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Adam’s race has done the harm; Adam’s race shall help to heal it. . . . And you, Narnians, let it be your first care to guard this Tree, for it is your Shield. —Aslan, in The Magician’s Nephew Nature is meaningful, teleological, full of design and purpose. It is ecological, arranging a fit between organism and environment , between desire and satisfaction, between appetite and food. “Nature makes nothing in vain.” —Peter Kreeft, Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing Narnia as an Agrarian Kingdom Anyone doubting that Lewis’s vision for Narnia is an agrarian one need only consider the job description for the first king of Narnia, given in The Magician’s Nephew. Even though it was the sixth book in the series to be published, The Magician’s Nephew is the first chronologically in the history of Narnia, and it may have been the second one Lewis imagined .1 It recounts the story of the creation of Narnia, and of its first inhabitants. In chapter 11, a London hansom driver named Frank and his wife, Nell, are called to be the first king and queen of Narnia. When Aslan pronounces that they will be king and queen, Frank protests that he is unfit for the job, having had no education (or “eddycation” as he says). Aslan then describes the duties of the king and, with each one, asks Frank if he is prepared to perform it. What are those duties? He The Magician’s Nephew Chapter 3 Creation and Narnian Ecology  85 86 Narnia and the Fields of Arbol is to farm the land with his hands (“use a spade and plough and raise food out of the earth”); to care for the animals and not to enslave them; to teach others (his children and grandchildren, the future kings and queens) to do the same (so the agrarian tradition will pass on); not to have favorites but to treat all creatures equally; and to place himself and his own life between his subjects and whatever threatens them—that is, as “ruler” he is called to be a servant of the land of Narnia, rather than to see Narnia as though it existed to serve him. Frank is understandably surprised to hear that these are the duties of a king, but he agrees to try. “‘Then,’ said Aslan, ‘you will have done all that a King should do’” (MN, xi). King Frank is to be an agrarian king over an agrarian state, in which all animals are equals, all are to care for one another, and, as we soon discover, all are to be protected by a tree. Now Lewis could certainly have begun Narnia’s history with the founding of a great city, or even with the building of Cair Paravel or some other palace or castle. He chose instead a pastoral kingdom that is to be governed with agrarian principles. This world will later develop cities, but they almost always wind up as examples of ruin and corruption .2 The peace and goodness of Narnia are associated with nature: with woods and wilderness and mountains. “Narnia of the heathery mountains and the thymy downs, Narnia of the many rivers, the plashing glens, the mossy caverns and the deep forests,” remembers the horse Bree wistfully from his captivity in Calormen (HB, i), while the mare Hwin speaks simply of “the woods and waters of Narnia” (HB, iii). Why did Lewis do this? If we are to be true to the story and its teller, we have to admit at the beginning what Lewis himself says in the eponymous essay: “it all began with a picture.” Lewis describes his storytelling as his attempt to tell the stories of the pictures that grew out of the soil of his imagination. One could argue, then, that the agrarianism of young Narnia is merely an imaginative fancy. But that argument would not stand close scrutiny. While there is certainly a romantic element to Lewis’s pastoral landscapes, a close inspection of The Magician’s Nephew and its literary genesis shows that it fits into a larger pattern of Lewis’s fiction in which the creation of the world is intimately tied to care of the world, and in which justice and human flourishing are closely connected to caring for what God has created. In other words, the implications of the creation—both the means of creation and the nature of that [3.149.233.97] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 09...

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