It’s a Narnia Christmas

EVERY Christmas, I re-read C .S. Lewis’s novel “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” The holiday seems like the ideal time for an excursion into my imaginative past, and so I return to the paperback boxed set of “The Chronicles of Narnia” that my parents gave me for Christmas when I was 10. For me, Narnia is intimately linked with the season.

I’m not alone. In Britain, stage productions of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” are a holiday staple, for good reason. The book rests on a foundation of Christian imagery; its most famous scene is of a little girl standing under a lamppost in a snowy wood; and Father Christmas himself makes an appearance, after the lion god Aslan frees Narnia from an evil witch who decreed that it be “always winter, and never Christmas.”

That I’m not a Christian doesn’t much hinder my enjoyment of either the holiday or the book, but the presence of Father Christmas bothered many of Lewis’s friends, including J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien, whose Middle-earth was free of the legends and religions of our world, objected to Narnia’s hodgepodge of motifs: the fauns and dryads lifted from classic mythology, the Germanic dwarfs and contemporary schoolboy slang lumped in with the obvious Christian symbolism.

But Lewis embraced the Middle Ages’ indiscriminate mixing of stories and motifs from seemingly incompatible sources. The medievals, he once wrote, enthusiastically adopted a habit from late antiquity of “gathering together and harmonizing views of very different origin: building a syncretistic model not only out of Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoical, but out of pagan and Christian elements.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/opinion/18miller.html?th&emc=th

An Orthodox Jewish friend of mine (a mensch, an observant but open-minded sort) rather liked the "Caspian" DVD he rented the other day, but he e-mailed me afterward, wanting to know:

"soooo, what's up with the Two Worlds' Business, how do you explain that?"

I wrote him back:

Read Tolkien in high school and in college, and discovered Lewis that way. The two of them -- along with Dorothy Sayers, a mystery writer, and Charles Williams, another (rather less successful) writer of fantasy fiction -- were a sort of writer's group -- called "The Inklings." (With Owen Barfield.)


I'm reading a Dorothy Sayers mystery, right now -- have about 60 pages to go. (Found it in a cardboard box full of books labeled, 'free,' a few weeks ago.) Dorothy Sayers was the odd one out, in many ways (the girl in the boy's club, who didn't write fantasy fiction, and was something of a feminist and hedonist) but she, too, wrote about "good" characters struggling against dark forces.
Most all their fiction has solid roots in ancient folklore, philology, medieval scholarship -- as a springboard to freeing the reader's imagination.

Found this on the web, just now:

http://www.pattern.com/shideler-inklings.html

This other world can be discussed in terms other than faërie, and I first became aware of it (long before the Ring books were published) in the works of Tolkien’s friends, C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams. These three and several others belonged to an informal group that called itself "the Inklings," and met on Thursday evenings in Lewis’ rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford. Their writings are markedly different in style and content, but they illuminate, supplem ent, and correct each other in fascinating ways and with surprising precision, even when no such interaction seems to have been intended. Thus—again, to me—while Tolkien’s world of faërie is imaginable but not believable, the world that I met in Lewis’ theological books and articles was initially believable but not imaginable. I assented to it intellectually, but I could not feel myself a part of it. My heart could dwell in Middle-earth, so to speak, while my head believed in the Christian God, but my intellectual and imaginative commitments were at odds. They did not actually conflict, but neither did they interact creatively.

I think it likely that a similar discontinuity between intellect and imagination lies behind the fact that a good many modern man and women find it impossible to believe in a God, much less the God of traditional Christianity. Their education in the faith has been concentrated upon its intellectual and practical aspects, but they have been given almost nothing to prepare them to receive it imaginatively as anything except an arbitrary construction. They were taught to envision a freshly laundered Jesus, who is docile, effeminate, unsure of his own identity, and without one drop of honest Jewish blood in his anemic veins. They were not educated to imagine—sometimes they were educated precisely to not imagine—any forms of worship other than their own (or more probably, their parents’), any other sets of words for transmitting=2 0the Word, or any other styles of Christian living. By means of these restrictions upon imagination, not only are they discouraged from the intellectual exploration of their faith, but worse, the natural impulse toward compassion—which is rooted in imaginative appreciation—is forced into a tragically narrow channel...