesus. Aslan is Jesus, in canon.

As for the worldbuilding, what Kit said about how cosy Lewis is. What I'm wondering is, how fair of a criticism is this ? Is "worldbuilding" (as in creating a consistent world with rules whose implications are taken into account as much as possible) in fantasy literature a modern concept ? Tolkien definitely did worldbuilding, but then Tolkien pretty much founded modern fantasy; if he was the first to do it we can't really blame Lewis for neglecting it. I haven't read much fantasy from before them but a lot of what I have read involved faerie lands which are clearly dream-like and not meant to be, well, functional or mechanistic. The only other example I can think of offhand is The Wizard of Oz novels, which I haven't read, but from what I hear it's also big on allegory and what I remember of the movie doesn't make me think it was much for consistent, mechanistic worldbuilding either.

Loquat said...

That's something I never quite put my finger on before - Lucy and Edmund both do essentially the same thing on their first trip to Narnia. Encounter a strange yet friendly adult, accept their offers of refreshment and shelter from the cold unquestioningly, accept as well their explanation of what this world is and what's going on, and afterwards continue to trust them even after receiving evidence that they might not in fact have the childrens' best interests in mind. Edmund's being "good", i.e. trusting and obedient to an adult authority figure; he just picked the wrong one.

Regarding whether Lucy should have made a mad dash for the wardrobe upon learning that Tumnus planned to kidnap her - I have to say, my own instincts would be to try to gather more information before running off in a panic, specifically on the subject of whether there are any accomplices lurking outside to catch a fleeing victim, and whether agents of the White Witch might be on their way to make sure Tumnus doesn't screw up.

Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little said...

"This may be nitpicking, but what I'd heard is that Lewis didn't consider
Narnia an allegory, or more specifically that he didn't consider Aslan
an allegory for Jesus. Aslan is Jesus, in canon."

Yes, that's what I recall, too. According to one of his letters (which I might be able to find online if I take the next two hours looking for it -- initial attempts at Googling this are not being as fruitful as I'd like), Lewis wasn't writing an allegory, but rather a thought experiment: "What if Jesus incarnated in a world of talking animals?" You might even call it a fanfic.

That said, I never realized until now how that whole thought experiment goes out the window when your talking animal incarnate Jesus needs Hyoo-Manhs to sit on the thrones. At that point you're not talking about how the Jesus story might play out in a non-human world so much as you're talking about how Jesus wants humans to colonize a non-human world. But then I suppose it is the same for Lewis as it is for many of us: what you consciously set out to write is often not what appears on the page.

Kit Whitfield said...

if he was the first to do it we can't really blame Lewis for neglecting it. I haven't read much fantasy from before them but a lot of what I have read involved faerie lands which are clearly dream-like and not meant to be, well, functional or mechanistic. 

I have no problem with neglecting consistency to make something more imaginative or dream-like or beautiful or poetically true; I just have a problem with neglecting it to make something more cosy and sentimental. (Especially when you're setting yourself up as a logician at the same time.) 

Fundamentally it's not the inconsistency that bothers me; it's that cosiness and sentimentality are the ruling principles. If consistency had been overruled by better principles, I wouldn't mind at all. 

Brenda said...

As far as going back to being children, I think I always imagined the transformation was mental as well as physical. They might have memories of being kings and queens, but they are thinking and feeling the way they originally did at that age - their perceptions did not remain adult. Everything was reversed, not just their physical appearance.

Joshua said...

Ana, you say:

And while none of the books could be called a true allegory, there are many allegorical elements within the books

The LtWW as a whole is definitely an allegory for the Ransom theory of atonement, which in Christian theology was the earliest theory on what the point of Jesus' death was. It's not widely held now.

In that allegory, Aslan plays the role of Jesus, as you point out, the Witch Satan, etc. Edmund plays the part of humanity.

Lewis was definitely a conservative - he writes an allegory of a piece of theology that hasn't been widely held for a thousand years. He also wrote a science fiction trilogy using pre-Copernican ideas about the solar system, which I find an amusing mental exercise, regardless of whether the result is to your taste.

Joshua said...

(Frankly, I don't see a difference beyond who is *technically* being satisfied, Satan or God. Even in TLWW, it's made clear that The Rules were laid down by The Emperor, so it hardly seems to matter to *me* whether Satan is being tricked into taking Jesus or whether God is taking Jesus as a debt payment.)I quite agree. Either way, God's motivations and attidute towards humanity seem unreconcilably contradictory. God loves us so much that he sacrifices his Son in one fashion or another to placate God's hatred for us. Waah?I don't know if this is true for ALL denominations, but in my childhood church it did seem that the theologians were more liberal than the laity.That is also my impression, until you look at the fundamentalist sects. I tend to be a counter-example in many churches I have attended. I think it is merely the fact of taking three years plus to learn theology makes the realisiation that you didn't start out knowing all the answers almost unavoidable, and with that realisation you tend to relax a bit about the black and white things you may have believed earlier.I could name a dozen Christian songs from my youth that endorsed Ransom/Substitution.The large majority of Protestant Christianity around the world seems to adhere to some kind of substitutionary sacrifice theory of atonement, to the point of not realising there are alternatives at all. Which is kind of disappointing to me, 'cos I don't think it makes much sense.(Incidentally, for what it's worth, Wiki says that Moral Influence is the oldest atonement theory. It may well depend on who is being asked the question, seeing as how quite a few of the "oldest" documents out there are considerably tricky to date and are open to interpretation about which "atonement theory" they're explicitly endorsing...)The wiki page I linked to claimed that for the ransom theory, too. I think you can only take the wiki so far, so I'm going to go with the datings I learned at college. I read the page you are presumably referring to, and I think that while it doesn't misrepresent the Bible or the early church authors it quotes, it does mischaracterise the quotations as explicating a theory of atonement at all. By which I mean, while Augustine (for example, without loss of generality) undoubtably did go on about the positive moral example Jesus provides at length, I think if you asked him if that was the sole or main mechanism by which Jesus saved us from our sins, he'd look at you funny.Dating documents isn't all that hard, especially when you're only aiming for nearest-thousand-years accuracy, which I am here. Whether you read a dated document as support for a modern theory or as an example of an ancient theory is where I disagree with it.

Amaryllis said...

I did think it was strange that all these pagan wood-creatures were so interested in Christmas.
But it fits with the allegorical elements of that book: you have to have Christmas before you can get to Good Friday and Easter.

'Narnia isn't real'
I remember being rather confused by the whole idea of "Narnia" when I read these books as a kid. Was it a fairy-tale, not-real kind of place, as in TLWWW? Or an actual country among others, as in THAHB? Or The World, as in TMN and TLB?

But I'm not sure these books were intended to hang together, as it were; or at least, consistent worldbuilding wasn't high on the list of priorities.

It's a truism in Christian circles* that "the Bible isn't a book; it's a library." I've even seen lists of correspondences between the various books and the Dewey Decimal system. I think that Lewis was writing a library, and moreover, now that I think of it, a library based on the Biblical bookshelves.  That is, TLWWW is a Gospel retelling, of course. So, let's see... Prince Caspian has Book-of-Joshua overtones, expelling the corrupt rulers from the land and restoring the pure faith. Dawn Treader is sort of an Acts of the Apostles, being the travels of the reformed former persecutor. (Paul had the scales removed from his eyes; Eustace did him one better and had scales removed from his whole body.) Um, The Silver Chair...I'm not sure, maybe the post-Babylonian prophets, holding fast to the faith regardless of worldly contradictions and defeats: I'm on Aslan's
side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as
like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.
THAHB, definitely the books of Kings, with wars among the nations, and the divine spirit visible behind the history for those who look. And of course, Magician's Nephew as Genesis and Last Battle as Revelation.

That's my theory, anyway, and I'm sticking to it. But I do think it's true that the story Lewis wanted to tell in each book didn't necessarily have the same focus as the books that preceded it.

Also, now that I come to think of it, the publication order of these books kind of mimics the "scope," I think is the word I want, of the usual arrangement of the books of the Bible. That is, Genesis starts out in a county of myth, where there are only a handful of humans. Then the scope widens, to families, tribes, nations in actual time and place, until the whole world is included as the final narrative circles backout of history and into myth. Thus, Narnia moves from dream-country, to real country, to the world, and back/on to the Really Real World. In my end is my beginning and all that.

But here's where I lose the power to talk coherently about such misty ideas, and I'll stop.

----
*there are, of course, other circles insisting that it is indeed a Book, one story without contradiction or ambiguity or context. But with those sorts we have nothing to do.

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