This book also throws in some aspects of Arthurian legend, a Christ figure, and a bunch of talking animals. The Snow Queen likes to freeze people into ice sculptures (shade of Sodom and Gomorrah, there) and has banished.Santa Claus.īut it doesn't stop there. There they meet a faun-hello, Greek mythology-who works for a witch that definitely resembles the Snow Queen of Hans Christian Anderson fame.
had a point: the story starts with a family of evacuee children during WWII (so: realism) discovering a wardrobe that doubles as a portal to the land of Narnia (so: fantasy). Tolkien argued that no book should have so many different types of characters and genres jumbled together.Īnd J.R.R. Lewis expected Tolkien to provide the same kind of encouragement and constructive criticism.īut, as Lewis's biographer George Sayer records, Tolkien thought The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was terrible. In the past, Tolkien had read his worksto Lewis and the other Inklings, who gave him useful feedback and support. Lewis and Tolkien were members of a small, informal literary club at Oxford called The Inklings, which met to discuss members' work-in-progress and other literature-related topics. Tolkien-you know, the guy who turned the world of children's lit upside down with books like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Ringstrilogy. Lewis said the lion Aslan, "came bounding in" and the pages started to fly by.Īnd-voila!- The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was born.Īfter he finished writing, Lewis excitedly read his new book aloud to his friend and fellow author J.R.R. The writing was difficult at first but eventually he started to see some other pictures. He decided to try writing a book for children, using his meeting with the evacuees and the picture of the Faun that had kept floating around in his mind. (He himself had been sent away to several boarding schools as a child and an adolescent, and his memories of them were a more than a wee bit unpleasant.)Īt that point, Lewis was already an experienced and prolific writer who had published numerous books, including a science fiction trilogy, a scholarly book about medieval allegory, a book of poetry, and some works on religion and faith. Lewis was interested in the evacuees and what it might be like for children to be uprooted from their homes and sent into a strange, unknown world. This strange image would stay with Lewis for decades until his chance encounter with some children who had been evacuated from London during World War II. It was just a mental picture-a picture of a Faun, a mythical half-man half-goat, carrying an armload of packages and sheltering himself with an umbrella as he walked through a snowy wood.
It wasn't a spiritual vision or a great artistic vision or some kind of prophecy. We're talking about the origin story of this classic work of kid's lit. The story of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe has a weird beginning.Īnd we're not talking about the line, "Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy." Because that's about as un-weird as first lines get.except for the inclusion of the name "Edmund" (which isn't so much "weird" as it is "more British than Michael Caine eating scones with the Queen.") The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe Introduction