The Chronicles of Narnia

**The Chronicles of Narnia** include Clive Staples Lewis' best known and commercially successful work, and comprise a fantasy series for children. They have been adapted a number of times for stage and screen.

* *The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe* (1950)
* *Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia* (1951)
* *The Voyage of the Dawn Treader* (1952)
* *The Silver Chair* (1953)
* *The Horse and His Boy* (1954)
* *The Magician's Nephew* (1955) - this is a prequel to *The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe* and should arguably be read first.
* *The Last Battle* (1956)

All of these books were written years after the Space Trilogy, whose publication dates were *Out of the Silent Planet* (1938), *Perelandra* (1943), and *That Hideous Strength* (1945).

Both series contain some common themes, notably their Christian theology, travelling to other worlds, and references to England and the two world wars.

Both series refer back to the two world wars, and the Space Trilogy was in fact written mostly during it.

### *The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe*

The earliest of the series. The Space Trilogy was in fact written in WW2, whereas in *The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe* has a key plot point of the children being evacuees. This book also contains a reimagining of the crucifixion on another world, featuring Aslan, the Lion, whereas *Perelandra* has Ransom averting a repeat of the Fall of Adam and Eve earlier in the Bible

Narnia features talking animals, particularly beavers, which is a parallel to the Hrossa

### *The Voyage of the Dawn Treader*

This shares with *Perelandra* the feature of being set mostly in an oceanic environment.

*Voyage of the Dawn Treader* addresses this briefly when Lucy sees mermaids through the preternaturally clear sea-water. Among other things, C. S. Lewis compares the deep water to dangerous mountains, and the shallows to sunny, habitable valleys. In addition, even though mermaids are usually depicted in media as being able to poke their heads above water and converse and breathe in air, Drinian explains that these merpeople cannot come up and examine the Dawn Treader or talk with them because... they cannot breathe air!

This may allude to Perelandra, in which, during the long chase/fight scene between Ransom and the Un-Man, Ransom briefly encounters humanoid faces in the water and speculates that the Perelandrans may have been amphibious.

In fact, when Lucy sees them, she expects them to be able to surface, because her coronation apparently featured singing mermaids that could breathe air. Drinian explains that those mermaids must have been a different sort.

In this book we also come across elderly stars, which parallels the Space Trilogy's notion of Oyeresu.

The Eustace Scrubb character is also a parody of "progressive" tendencies. He is the only child of what Lewis describes as "very up-to-date and advanced people," who send him to a progressive mixed school. Eustace calls his parents by their first names (Harold and Alberta); his parents are vegetarians, nonsmokers, teetotallers, pacifists, and wear an unspecified special kind of underclothes. This is a lighter parody of such values than the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments.

### *The Silver Chair*

Most of the action of this novel takes place underground, which parallels some of the later scenes in Perelandra. Eustace returns, but due to his reformation, he does not fit well into Experiment House, which has lunatic ideas about education. This again, parallels the NICE and Mark Gainsby Studdock's experience with them.

The Deep Realm also includes dragon and salamander type species.

### *The Magician's Nephew*

This book discusses Christian implications, including atonement, original sin, temptation and the order of nature, which are common to both series.

While the other books are less explicitly interplanetary or science fiction, this book features the world of Charn. Charn is a dying superpower, with a sky with is dark like Perelandra's, and which orbits a red supergiant star.

Atlantis as mentioned in *The Magician's Nephew* may be a reference to the island of Númenor in the mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien, a close friend of C.S. Lewis. The Legend of Númenor is a reshaping of the Greek myth of Atlantis, and Númenor is mentioned (albeit spelled 'Numinor') in 'That Hideous Strength', the final book of Lewis' less well known Cosmic Trilogy. There is also a parallel here to Logres.

Jadis is also a satanic figure, and brings evil into the world of Narnia, much as Weston does. She also eats from the tree of Life, another Edenic parallel.

The sun of Charn was old, red and far larger than the Earth's sun , and the sky was so dark blue that it was nearly black. When asked, Jadis said it had "always been so. At least, for hundreds of thousands of years." Also in the sky was a single bright, celestial object that hung left to the sun. It may have been a distant moon, another planet, or another nearby star.

The air of the Charn world was thin and cold, much like the uplands of Malacandra and there was no water visible since the river of the city of Charn had all dried up, which meant no plants or animals remained alive. Before Jadis destroyed all the world's life, however, it had had a different appearance: according to her own description, it had, within her own lifetime as Queen, teemed with life and activity.

The explanation for this is that all life on the planet was destroyed in a single petulant act of evil magic, the utterance of the Deplorable Word, by Jadis, who is perhaps the Dark Oyarsa of her world. It is unknown how long ago this occurred before Digory and Polly's visit, but long enough for stone palaces to fall down and stone statues to erode away. Perhaps this was long enough for the great river of Charn to dry up, or perhaps this was an ecological consequence of the destruction of life.

By the time of their visit, the planet was a dead and sterile world, in which the only living thing was Jadis herself. She had placed herself in magical suspended animation in the palace, awaiting possible rescue by chance visitors from other worlds. Jadis placed herself on a stone throne at the end of a long line of figures of other seated royals, in a chamber called the Hall of Images.

*The Dark Tower and Other Stories* has material which has been compared to Narnia. Despite his salacious nature, Cyril Knellie has been compared to the series. Knellie has been compared to other characters in Lewis' work, notably in ***The Chronicles of Narnia***. Lindskoog notes:

> Knellie closely recalls Uncle Andrew of The Magician's Nephew (1955). Both have backwards reactions to beauty and horror (Tower 52, Nephew 100); are white-moustached (Tower 28) or gray-haired (Nephew 11); are "vain," "terribly anxious to be regarded as a man of the world," dandies in matters of dress (Tower 28-29, Nephew 76); believe in the "complete moral freedom of the artist" or magician (Tower 52, Nephew 18); seek a tot of liquor in their rooms when "a good deal shaken" (Tower 53) or "terribly shaken" (Nephew 75); and, most strikingly of all, beg for brandy in a suddenly-fallen total darkness in which they are present as unwanted stowaways (Tower 53, Nephew 97).
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### *The Last Battle*

The apocalypticism of this book is mirrored in the fight between Ransom and Weston in *Perelandra* and also the thwarting of National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments who wish to take over the world.

A fake Aslan can be seen wandering around. This mirrors the tramp known as the Sleeper, who is mistaken for Merlinus Ambrosius in *That Hideous Strength*.

## *Planet Narnia*

Just as each of the Space Trilogy is centred around a particular planet - *Out of the Silent Planet* (Mars), *Perelandra* (Venus) and *That Hideous Strength* (Earth), so Dr. Michael Ward thinks that the Narnia series is written to represent each of the planets. As its publicity states,

> The award-winning and best-selling Planet Narnia argues that Lewis secretly constructed the Chronicles of Narnia out of the imagery associated with the seven heavens of the medieval cosmos.
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These seven planets would be the traditional planets, i.e. visible with the naked eye and also including the Moon and the Sun.

* Venus - *Perelandra* - *The Magician's Nephew*
* Mars - *Out of the Silent Planet* - *Prince Caspian*

*The Silver Chair* is said to be about the mutable Moon which would associate it with Sulva (note the resemblance to "Silver in the Space Trilogy.)

## External links

* Worlds before Narnia – C S Lewis’s Heavens
* Planet Narnia
* Tumnus’s Book Shelf: The NarniaFans Book Reviews : Perelandra