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Today my book Paths in the Snow: A literary journey through The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is published.  Huzzah!  The book has been several years in the making, and even longer in the brewing and mulling, and it is quite something to see copies arrive in a parcel. 

The book explore the first Narnia novel chapter by chapter, examining the literary and historical aspects of the book, especially when Lewis appears to be echoing and alluding to other literary works.  For example, I suggest that the first line of the novel, “Once there were four children, and their names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy”, can be read as an echo of the opening of “The Tale of Peter Rabbit”.  That story played a symbolic role in Lewis’ theories of literature – he said on more than one occasion that if a literary model couldn’t accommodate Peter Rabbit, then it had failed the test.  Beginning the whole Narnia series with a quiet allusion to one of the most famous stories about talking animals seems a typically Lewisian touch.

As that first chapter continues, Lucy stumbles into a wardrobe, and finds herself in a magical wood.  The language which Lewis uses to describe this moment recalls the opening of Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which the figure of the poet begins his exploration of hell, purgatory and paradise by finding himself lost in an unknown wood.  Again, it seems a very C.S. Lewis move to gesture towards Beatrix Potter and Dante Alighieri in the same chapter.  Never mind the fact that Lucy has walked past some green wall-hangings and a harp on the way to the wardrobe, which seem to me to be borrowed from the imagery of the medieval romance Sir Orfeo.

Before I disappear down the proverbial rabbit-hole with these allusions, I thought I’d mention some of my favourite moments in the book.

Sweet rationing

I discuss the notorious Turkish Delight scene against the historical background of rationing. Though the book was published in 1950, rationing had not been abolished in Britain when the Second World War ended.  In was still going on when The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe came out.  Many children reading the book when it was published would never have been able to buy sweets that were not tightly rationed.  This makes Edmund’s temptation more understandable, but his fall more serious.  By agreeing to a supply of unlimited Turkish Delight he is not only being a greedy small boy, but he is implicitly doing other children out of their share, and taking sweets from someone who (if they were in our world) would be involved in the black market.  In fact, when I researched the matter further, it turned out that sweet rationing had not been completely continuous, but had been suspended for six months in the last years of the 1940s.  When supplies ran out, they were rationed again – so contemporary children would have had a vivid feeling of having sweets offered to them and then taken away on a national scale.  No wonder this scene resonated so strongly with young readers!

The shaking of hands

I noticed forgiveness is often accompanied by a handshake in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.  Tumnus, Peter and Edmund are all forgiven, and the person doing so symbolizes it by shaking hands with them.  This could, of course, simply be the emotional landscape of children’s literature in the 1950s, but something about the gesture rang a bell of memory for me.  I looked up J.B. Phillips’ Letters to Young Churches, a translation of the New Testament Epistles in contemporary language (well, contemporary for the 1940s), and found that I was right: Phillips repeatedly substitutes “ a hearty handshake” and “a handshake all round” for the holy kisses which Paul instructs the believers to exchange.  This led to a discussion of the way the Bible was being translated in the mid twentieth century, Lewis’ views on new translations and the King James Bible, and some unintentionally comic bits of 1940s Bible-ese.

The hunting of the metre

In the last chapter, when the Pevensies have been kings and queens in Narnia for years, they ride out to chase the legendary white stag who can grant wishes to anyone who catches him.  In doing so, they don’t capture the stage, but they do wander back into our world.  I was intrigued by this passage, not least because it is when the Narnian monarchs are at their most royal and medieval that they find England again.  The end of the novel pictures our world, the wardrobe and the spare room not as the dutiful return to a disenchanted world, but as the triumphant end of a great Arthurian quest.  The more I reread that passage the more I wanted to pick apart its style.  It was so different from the language with which Lewis described their entry into Narnia.  So I got down to the technical level of syntax, and speech prefixes, and suchlike, and realized that Lewis was mimicking Malory and other medieval romance writers.  The rhythms and style of his writing were inserting the Pevensies into the canon of Arthurian questers, even without the reader noticing it.  There was even a moment, which I point out in detail, when he unconsciously (or possibly not) starts writing in medieval alliterative metre in this chapter.

There are lots of other nuggets from Paths in the Snow that I’d like to mention – and I might do in future posts.  It has been absolutely absorbing to write, and I hope that publishing it will carry on the great conversation about Narnia.  The whole purpose, from my point of view, is for this kind of literary discussion to lead us further into the depths of the work.  Not to clinically dissect Narnia, but to explore what makes it most Narnian, and to spend time inside the world, understanding what provides the shadows and the echoes in the landscape.  I hope Paths in the Snow does that.  To that end, I’m very happy to virtually visit book clubs or church groups, or simply groups of people who want to sit around and chat Narnia.  Timezones and whatnot permitting, I would be delighted to “zoom” in and talk about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.  You can contact me on jem[dot]bloomfield[at]hotmail[dot]co[dot]uk

See you at the wardrobe door!