Professors debate the meaning behind the creator of ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’
by Jenny Davis
A lion offering his own life on a stone altar and then coming to life again to help save a kingdom is part of the story line in the C.S. Lewis book, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. While it may sound like a Christian allegory, that may not be the case.
Paul Kerry, a Brigham Young University history professor, said the story was not written as Christian symbolism, but rather was motivated by images of Lewis’ imagination and experiences of the author’s own life.
“C.S. Lewis knew the technical term allegory,” Kerry said. “If he wanted the story to be an allegory he would have included it in the title. The story started from images in his head, such as a fawn with an umbrella, a witch and a lion.”
Lewis explained how he was motivated to write the story in his book, Letters to Children. In response to his motives of the story he wrote:
“Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children, then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument … then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out ‘allegories’ to embody them. This is all pure moonshine.”
Kerry said that to say the book is simply a Christian fable takes away much of the beauty of the story. He said that if people look at the book as having only a Christian theme, other important parts of the story are lost.
Kerry also said that experiences of Lewis’ own life influenced the story. For example, Lewis himself was a professor who lived in the countryside and took in evacuee children during the bombings in England. Also, as a student and professor at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, he was deeply inspired by the beauty of the gardens and architecture of the buildings.
“Lewis lived much of his life in Oxford as a student and taught there for many years, then at Cambridge for many years,” Kerry said. “He would eat his meals there; he even had worship services there. It was like a complete world, and these places are so magnificent that when you are there, it feels like it is a different world—like Narnia.”
Kerry said that Lewis would have developed a close bond to his colleagues at Oxford and Cambridge, including colleague J.R.R. Tolkien. The universities separated the professors into their respective colleges, so the professors felt they were on a mission together to find knowledge and wisdom, much like the characters in Lewis’ stories. Kerry said that Lewis’ life experiences, his intellect and also his strong convictions as a Christian come together in his writing.
Another Brigham Young University professor, Bruce Young, who teaches a class on Lewis, said he agrees that although the book has Christian themes, it is not just an illustration of Christian principles.
“Lewis calls it a ‘supposal,'” Young said. “However, after having talked about this for years with my students I can see that it really is a mix. It is symbolic, but at the same time it is also an imaginative supposal. It’s a pretty complex thing, but at least it would be fair to say that it is not a simple allegory. It’s not just a one-on-one correspondence when everything is referring to something else.”
Carl Sederholm, a humanities professor at BYU, said Lewis thought with and through Christianity, which is why his work has Christian themes.
“I’m always reluctant to paint a straight allegory,” he said. “But Christianity is there.”
