Narnia: The Author, The Critics, and The Tale

Before the recent revival of fairy tales got fully under way, C.S. Lewis's seven Chronicles of Narnia were treated a little like "hand-me-down" clothes which are passed down from big to little children and are immediately given up when the little ones outgrow them. Now that people are returning to the old distinction between stories which can only be read by children and those which can be enjoyed by people of all ages, the Narnian books occupy a position on something like a "Jacob's Ladder" and are continually being passed up and down from young to old, from old to young, depending on which member of the family discovers them first. Of the million copies of the Chronicles sold in England and the United States last year, about half were bought by college students.

Professor Tolkien's Hobbit and Lord of the Rings grew out of the stories he told his children, but Lewis, who was a bachelor for most of his life and knew little about children, wrote fairy tales simply because he liked them himself and because he found them the best art-form for what he had to say. As scholars of the past, both men knew that the association of fairy tales and fantasy with children is very recent and accidental. Fairy tales gravitated to the nursery when they became unfashionable with adults. It surely marks an important recovery that they are coming back—indeed are back—into fashion with whoever likes them of whatever age.

Asked how he came to write the first Chronicle of Narnia—The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—Lewis said: "All my seven Narnian books, and my three science fiction books, began with 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. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: 'Let's try to make a story about it.'"¹

Though Lewis had probably forgotten it, there is some evidence which would seem to indicate that the initial impetus behind his Narnian stories came from real children.

In the autumn of 1939 four schoolgirls were evacuated from London to Lewis's home on the outskirts of Oxford. It was his adopted "mother," Mrs. Moore, who mainly looked after the evacuees, but Lewis shared the responsibility of entertaining the young visitors. On the back of another book he was writing at the time, I found what I believe to be the germinal passage of the first story of Narnia—The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It says: "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."

I've been told by a neighbor who used to see them across her back fence that the schoolgirls did not remain very long in Oxford, and I've never been able to discover whether Lewis wrote any more of the story at this time. The next we hear of the book is from Chad Walsh who says that, when he visited Lewis in the summer of 1948, he talked "vaguely of completing a children's book which he had begun "in the tradition of E. Nesbit.'"² Then, on the 10th of March, 1949, Lewis read the first two chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to his friend, Roger Lancelyn Green, who is the only person to read all seven stories in manuscript. Spurred on by Lancelyn Green's encouragement, The Lion was completed by...