TripLit with D. Major

TripLit with D. Major

Finding Narnia, Again

C.S. Lewis (Clive Staples Lewis) dedicated The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to his goddaughter, Lucy, who was the inspiration for the youngest female character, Lucy Pensevie. In the dedication, Lewis laments that by the time the book is published more than likely Lucy will be too old for fairy tales, but he hopes a day will come when she is much older and that she will once again return to them:

My Dear Lucy,

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. You can take it down from the upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it…

I felt like Lewis was speaking directly to me here. Before I began penning this piece I had to hunt down my copy of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe which was tucked away on an “upper shelf”—I had to get a footstool—and when I took it down I also had to “dust it” off. I don’t believe that you are ever too old for fairy tales, though. But I do understand Lewis’s words here. There comes a time when your childhood is irretrievably lost, and even though you’ve kept your childhood memories, those memories do not capture the childlike wonder for life you once possessed. Yet, there will also come a time when you return to those memories and they become more real than the present, and it is then that you may recapture that wonder and return to fairy tales.

This idea is fully articulated at the beginning and the end of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. When Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy are children and still have ripe imaginations they’re able to access Narnia. It’s no accident that the youngest Pensevie child, Lucy, is the first to discover a magical wardrobe that leads to Narnia. And it is no surprise that when Lucy tells her siblings what she has discovered that they do not believe her. At the end of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, when the Pensevies have “aged out” or in other words, because they’ve become adults, they must leave Narnia. Lewis is not only setting up rules for his fantasy world, but is also making a statement about the child’s imagination verses the adult’s imagination, or lack thereof.

When I first read (and reread and reread) the Chronicles of Narnia I lived in the countryside in Missouri; the forty aces we owned bordered acres and acres of farmland and virgin forest. It was absolutely beautiful country. The child version of myself used to pretend to be Lucy having grand adventures in Narnia. And like Lewis, I also “mapped” out my fantasy world which included places I named. “Hollow Tree” comes to mind. Like its namesake, it was a hollowed- out tree I used to crawl inside and travel to my personal Narnia. Looking back, Lewis’s treatment of nature as magic and magic as nature coincided with my hyperbolic response to the landscape of my youth. We would ultimately move to Atlanta, but I’ve always felt that I left my childhood there and I’ve been trying to get back to Narnia for years.

I’ve gotten real close to returning. I attempted to enter Narnia by turning an antique wardrobe I found at a flea market into a magical wardrobe. My sister painted the interior doors with scenes from Narnia—the White Witch on her sleigh and Aslan in the Witch’s Stone Garden freeing her victims. Sadly, our spells didn’t work. One, my wardrobe wasn’t hewn from wood grown from a Narnian apple tree, and two, was no longer a child at the time.

Dawn’s Narnia Wardrobe: Aslan frees the statutes in the White Witch’s stone garden.: “WHAT AN EXTRAORDINARY PLACE!” cried Lucy. “All those stone animals—people too! It’s—like a museum.” Aslan’s breath brings the statutes back to life: “He [Aslan] had bounded up to the stone lion and breathed on him. Then without waiting a moment he whisked round—almost as if he had been a cat chasing its tail—and breathed also on the stone dwarf…” (pg. 167)

“On the sledge, driving the reindeer, sat a fat dwarf…behind him, on a much higher seat in the middle of the sledge sat a very different person—a great lady, taller than any woman Edmund had ever seen. She was also covered in white fur up to her throat and held a long straight golden wand in her right hand and wore a golden crown on her head. Her face was white—not merely pale, but white like snow or paper or icing-sugar, except for her very red mouth.” (pg. 31)

Ten years ago, I made another attempt at Narnia. As a grad student I taught “world-building” and “map-making” in a C.S. Lewis course. Of course, Lewis’s map of Narnia was part of the discussion, but the real pleasure was when the students shared maps of their own fictional worlds. That aforementioned childlike wonder was written across their faces. And to my surprise and complete and utter joy, at the end of the class a student pulled out a flute and played the Narnian lullaby that Mr. Tumnus played in the 2005 The Narnia Chronicles: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe movie. I never wanted that class to end.

My next try at cheating my way into Narnia was in April of 2024, when my husband, Nick, and I travelled to England. Nick is a Brummie (or maybe a hobbit – they are very similar); he has to get his football fix so we visit England quite often. It works well for me; I’m a total Anglophile…if you haven’t made that correlation yet. While there, we took a literary tour of Oxford, where C.S. Lewis attended and later taught at the university. It is also one of the cities that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, and apparently where Harry Potter lives, but don’t get me started on Harry Potter.

So, how did the Oxford city landscape influence Lewis when I just told you that Narnia was nature-bound? Lewis did what most writers do when world-building. That is, he used an amalgamation of settings to create Narnia. We know that the natural world of Narnia was inspired by Northern Ireland because Lewis was quoted as saying so. According to The Newry Times News, a local newspaper in County Down, Ireland, Lewis stated, “That part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough is my idea of Narnia.” I haven’t been able to locate such a straightforward statement from Lewis regarding settings in Oxford that may have inspired Narnia, but how couldn’t have Oxford inspire his writing when he spent such a significant portion of his life there? According to timeline of Lewis’s life obtained form the C.S. Lewis Foundation, after serving in WWI, “he received a First in Honour Moderations (Greek and Latin Literature) in 1920, a First in Greats (Philosophy and Ancient History) in 1922, and a First in English in 1923. Later in 1925, Lewis was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he served as tutor in English Language and Literature for 29 years” Walking the same footpaths Lewis travelled on a daily basis, it would be unrealistic to not see how Oxford helped sculpt Narnia.

So, it is my hope that with the photos and accompanying passages I’ve provided here, you are able to find a way to cheat your way into Narnia again or just pretend a little.

Image of me standing on top of Martyrs’ Cross: During Queen Mary’s (or “Bloody Mary” as she is sometimes known) reign, protestants were burned at the stake at this site. It’s doubtful that there’s any connection between the stone bricks at Martyrs’ cross and the stone table where Aslan was sacrificed, but as I had already been transported to Narnia, I felt I had the right to entertain a new theory. The White Witch demanded a blood sacrifice just like Queen Mary.

Image of Narnia Door Oxford, England: As a fellow at Magdalen College, Lewis often walked down St. Mary’s Passage and would pass by this wooden door with a lion carving embellished on it. The carving is thought to have inspired the lion character, Aslan, in The Narnia Chronicles. The door also resembles a wardrobe door and has been nicknamed the “Narnia Door.”

Image of the lamppost: The lamppost may also be found on St. Mary’s Passage just a few steps across from the Narnia Door. After Lucy first enters Narnia she walks through the woods and follows a source in the distance where she discovers a lamppost. Moments later, she meets Mr. Tumnus: “As she stood looking at it, wondering why there was a lamp-post in the middle of a wood and wondering what to do next, she heard the pitter patter of feet coming toward her.” (pg. 9)

A side view and a front view image of fauns in St. Mary’s Passage: Above the Narnia Door and on either side of it are two ornately carved golden fauns. Lucy first meets the Pan-like creature, Mr. Tumnus, Lucy at the lamppost: “From the waist upward he was like a man, but his legs were shaped like a goat’s (the hair on them was glossy black) and instead of feet he had goat’s hoofs. He also had a tail…He had a strange, but pleasant little face, with a short pointed beard and out of his curly hair stuck two horns, one on each side of his forehead.” (pg. 10)

Images of the entryway and the door to the School of Metaphysics with bordering stone keystones and grotesques: “Lewis served as philosophy tutor at University College” and would enter through this door. He was greatly influenced by his surroundings and may have drawn inspiration for his stone garden setting from the stone bosses and monuments found on the buildings at Magdalen College. Rather than killing her enemies the White Witch turns them into stone It makes you wonder if the mythical creatures and keystones around Oxford are actually trapped in.

Images of front of The Eagle and the Child Pub and the pub sign: Lewis was a member of The Inklings, a friend circle who included J.R.R. Tolkien and Lewis’s brother, Warren Lewis. They met for 16 years in Jack’s (Lewis’s friends called him Jack) rooms at Magdalen College on Thursday evenings and, just before lunch on Mondays or Fridays, in a back room at “The Eagle and Child,” a pub known to locals as “The Bird and Baby.” Unfortunately, Nick and I weren’t able to get a pint and soak up the spirits of these great writers because the pub was under renovation. Nor could I convince the workers to let me have private tour.

*Quotes were obtained from the 1994 The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Book Two edition published by Harper Collins Publishers, The Newry Times (Nov. 20, 2003), and “The Life of C.S. Lewis Timeline” found on the C.S Lewis Foundation online site.