The creator of the Narnia books has been enlisted to help wean a new generation off paramilitary activities in Northern Ireland.
As Disney prepares to bring CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to the big screen this Christmas, culture campaigners in East Belfast are reclaiming the author as an alternative role model for children in the Ulster loyalist stronghold.
A mural dedicated to Lewis’s legacy and Ulster roots has replaced another that once celebrated the exploits of armed loyalist paramilitaries. The move to ‘de-militarise’ the walls of Protestant East Belfast has also seen murals praising the UVF erased and replaced with ones highlighting the local roots of Northern Irish soccer stars such as George Best, Derek Dougan and Sammy McIlroy. Other ‘de-militarised’ walls in the area include one now with a mural recalling Alamo hero Davy Crockett’s Ulster origins.
CS Lewis was born in Holywood in 1898 and lived there until he was nine when his family packed him off to boarding school in England. Despite his long absences from home, Lewis continued to return to his native Ulster up until his death.
East Belfast multilingual academic and Ulster Unionist Dr Ian Adamson even points to East Belfast’s rural hinterland as the inspiration for Lewis’s Narnia.
‘On maps he drew of Narnia there is an uncanny similarity between the topography and that between the Holywood hills and the Mountains of Mourne in the distance. This is an area he was always fond of, which he remembered from his Ulster childhood.’
Adamson is chairperson of the Somme Association which was established to record the impact of the First World War on Ulster, particularly the loss of tens of thousands of local men in the Battle of the Somme.
‘The other major connection aside from his childhood in Ulster is the fact that Lewis like his friend at Oxford JRR Tolkien fought in the First World War. This is another important Ulster link that people here can relate to.’
He added that through education programmes, cultural campaigners are teaching a new generation of local children that CS Lewis is ‘one of their own.’