History Book: A story for all time

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, October 13th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Finally today, the WORLD History Book. Seventy-five years ago, a simple wardrobe opened into a world of talking animals, mythical creatures, and a lion on the move. Here’s WORLD’s Paul Butler.

PAUL BUTLER: The first sentence of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe comes in like a lamb:

MICHAEL YORK: Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy…

C.S. Lewis was a masterful storyteller, but that just might be the most uninspired sentence in all his books…however, the same cannot be said about the dedication printed a page before…written to Lucy Barfield—daughter of fellow inkling Owen Barfield—she’s believed to be the inspiration for his character bearing her name.

Lewis writes this:

MICHAEL YORK: My Dear Lucy, I wrote the 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.

For the first-time reader, it’s a delightfully clever dedication. But for those who come back to the book a second time—it contains more of Narnia than the story’s first sentence. It’s a Narnian apple seed that becomes the portal to another world.

YORK: And shortly after that they looked into a room that was quite empty except for one big wardrobe; the sort that has a looking-glass in the door…

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was originally published in the United Kingdom on October 16th, 1950…released a month later in the U.S. …introducing children to a memorable cast of characters and a land where it was always winter, but never Christmas. And where a lamppost sprouted in the forest.

YORK: 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 a pitter patter of feet coming towards her. And soon after that a very strange person stepped out from among the trees into the light of the lamp-post.

In an essay on writing, Lewis explains where the idea came from. He says it all started with a mental picture of a faun carrying parcels and an umbrella in a snowy wood. It popped into his head when he was 16 years old. He said that once he turned 40, he thought: “Let’s try to make a story about it…”

YORK: And so Lucy found herself walking through the wood arm in arm with this strange creature as if they had known one another all their lives.

Lewis said when he began writing he had no idea where the story would go…but once Aslan came bounding into it—in Lewis’s words: “He pulled the whole story together…and soon pulled the six other Narnia stories in after Him.”

YORK: None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different…

The world of Narnia seems a hodgepodge of images from Lewis’s life, and fairytale fragments he’d grown up hearing. Lewis’s friend and fellow inkling J.R.R. Tolkien disliked the story…but over the last 75 years, he’s been out voted.

JOE RIGNEY: I just love them as they are, including for all of the reasons that JRR Tolkien hated them…

Joe Rigney is Fellow of Theology at New Saint Andrews College and author of Live Like a Narnian, Christian Discipleship in Lewis’s Chronicles…

RIGNEY: Let's throw Father Christmas and a witch and these kids… let's just throw them all together in this mishmash and make a story out of it. And Lewis said, “I'm just going to put all the things I like and I'm going to make a really, really good meal.”

In another essay on writing, C.S. Lewis explained his approach this way… “I wrote fairy tales because the Fairy Tale seems the ideal Form for the stuff I had to say.” According to Lewis, it allows the truth to sneak past the defenses of religious obligation.

RIGNEY: I’m supposed to love God. I’m going to try really hard. And he thought that fairy stories could steal past the watchful dragons. It could sneak around that inhibition and that obligation that freezes feelings. And it could kind of get in behind it.

Many casual readers misunderstand Lewis’s intent…seeing the Christian imagery of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as allegorical. But Lewis said he was doing something very different…what he called a “supposal.”

RIGNEY: And he basically said … suppose that the son of God became incarnate in a fantasy world full of talking animals in the way that he had really become incarnate in this world as a human. What would that be like? So that was a question, but it's … not just about this world. It's a separate world that you have to go into and live there for a while and soak in it with the goal that when you would come back, you would have been changed, altered, transformed by breathing that Narnian air…

Rigney doesn’t remember the first time he read the story of Aslan, the White Witch, and the magic wardrobe…but he says he knows it planted important seeds.

RIGNEY: It’s worth pointing out how Gospel centered the story is. Despite the fact that Edmund is a rotten stinker who deserves every bit of the judgment that's coming to him through the witch … that Aslan's merciful and rescues him and then dies for him and sacrifices for him … And so just that theme of glad-hearted sacrifice that the winter is now past and the spring has come and forgiveness is offered and redemption, that's fundamental to this story and one of the reasons why it resonates so strongly 75 years later.

So how did Lucy Barfield respond to her Godfather’s fairytale? She read it for the first time at age 13…a year before it was published. She assured Lewis that she wasn’t too old at all and that she understood Narnia perfectly…but she found she needed to return to it many times as an adult.

The year of Lewis’s death, Lucy was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis…a condition that confined her to a hospital bed…and eventually trapped her inside her own body.

In the final years of her life, Lucy’s brother Jeffrey would visit her and not just read to her from Lewis’s books…but also many letters from fans of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. She is reported to have said: “What I could not do for myself the dedication did for me. My Godfather gave me a greater gift than I had imagined.” Jeffrey later said that the letters gave her great joy…and in his words, “were received with wonder as snow-flakes in the desert.”

The Chronicles of Narnia have been translated into sixty languages and sold more than 115 million copies…and those who have visited Narnia are rarely the same.

YORK: : And the professor who was a very remarkable man didn’t tell them not to be silly, or not to tell lies, but believed the whole story. “Yes of course you’ll get back to Narnia some day. Once a king in Narnia, always a king in Narnia.” And that is the very end of the adventures of the wardrobe. But if the Professor was right it was only the beginning of the adventures of Narnia.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. The audio excerpts of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are read by Michael York from the audio book available on Audible. I’m Paul Butler.

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