3 things about Narnia

[edenfalling]

I have been reading a lot of Chronicles of Narnia fanfiction for the past few days, which has led me to three realizations that I am now sharing with the world. *grin*

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1. There is a very particular Narnia fanfic I want to read, and which nobody seems to have written (or perhaps even thought about). It is an AU of The Last Battle in which there is NOT a train accident. Jill and Eustace get to Narnia anyhow, they and Tirian manage to save the country without Aslan declaring Game Over, and then they're told that they're too old now and must go home to England forever.

And they and the Pevensies live. They grow up. They get jobs. They marry (this would be a Jill/Eustace story, most likely, because I do love their banter) and have children. Edmund goes into law. Lucy becomes a doctor. Peter joins some sort of armed forces, and then maybe goes into politics. Eustace goes into academia, probably in the sciences. Jill... I dunno about Jill; maybe a teacher? And without the train crash to jolt her, Susan continues to drift away from her family, though she may be reconciled at some point as she grows older and maybe has children and hopefully stops being so obsessed with fitting in.

And maybe twenty years later, when all the Friends of Narnia are together for a family reunion of sorts, some of the adults overhear some of their children talking about a peculiar adventure they've had, in a fantastical country where the animals talk, and there was a Lion...

The trouble is, this story has no plot. I think it would work best as a series of vaguely connected oneshots. But I never liked the ending of The Last Battle -- while it may work wonderfully as theology, it's utter rubbish as a novel, a complete cop-out instead of a brave facing of consequences -- and I always felt that if the point of going to Narnia was to learn to know Aslan there as practice for serving him in England, then by god, there ought to be some actual examples of how to live in mid-twentieth-century England as a good and noble person.

Otherwise what is the point?

(I am not going to write this story, btw. I do not have the time, nor do I know anything about everyday life in England during 1950-1980. But if you feel inspired to adopt the plot bunny, I promise to review every chapter and/or component fic!)

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2. I remember quite clearly the first time I realized Narnia was, among many other things, a Christian allegory. I was reading a collection of Elric of Melnibone stories written by people who weren't Michael Moorcock, and one of them (possibly by Neil Gaiman?) dealt with a young boy who read all sorts of fantasy, including Elric and Narnia, and who realized at one point that Narnia was Christian allegory, and who felt horribly betrayed by that realization.

I stopped reading the story for a moment, thought about Narnia, and said, "Oh. It is Christian allegory, isn't it? Aslan is Jesus; the Emperor-Over-Sea is God. Huh." And then I continued reading the story.

I didn't feel betrayed. I felt wrong-footed, certainly, but not really betrayed. I think this is because I had always viewed Aslan as a religious figure. He is very clearly a deity of some sort. It's just that he's so vividly drawn as a lion, and I was exposed to enough non-Christian mythology as a child, that I assumed he was a pagan deity. When I thought about it at all, I figured that the Pevensies were supposed to establish or revive his worship in England, or just live according to the values he taught them. And since those values seemed, to me, to be love, trust, faith in those you love and trust, and honor (which is basically treating other people with respect and trust and love), I was completely in favor of that. (They are fairly universal values, you see.)

I do look back and wonder how I could so easily identify one explicit Christian reference (Lucy's comment about a stable holding something bigger than the whole world, in The Last Battle) and miss others like the Lamb thing at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, or the 'sacrifice his life to redeem others' motif in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but... it's not as if Christianity has a monopoly on lambs or redemptive self-sacrifice.

To be honest, to this day, even though I intellectually see the Christian elements in the series, my heart still reads them as pagan stories about a Lion-god. And there is nothing wrong with that.

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3. I don't care what Lewis says about centaurs having to eat to fill a Man stomach and a Horse stomach. Their internal anatomy cannot be literally like a human torso stuck onto a horse's body. I figure the stomach and most internal organs are in the horse part, and the human torso, instead of having duplicates of the kidneys and whatnot, is filled with nothing but giant lungs! (Which, obviously, have no duplicates in the horse part.) This is my theory, and I am sticking to it. *grin*

Comments

[lynati-1.livejournal.com]

I just finished reading The Graveyard Book about 30 minutes ago, and after reading your #1, I now want to see Nod run into one of the Pevensies, whether age appropriate to their time-lines or AU equivalent to each other. There's no plot in that either, outside of being young brits who have walked in two world and then grew up to find they no longer will fit through the old doors, as it were, and the consequence of having to live in such a mundane world after what they've experienced outside of it.
And typing this, I'm now thinking of Neverwhere in addition to it, and my brain hurts. I'd better stop before it tried to become something.

[edenfalling]

Hmm. Yes, aside from the completely incompatible timelines, Bod and the Pevensies do have a fair bit in common. And I suppose, if one assumes that Susan was reconciled to Narnia and Aslan after her family's death, she could reasonably still be alive once Bod leaves the graveyard.

Let's see. Assuming the Pevensies were evacuated somewhere between 1940 and 1944, and Susan was maybe 12-14 years old during LWW, that would have her born in 1926 at the earliest, more likely around 1930, which would put her in her seventies or early eighties when Bod leaves the graveyard, assuming he leaves somewhere between 2000 and 2010, based on the use of cell phones in The Graveyard Book. Ha! It would work.

(Disclaimer: I have no idea if there are official timelines for either canon; this is all guesswork based on hints internal to the books.)

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

1. I only liked about half of The Last Battle, namely Jill and Eustace and the King, and the end of the world. All that stuff about the nasty ape forcing the donkey to wear the lion skin and be a false prophet, and the evil Calormenes... bleh.

1a. What I want to see in Narnia is what happened the REST of the time. All those centuries after King Frank and Queen Helen-- what happened to their descendants? When did people settle in Archenland, and Calormene, and the Eastern Isles? What else happened during the rise of Telmar, and what's west of the lamppost besides that? How did the White Witch reach Narnia, and what was she doing between the beginning of the world and her reign? What's south of Calormene? What adventures did Reepicheep have? Were there ever dwarven nations? Did anyone ever explore the depths of the world, or the west or south or north, like Caspian did the east?

2. About the only "obvious" detail pegging Aslan as a particular religion's allegory is that tiring "sons of Adam and daughters of Eve" phrase, which fits all Abrahamic religions (which I think is pretty much Christianity, Judaism, and Islam?) The rest isn't that unusual, and one can argue other characters, like the Tisroc, the Star's Daughter, and the giant who slept under the mountain til the end of time, as fellow gods and demigods.

3. If one's explaining to children, like Jill and Eustace were, or the average person doesn't have a good grasp of internal anatomy, then one could easily talk in terms of "horse stomach and man stomach" to explain diet, culinary customs (like our idea that sweets come last), and stomach capacity.

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Lucy's comment about a stable holding something bigger than the whole world

Oh! I never got that! I just thought, cool, sf/f thing of weird space.

I may be wrong here, but I think the "Lion became a Lamb" thing was at the end of The Last Battle. Because with the exception of LWW, which I read first, I read them all in chronological order, and I remember only on that very last couple of pages having it hit me that it was a Christian allegory.

That didn't bother me too much, even though I was a six-year-old atheist. No, what had me upset and also hopping mad was the Shadowlands thing. DEATH IS NOT A HAPPY ENDING! It was awful! In rereading I prefer to pretend that the book doesn't exist.

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

I always thought Aslan was a pagan god too :O

[edenfalling]

When Edmund, Lucy, and Eustace get to the shore at the end of VotDT, they meet Aslan in the form of a Lamb (complete with capital letter and sweet voice); he transforms into a lion halfway through the conversation. I just checked that last night, actually. :-)

No, what had me upset and also hopping mad was the Shadowlands thing. DEATH IS NOT A HAPPY ENDING! It was awful!

Yeah, as I said, it works as theology, but it suffers from UTTER FAIL as a novel; Lewis pulls a sort of bait-and-switch and finishes a story that is NOT the one he promised to tell at the beginning of the book.

[edenfalling]

1. I have somehow acquired a plot bunny for a story in which Diggory gets an inheritance from some distant relative and splurges on his country house. Polly tells him he's being utterly silly, which is true, and then laughs at him when he loses all his money via some bad investments several years later (which is why he's poor at the start of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader). I don't have time to write this!

2. I figure that if Tash is objectively real -- which he is, according to The Last Battle -- then it's quite likely that other Calormene deities, such as Zardeenah, are also real. And there's a river god of some sort in Prince Caspian, who asks Aslan to loose his chains (i.e., destroy the bridge at Beruna), which always seemed to me to argue that Aslan was more the chief god of a pantheon than a strict analogue of Jesus.

3. True, but I rather doubt Lewis was being anywhere near that thorough or logical about his world-building. Narnia is a joyous muddle of everything that struck his fancy at some point or another, and trying to make all the disparate elements play nicely is something of a fool's game. Nonetheless, I can't help wanting to try. *sigh*

[edenfalling]

I think Aslan makes a much better pagan god than he does a Christ figure, honestly! He's so distinctly himself (and so distinctly a LION) that I always suffer a slight mental disjoint when I remind myself that no, he's really meant to be Jesus.

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Totally forgot that bit. But isn't there a paragraph towards the end of TLB when they're staring at him being glorious and whatnot, and "the Lion was a Lamb"? It's Very Portentous.

[edenfalling]

Hang on, let me check. *rummages through book*

I can't find anything about a lamb. (Possibly I simply flipped pages too fast; I do that sometimes.) But the last two paragraphs of the book say:

"There was a real railway accident," said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are -- as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands -- dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."

And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

The capital letters are generally a sign of Godhood, Aslan changes his shape, and this is really hammer-in-the-face unsubtle on the "look, it's a religious experience!" front, but it still didn't hit me as explicitly Christian until I had the allegory pointed out by that story.

[rahirah]

I never felt betrayed by learning about the allegory (I can't even recall exactly when it happened) but I remember being somewhat annoyed when it got too obvious (as with the Lamb thing).

And totally agreed about the centaurs. Being a strange child, I spent considerable time drawing diagrams of the internal workings of fantastic creatures.

[edenfalling]

The Lamb thing initially bugged me not because I noticed the allegory (because I didn't) but because Aslan, in my mind, is a LION; for him to appear as a lamb was, therefore, nonsensical. (And, indeed, the only way that scene makes sense is if you read it allegorically.) So now it annoys me for two reasons: excessively obvious allegory, and what I can't help reading as weirdly OOC behavior for a pagan lion-god. *sigh*

What sorts of fantastic creatures? Chimeras? Hippogriffs? Manticores? Mermaids? Hydras? (I have always wondered about a multi-headed monster's decision-making process...)

[rahirah]

Hippogriffs, pegasi, dragons, centaurs... I'd try to work out ways to give the flying critters keeled breastbones with sufficient surface area to attach proper wing muscles, and try to work out the lifting capacity of dragons by studying pterodactyls and those extinct giant condors. I think I eventually arrived at a dragon design I liked based on the idea of feathered dinosaurs.

[edenfalling]

Cool!

[alchymie.livejournal.com]

1. You make an excellent point: what, exactly, was Aslan's purpose in bringing kids from our world into Narnia? Obviously not so they could live good Christian lives in modern England, if the Professor is any indication. But somewhere in the books it was said (I paraphrase) that Narnia isn't a country of humans, but a country that needs a human to rule. So the Pevenseys had to've been brought there, not for their own sakes, but for the Narnians'.

Besides, as you note, while seeing Peter, Edmund, &c all grown-up and Doing The Narnian Thing makes a nice series of vignettes, we don't really have a story. Pity, that: it's a brilliant concept.

2. I think it was the Lamb in Dawn Treader that made it clear to me how Christ-allegorical the Narnia books were. (Of course, since then I've read a lot of Lewis's other books, and am no longer in doubt.) The allegory never really bothered me until Last Battle, where (like Ted Sturgeon did in some of his later works) the morality was being shovel-fed to the reader.

3. YMMV. Me, I never saw how the human mouth on the centaur could eat grass in the first place!

[edenfalling]

1. We have no real indication that Diggory failed to lead a good Christian life. I grant you he's apparently rubbish with money and young children, but I take that as part of his general... um... well, tendency toward being self-important and useless without Polly around to manage him. He may well have been a wonderfully inspiring university professor and a contributor to charity and other good works; we hear nothing about the rest of his life one way or another.

On the other hand, this means that we have no indication that he did lead a good Christian life, either. *sigh* Lewis can be such a shortsighted writer in many ways.

3. Obviously centaurs have very strong equine-style molars and their taste-buds are not at all human. And they don't graze, exactly; they harvest grass and hay and other grains and eat them like salad. :-)

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

*headdesk* Tash. Not Tisroc. Obviously, I haven't read the books for entirely too many years.

Bacchus is also objectively real, in Prince Caspian. Bacchus, Silenus, and the Maenads all gather with Susan and Lucy while Aslan is taking them to wake all of Narnia, free the nonconformist Telemarines, and bring reinforcements.

... is the copyright off Narnia yet?

[edenfalling]

... is the copyright off Narnia yet?

You know, I have no idea... *googles* Apparently not; Lewis's estate seems to have renewed all the copyrights in the late 70s and early 80s, so they won't be in public domain until at least 2045 under current US law. Bother.

[supplanter.livejournal.com]

Maybe current perception of Jesus is just out of whack with Lewis's/1950s England's? :p

(j/k, I know nothing; I read the Dawn Treader and watched a cartoon of the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe ages ago and the first Narnia movie more recently, but have no attachment to any of it, really. ^^;;)

[edenfalling]

Well, Lewis had a very particular view of Christianity, and he was always at pains to make clear to people (one of his other careers was as a notable Christian apologist) that Jesus is not just about love and saving people, but is also powerful and terrifying because absolute goodness can be a horrible thing to run up against (it forces you to face all your shortcomings). Which is, I think, the reason he goes on about Aslan not being a tame lion. (Although that probably also has to do with him disliking the style of prayer that goes, roughly, "Dear God, I would like to pass my chemistry test," in which the person praying has no intention of meeting God halfway by taking notes in class, reading the textbook, and reviewing all the lab experiments. Lewis's God does not exist for humanity's convenience.)

...And I'm kind of boggled that I've read enough of Lewis's non-Narnia work to know that about him. O_O

[supplanter.livejournal.com]

I think I actually read a little of the Screwtape Letters!  Except I thought Dickens wrote them for some bizarre reason, and I haven't the foggiest why I'd wanted to read it anyway (not remembering what little I read at all). XD;;

...I think I know more about Lewis from reading about Tolkien than anything else. ^^;;

[edenfalling]

The Screwtape Letters is such an odd book to read. Partly this is because I, personally, think Lewis is right about maybe half of what he's saying, while at least another third of the moral system he's trying to sell is wrong and unjustified/unjustifiable. (The remaining fraction is stuff I find justifiable but happen to disagree with anyway.) But it is an extraordinarily difficult book to argue with as you're reading, because Lewis defines the playing field and he tilts it to favor his own arguments.

It reminded me of the time I ran across one of his "Of course Christianity is correct!" arguments, which I think is called the 'lunatic, liar, or Lord' theory. It goes like this: In the New Testament Gospels, Jesus claims to be the son of God. If you disbelieve this, you're saying that Jesus was either a liar [and by implication, not to be trusted on any other subject, which renders all his moral guidance useless] or completely mad [which also renders his teachings useless]. Since his teachings are evidently true in other respects, and his actions don't seem mad, he must have been telling the truth and therefore he is the Lord. (The stuff in brackets is my translation of Lewis's implied stance.)

This argument depends on two things. First, you must believe that the Gospels are accurate history (which is a very dicey assumption, since all four disagree with each other, and were all clearly designed as evangelical propaganda), and second, you must assume that being a liar or delusion about one particular aspect of life automatically renders all the other portions of your life false and untrustworthy (which is not necessarily true at all; people are amazingly talented at compartmentalizing our lives and being only selectively nuts). But Lewis doesn't admit that he's working from those assumptions, and since many people raised in a nominally Christian culture have a knee-jerk negative emotional reaction to calling Jesus a liar or a lunatic (even if they aren't Christian believers themselves), it can be a tricky argument to answer... so long as you accept the playing field Lewis defines.