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A Guide ThroughNARNIAbyMartha C SammonsFaltering, with bowed heads, our altered parentsSlowly descended from their holy hill,All their good fortune left behind and done with,Out through the one-way passInto the dangerous world, these strange countries.No rumour in Eden had reached the human pairOf things not men, yet half like men, that wanderedThe earth beyond its walls;But now they heard the mountains stirred and shaken,All the heap'd crags re-echoing, the deep tarnsAnd caverns shuddering and the abysmal gorgesWith dismal drums of Dwarfs;Or, some prodigious night, waked by a thumpingShock as of piles being driven two miles away,Ran till the sunrise shone upon the bouncingMonopods at their heels;Or held their breath, hiding, and saw their elders,The race of giants-the bulldozer's pace,Heads like balloons, toad-thick, ungainly torsos-Dotting the plain like ricks . . . .Memory, not built upon a fake from Piltdown,Reaches us. We know more than bones can teach ....Before we're born we have heard it.Long-silenced ogres boom, voices like gongsReverberate in the mind, a Dwarf-drum rolls,Trolls wind unchancy horns.C. S. Lewis, "The Adam Unparadised"I N T R O D U C T I O NThe purpose of this book is to tell you something about the creator of the sevenNarnia books, how he came to write them, to summarize the history of Narnia, andthen to talk about what the Pevensie children learn during their adventures, andtheir meaning to readers of these Chronicles.Published during a relatively brief time-only about 6 years-the Narnia talesachieved quick success, especially as children read them and their parentseagerly grabbed them up to see what their offspring were so excited about.Lewis's friend, Walter Hooper, tells of a boy in Oxford, for instance, whoseparents found him chopping away at the back of their wardrobe and into thebricks of their house, trying to get into Narnia. The Last Battle received theCarnegie Medal for the best children's book of 1955. Yet these "fairy tales" arenot just for children, as we shall see. In fact, in recent years these storieshave become Lewis's most widely read and best selling books, especially aroundcollege campuses. Readers range from four-and-a-half year olds to monks, whoread them for their theology, to college students analyzing them in depth forcollege courses and masters' theses. Of all Lewis's works, ranging from literarycriticism to Christian apologetics to fiction, many believe the seven NarniaChronicles to be his best and most lasting work.C. S. Lewis once wrote that the test of a good book is the "number of timesyou can read it and find more in it than you did to start with-or find that yourdelight doesn't diminish with re-reading." Although this "test" seems to holdtrue for all of Lewis's novels, the Narnia tales seem overwhelmingly packed withadventure, suspense, humor and sorrow, philosophy and theology. Of course, Lewiswould be the first to urge a reader not to "try" to find things he didn't seehimself in these books or have inherently within him to begin with. You maythink of them simply as good children's stories or may sense the many virtuesthe young heroes and heroines learn during their visits. In response to theannouncement that the Narnia books would be televised beginning in early 1979,Walter Cronkite said, "The Chronicles of Narnia have genuine family appeal. In adramatic and compelling way these classics present human values often lacking intoday's television: loyalty, courage, caring, responsibility, truthfulness andcompassion. Produced with care for these values, The Chronicles of Narnia can,and I believe will, become the classics in television that they are inliterature." 1A unique view of man, especially in our modern world, can be seen in fourordinary English children becoming Kings and Queens, for Lewis believed in thepotential of each individual to some day be a King or Queen of heaven. Eustace,turned into a dragon and literally peeled out of his sins by Aslan, plus otherslike him, are turned insideout, their prideful personalities remade by Aslan.Furthermore, each individual learns to obey and to perform his particular taskwhen summoned into Aslan's world. This harmonious plan of things is jarred outof tune by evil, which is not only confronted and defeated in a personal,internal warfare, but externally-in perpetual battles with wolves, bad dwarfs,White and Green Witches, and their like. By experiencing the affects of evil onNarnia, by learning to recognize the various shapes and disguises of evil, andby perceiving the nature of temptation, we can certainly better understand it inour own world and learn to overcome it.After reading these stories, you may return to the "real world" changed, witha new way of looking at things, your mind opened to the possibilities of anunseen spiritual world and the limits of merely human intellect and undevelopedimagination. On an even deeper level, though, perhaps you may be touched in aspecial and personal way by the Great Lion, Aslan himself-and the infinite,bounding joy he brings and bestows on his country, or the terror he evokes inthose who fear and hate him. Or you may hear echoes of some Christian conceptpresented in a startling new way, without its "stained-glass-and-Sunday-schoolassociations." No matter what you have enjoyed about these stories, we hope thisbook helps you understand a little more about the author of the NarniaChronicles and, more important, about the Creator Author depicted within itspages, whose story "no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in whichevery chapter is better than the one before."--Martha C. SammonsCHAPTER 1The Creatorof theNarniaChronicles"He has made everything beautiful in its time;also he has put eternity into man's mind."Ecclesiastes 3:11C. S. Lewis is becoming increasingly well known as the author of anoverwhelmingly varied range of books other than the Narnia tales. He is a well-respected authority on Medieval and Renaissance literature and Milton; he haswritten key theological works such as Miracles and The Problem of Pain; and hisbook, Mere Christianity, was instrumental in the conversion of people as diverseas Watergate felon Charles Colson and black radical Eldridge Cleaver. TheScrewtape Letters is a unique classic whose main character is a devil advisinghis nephew on how to corrupt a human soul. The slim volume The Abolition of Manmay well be one of the great philosophical books of our time; and the sciencefiction trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength)are to be found in every bookstore.Lewis is now read three times as much as he was in his lifetime, and booksales have increased six fold since his death. In 1978, for example, two millionof his books were sold in the U.S. and England-over one million of the NarniaChronicles alone-and the trend is increasing. When asked what quality aboutLewis impressed them most, members of the New York C. S. Lewis Society gave awide range of responses, mentioning such qualities as "joy," "truth,""imagination," "wholeness," "belief," "holiness," "light" and "beauty."But why would a bachelor Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature atCambridge University write seven children's stories when he was in his fifties?While it is always difficult to point categorically to elements of an author'slife as influences in his writings, we will look at some of the most importantevents in Lewis's life which helped to mold so creative an imagination and whichled to the writing of the Narnian Chronicles. If you are interested in learningmore, Lewis's life is described at length by Walter Hooper and Roger Green in C.S. Lewis: A Biography, and by Lewis himself in his autobiography, Surprised ByJoy.Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29, 1898 in Belfast. He died onNovember 22, 1963-the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. When his motherdied before he was ten, Lewis was very angry at God for not miraculously healingher, like a Magician. Perhaps some of his deep distress at his mother's longillness is reflected in Digory's sorrow over his dying mother and her joyousrecovery through the life-giving apple from Aslan.When Lewis was five, his family moved to a huge house whose atmosphere had aprofound influence on him and his older brother, Warren. Lewis said: "I am aproduct of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, distant noises of gurglingcisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles." Because of thetypical cold wetness of the climate of Great Britain, the boys were often drivento entertain themselves indoors. In The Magician's Nephew, Digory and Pollyexplore the attic above their houses just as Lewis did: "Their adventures beganchiefly because it was one of the wettest and coldest summers there had been foryears. That drove them to do indoor things: you might say, indoor exploration."Such a setting became the matrix for Lewis's fertile imaginati... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]