Why The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is still a classic
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: Chapters 1 - 3
Earlier this year I wrote about why I secretly hated the Chronicles of Narnia as a child. In it, I made a promise to read and review all seven books, so as to see if my childhood memories fit the actual quality of the stories. And so I dusted off my old, single-volume Brazilian edition from the shelf and began reading. Now I am finally ready to deliver on my promise. Ladies and gentlemen, the one that started it all: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Before the book even begins, we have that wonderful dedicatory to Lucy Barfield, adoptive daughter of fellow Inkling Owen Barfield and Lewis’s godchild:1
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 then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be
your affectionate Godfather,
C. S. Lewis
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. This sentence stirred something inside the heart of many a reader — myself included. Despite being written to a specific girl, we could almost say it is the mission statement of the Narnia series.
Lewis tells us in Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said that the Chronicles grew on his mind from a series of images — “a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion” —, which were then shaped by a desire to, if possible, transmit to children some of the mythical beauty of the Christian story. Not Christian orthodoxy, but Christian imagination.2 The first priority of the Narnia stories (like all good art) is to be good stories. But if their author was successful in his intent, they will also wake up something inside a young reader — and re-awaken it in an old one.
This is just the first paragraph, and the story hasn’t even begun yet. Let’s move on!
Meet the Pevensies
No one, I assume, needs me to summarize The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But this is my Substack, and you can’t stop me.
The story begins, appropriately, with Once upon a time:
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.
The four siblings are sent to the countryside to live with an old Professor during the London air-raids in World War II. All my childhood I assumed that Professor Kirke was the Pevensies’s uncle. Turns out that is never stated, likely because Lewis thought the real explanation obvious: the Professor is just a kind old man housing refugees during Operation Pied Piper. In real life, Lewis himself was one of such people, taking in evacuee girls throughout the entire war.3
We are not given ages for the Pevensie children, but these are less important than their relative standing towards one another. Peter and Susan are the older ones, acting as natural authority figures in the absence of their parents. Both are still, nevertheless, children. The first we hear of Peter he is excited about exploring this old, strange house they’ve been moved to, and about the perspective of a holiday where they can do whatever they want.
Susan, more often than Peter, tries to be the responsible one: she tells her siblings they should all go to bed and tries to make them see the bright side when their plans are ruined by rain. Edmund’s reaction, however, shows that she can come across as more condescending than motherly. (In)famously, it is Susan’s desire to be an adult that will lead to her fate in The Last Battle. Here, on her first appearance, we see the seeds of that.
Lucy is the youngest one, young enough that the Professor’s appearance scares her when she first sees him. She is “innocent”, but not foolish (she does not lock herself inside a wardrobe, as the text remind us).4
And Edmund is a jerk. The kind of jerk all of us either knew or were. He laughs at the Professor’s appearance when they first meet; pretends his not sleepy, though this makes him grumpy; resents Susan for trying to act like their mom; and when their plans to explore the woods are ruined by rain, Edmund says he knew all along it would be raining — even though four lines above he was excited about the prospect of seeing foxes. Edmund has the kind of petty disposition that convinces itself it is right however it acts, and that resents those that do not wallow in the same misery.
I do not think I am making ground-breaking literary criticism by saying the Pevensie children are not deep, complex characters. They are mostly types. Not archetypes, nor stereotypes, but types: the almost-mature juvenile, the grown-up-wannabe, the petty jerk, the good child. Kinds of people the reader can quickly identify, either in himself or in others. I believe Lewis said once (though I cannot recall where) that a book in which extraordinary things happen should, as a general rule, have an ordinary protagonist. An extraordinary man in an extraordinary adventure is one extra too many.
The role of extraordinary character is given instead to the Professor. From our first meeting his unusual appearance is noted: full of shaggy white hair and “so odd-looking that Lucy […] was a little afraid of him”. His role in the book is to present the Pevensies with a new paradigm of how a “grown-up” thinks and acts. A few chapters down the line, when the children tell him that Lucy’s been claiming to have found a country inside the wardrobe, the Professor does not dismiss the idea as absurd; instead, he examines it on its own merits (“Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?”). The Professor is a man more concerned with the truth than with being sensible.
Perfect reflection of him is his home: an old, large house, almost labyrinthic in its extension of “long passages and rows of doors leading into empty rooms”, filled with old books, paintings, armor. Though we spend little time in it (it is a short book), the Professor’s house is as remarkable as any of the fantastical locations we will meet later. It is a place at the same time adventure-inviting, cozy, mysterious, and just a tad creppy.5
One day, because of the rain, the children decide to explore the house. Lucy finds the empty room with the wardrobe and walks into it. Inside, she finds wintery woods and a lamp-post.
Let’s talk about the lamp-post. There is a story roaming around the internet that Lewis put the lamp-post in Narnia just to jest Tolkien, who once wrote:
The electric street-lamp may indeed be ignored, simply because it is so insignificant and transient. Fairy-stories, at any rate, have many more permanent and fundamental things to talk about.
“On Fairy-Stories”, J. R. R. Tolkien
While I love to imagine Lewis going out of his way to spite his friend, I do not know of much evidence for this story, and quite some evidence against it. First, the lamp-post is a gas lamp, not an electric one.6 Second, though he does not mention the lamp-post, Lewis himself remarked that the “picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood” had been in his mind since he was sixteen.7 Third, it has been said that the lamp-post was inspired by the Victorian gas lamps at Malverns, where Lewis was a student8 (though this is the weakest evidence, since there is little source for this claim).
Lucy meets a faun named Mr. Tumnus, who invites her to his house to drink some tea. The reader is then treated to a warm, cozy passage:
Lucy thought she had never been in a nicer place. It was a little, dry, clean cave of reddish stone with a carpet on the floor and two little chairs (“one for me and one for a friend,” said Mr Tumnus) and a table and a dresser and a mantelpiece over the fire and above that a picture of an old Faun with a grey beard. In one corner there was a door which Lucy thought must lead to Mr Tumnus’s bedroom, and on one wall was a shelf full of books. […] And really it was a wonderful tea. There was a nice brown egg, lightly boiled, for each of them, and then sardines on toast, and then buttered toast, and then toast with honey, and then a sugar-topped cake.
This coziness is characteristic of Narnia. These are stories of kings and queens, magic and war, but the happiness to be found in them is a homely one, the happiness of old comfortable shoes and the smell of afternoon tea.
In fact, I would say Lucy and Mr. Tumnus’s tea party may be the most representative passage in the entirety of the Chronicles. Immediately after describing the delicious food, the narrator tells us that:
[W]hen Lucy was tired of eating the Faun began to talk. He had wonderful tales to tell of life in the forest. He told about the midnight dances and how the Nymphs who lived in the wells and the Dryads who lived in the trees came out to dance with the Fauns; about long hunting parties after the milk-white stag who could give you wishes if you caught him; about feasting and treasure-seeking with the wild Red Dwarfs in deep mines and caverns far beneath the forest floor; and then about summer when the woods were green and old Silenus on his fat donkey would come to visit them, and sometimes Bacchus himself, and then the streams would run with wine instead of water and the whole forest would give itself up to jollification for weeks on end. “Not that it isn’t always winter now,” he added gloomily.
We are presented with a scene of very mundane, comfortable pleasure; and then the horns of elfland are sounded to our ears. We are told of things wild and magic that sweep our imagination in their dance. Tolkien once wrote that fairy-stories have three faces: “the Mystical towards the Supernatural; the Magical towards Nature; and the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man.”9 If there is such a thing as “Narnia-ness”, I would argue it is in how Lewis uses these three faces. The Magical is the land of Narnia itself, with its talking trees, its fauns, its nymphs and white stags. The Mirror is notably not one of scorn, but of this very human-like coziness. The Mystical will come later, along with the Great Lion.
Tumnus flute makes Lucy fall asleep, and we soon learn the truth: the faun works for the evil White Witch, usurper ruler of Narnia who keeps the land in eternal winter. He was meant to kidnap Lucy and bring her to the Witch, but, repenting, he helps her get back to the Lantern’s Waste and through the wardrobe.
Lucy returns home, assuming her siblings must have missed her — after all, she has been missing for hours! But she finds out that, in our world, only a few moments have passed. The older ones do not believe her, and Edmund takes the chance to mock Lucy.
Some time later, Lucy returns into the wardrobe. Edmund follows her (and does lock himself in) and meets a great pale woman in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. The woman introduces herself as the Queen of Narnia.
The White Witch’s description bears mention. She is an imposing figure, “a great lady, taller than any woman that Edmund had ever seen”, white from head to toe, except for the golden crown and wand, and her very red mouth. She is indeed a queenly figure; but there’s something off about her. Her face is not the pale fairness of a fairy-tale princesses, but an inhuman white: “white like snow or paper or icing-sugar” — a modern reader might be reminded of a vampire. And all statements about her are quickly qualified by the last sentence in the paragraph: “It was a beautiful face in other respects, but proud and cold and stern”.
The Witch is, indeed, queenly; queenly like Snow White’s Stepmom, or like Claudius is kingly. She is a very specific archetype of royalty, to be contrasted later with the true king of Narnia.
But again, we are not there yet…
Thanks for reading Making by the Law in Which We’re Made! Join us next week as we continue exploring The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. If you like my work, consider subscribing for free. Or, if you really like my work, you can become a paid member for less than a Starbucks Cappuccino.
At any rate, it has been my pleasure, and I’ll see you all soon.
C. S. Lewis, Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said.
One of those girls, Patricia Heidelberger, wrote of her time on The Kilns as “two of the happiest of my school life”. David Beckmann, Friends at Home: C. S. Lewis’s Social Relation at The Kilns.
I can’t recall the source for this information, but apparently either Lewis himself or his editors were worried children would lock themselves inside wardrobes after reading the book. So the narrator makes sure to remind us again and again how foolish it is to lock oneself inside a wardrobe. Of course, Edmund does just that in Chapter Three.
We could almost say that the house is good, but not safe…
But when he saw what Digory was looking at, even he began to take an interest. It was a perfect little model of a lamp-post, about three feet high but lengthening, and thickening in proportion, as they watched it; in fact growing just as the trees had grown. "It's alive too — I mean, it's lit," said Digory. And so it was; though of course, the brightness of the sun made the little flame in the lantern hard to see unless your shadow fell on it.
“The Magician’s Nephew
C. S. Lewis, It all began with a picture.
J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories
Very nice!!