Planet Narnia

Charn_Tim

Charn_Tim

The Scholar, O.L.
Knight of the Noble Order
I just heard that a book is being released, called Planet Narnia by Michael Ward, claiming that C. S. Lewis had a secret meaning to the Chronicles of Narnia. His basic thesis is that: "Lewis secretly based the Chronicles of Narnia on the seven heavens of the medieval cosmos." (a quote directly from the book's homepage.)

This wouldn't be so remarkable, except that the book seems to be getting some serious attention; in the reviews section of his website, for example, Walter Hooper raves about it and other Lewis scholars seem to praise it as well. It is also being published by Oxford University Press, so it's no joke.

I have a couple questions for everyone.
  • I don't think the book has come out yet, but when it does, will you read it?
  • Do you think it's plausible to any degree that CS Lewis had a secret meaning to the CoN when he wrote it?
  • What do you think Lewis would have said to the author of this book?
 
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A man as bright as CS Lewis would never have written something so cleverly hidden that it took DECADES for a scholar to find....in a book for kids and the young at heart! A man like TS Elliot might put a lot of extra baggage in something written to be obscure and abstruce like "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" but not in kids' literature.
 
A Hidden Structure?

I heard an amazing lecture by a C. S. Lewis scholar last week. He has a theory about a hidden structure in the Chronicles. Don't worry, it doesn't do an injustice to C.S. Lewis and what he was trying to do.

Have you ever heard of "The Discarded Image"? It's a book Lewis wrote about the way people in Europe viewed the universe back in the middle ages. They believed there were "seven heavens". The first heaven was occupied by the Moon, the second by the Sun, the third by Venus, the fourth by Mercury, the fifth by Mars, the sixth by Jupiter, and the seventh by Saturn; beyond the seven heavens was the "Primum Mobile", or the primary movement, which is where all the stationary stars were; and God was believed to be beyond that, the "unmoved Mover".

Okay, now for the theory. Take a look at "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," and see how many references to Jove, joviality, and such, there are.

Peter often says "By Jove!" Saint Nicholas, who seems to be out of place amongst nymphs and fauns and werewolves and such, is the most jovial iconic figure in the 20th century popular mind. He brings Christmas with all its joy into the joyless winter of the Witch. Aslan himself is full of vim and vigor and joy, and has a romp with Lucy and Susan after he rises again. All Jupiterish types of things happening in the book.

The theory goes on to show how each of the books is written with the theme of one of the seven heavens and its home planet. But since this thread is in the LionWitchWardrobe forum, I'm not sure how appropriate it is to discuss those books too, here.

Anyway, that's the theory. I haven't yet gone back and reread LWW to see just how many jovial references there are, but there's the theory.
 
Hey, LMP, I actually just started a thread about this. (Perhaps the threads should be merged?)

Anyway, the scholar was Michael Ward and he wrote a book called, Planet Narnia. As he says on his home page and as I quoted in my thread, his thesis was that CS Lewis "secretly based the Chronicles of Narnia on the seven heavens of the medieval cosmos". Do you agree with Michael Ward that this is the case?
 
I'm sorry, But I think this idea is silly. Santa's oragains go back mch futher than the 2oth century, to the seventh cenuty i think, so is not out of place with the other cretures of narnia. Also, I don't think refrence to Jupiter should be taken as a concton with the planet jupiter. My understnading is that it was a comon phrase back when Lewis was writing, and has more to do with the Romaen god, whom the planelt was named after than the planet itslef.

Finally I cant think of any where elese in Lewis other wring which would saget Lewis belived such Ideas.
 
interesting. i was just curious enough to click the link and read a bit of the website to see where on earth this guy might be coming from. did you read the descriptions of each of the seven "heavens?" as i read the descriptions, i amused myself by attempting to guess which book would be listed at the bottom of the page as being based on a particular "heaven." most of them were fairly obvious, as the author makes a point of listing the characteristics of the roman god affiliated with each specific heaven that could easily be paralleled to aspects of the chronicles. therefore, i can see the points from whence the parallels are drawn...

luna: silver; envy; wateriness; confusion; lunacy; boundary between certainty and mutability; sponsor of hunting and wandering; spencer mentioned cynthia (associated with luna) "across the night sky in a chariot pulled by two horses, 'the one black, the other white"

the silver chair: silver; emerald witch (green associated with envy) who attempts to confuse and make eustace, jill, and puddleglum uncertain of narnia; rilian is not in his right mind; the witch's horse was white and rilian's was black

mercury: swiftness, heraldry, skill in speech and learning, bright alacrity, ability to divide and recombine

the horse and his boy: calormene skill in storytelling; aslan is mistaken for 2 lions, but was indeed very swift

venus: sweetness; warmth; beauty; laughter; motherliness; sexuality; fertility; vitality; creativity; hesperus, who represents the "evening star" aspect of venus had daughters who "guarded a grove of immortality-giving apple trees"

the magician's nephew: well, there is the apple tree; and i suppose the ground of the newly-created narnia was "fertile," though that's not the sort of fertility usually associated with venus

sol: gold, dragons, wisdom, liberality, generosity, freedom, riches, enlightenment, opposition to greed

the voyage of the dawn treader: deathwater, where everything turns to gold; dragon island/eustace; the ship looks like a dragon

mars:vegetative growth in the month of March; strength, discipline, courage, order, or cruelty and lawlessness

prince caspian: i'm lost on this one. it appears (based on another page of the website) that ward is claiming that aslan's appearance among the trees is some reference to the "vegetative growth."

jupiter: kingliness; magnanimity; festal joy and "joy, in particular that pleasure and heartsease which come in late spring and early summer when all vestiges of winter have finally vanished"; tragic splendour; summer-time tranquility; thrones

the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe: kings/queens, 4 thrones, the joy of winter vanishing into spring

saturn: pestilence, treachery, disaster, and death, or godly sorrow, penitence and contemplation, father time

the last battle: i suppose many of the circumstances in the last battle could be filed under "pestilence, treachery, disaster, and death;" father time awakes

there are probably several other things i didn't list, as well. my guess is that the book consists of many more such examples than what can be found on the website. convincing? psh.

my opinion is that ward is grasping at straws on MANY of those examples. it's easy to find exactly what you're looking for if you take things out of context. furthermore, he conveniently doesn't list things such as:

bacchus, the festive son of jupiter can be found in pc, NOT lww; they do say "by jove" in several of the books; strength, discipline, courage, order, cruelty, and lawlessness are themes that can be found in MANY of the books--not just pc...the same goes for several of the other ideas listed under certain gods/planets; water is obviously more abundant in vdt than sc; lord rhoop's experience seems to fit in better with saturn than with sol; it would seem that the gold and silver trees in mn would represent luna and sol, not venus; aslan made it CLEAR that there was only one lion throughout hhb, so he did not in fact "divide and recombine"--he was swift (another characteristic of mercury), but it's either one or the other. (i'm sure there are a multitude of other contradictions that were so conveniently passed over by the author.)

you must also remember that lewis, as a professor of medieval and renaissance literature, would have been familiar with medieval cosmology and he was a fan of mythology (on which all of that medieval cosmology is based). you can find mythological creatures, etc. strewn throughout the series, so it only makes sense that some of the characters/objects/situations may very well have mythological counterparts; there may even be references to these "seven heavens/planets/gods" as mythological characters, but not in the sense that ward appears to claim--not in the sense that the whole series is based on this cosmology. lewis used elements from mythology to represent, or to simply serve as a backdrop for, certain ideas he wanted to express, not the other way around. [insert another comment about taking things out of context.] anyway, i'm certain that someone as brilliant as lewis would have been much more profound in his symbolism than the silly, superficial ideas i could gather from that website. after all, it was his habit to do so.

so...

would i read it? i'd probably skim through it if i came across it in a bookstore, mostly just to see if everything else ward has to say is as ludicrous as i suspect.

do i think lewis may have had a secret meaning? i agree with eveningstar. my understanding of lewis is that he wasn't particularly fond of absurd obscurities anyway.

what would lewis say? ...probably something much more clever than i can think of

anyhow....sorry for the book report :p
 
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I dunno... it all sounds kinda strange to me. I think Lewis meant the CoN as childrens' books, with a slightly allegorical meaning behind them. I think all these seven heavens associations are just trying to read different meanings into things that Lewis didn't actually intend. Besides, many of the things they reference to in those books are minor pieces... Calormene skill in storytelling? That comes in hardly at all. It's just a sidelight.
 
Charn_Tim said:
I have a couple questions for everyone.
  • I don't think the book has come out yet, but when it does, will you read it?
  • Do you think it's plausible to any degree that CS Lewis had a secret meaning to the CoN when he wrote it?
  • What do you think Lewis would have said to the author of this book?
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I don't know if I would read it...probably not. If it's scholarly, I read enough of that for school. And if it's not, I might as well read Narnia. If I had it personally recommended to me by someone that I know has good taste in books, then maybe.

As for the books having a secret meaning...they're already an allegory! Why would he put in a SECRET meaning? Secret sounds like he's trying to manipulate us...into...um...internalizing the medieval cosmos? Sure. Really, I think it's somebody who likes to read meaning into things and was looking for something to write about. And he saw that there were seven books, so he went, Aha! The seven spheres!

If that's the case, then I present my own theory: the CoN were ACTUALLY based on the seven joys of Mary!
Incarnation: MN. It's the beginning of Narnia, just like the Incarnation is the beginning of the major events in the New Testament. Miracles, something from nothing. It's brilliant!
Visitation: VDT. There's a journey to meet old friends, and an acknowledgement of divinity (Eustace's conversion).
Nativity: LB. There's a stable! That MUST mean there's a connection! Lucy even says so!
The Magi's visit: PC. Great kings (and queens, fair play) come to welcome and support a new king, but an evil king wants to kill the true king.
Finding Jesus in the Temple: HHB. A journey is taken, a son is lost and found again. Oh, and there's that reference to the TEMPLE of Tash.
Resurrection: LWW. Obviously.
Assumption: SC. Jill and Eustace are taken to Aslan's country, despite the fact that they haven't died.

Ta-DA! I'll take my royalties now, please and thank you.
And in case anyone thinks this is ridiculous, you're right! :p That's why I picked something really random for my "theory."

More seriously, it might still be an interesting read, and it might give us new ways to look at Narnia, but I doubt that Lewis was thinking about the seven spheres when he was writing the series. I like to think he'd chuckle and then walk away, if he met the author of this new book.
 
Well, if we argue that the Chronicles are allegorical, then there are multiple layers of meaning. Dante, who Lewis must have been familiar with, associated the "heavens" of the medieval cosmos with virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope, and love)...it makes me want to go re-read the CON (as if I need an excuse to read them ;) ) and see how those virtues are expressed in Lewis's work. As an earlier post pointed out, the Discarded Image demonstrates that Lewis was clearly familiar with medieval cosmology.
 
I agree with Lady Liln.

Lady Liln said:
you must also remember that lewis, as a professor of medieval and renaissance literature, would have been familiar with medieval cosmology and he was a fan of mythology (on which all of that medieval cosmology is based). you can find mythological creatures, etc. strewn throughout the series, so it only makes sense that some of the characters/objects/situations may very well have mythological counterparts; there may even be references to these "seven heavens/planets/gods" as mythological characters
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Took the words right out of my mouth. :D

And, yeah I'll probably read it, but just to see what he says and take notes to refute it if I ever come across a disciple of Ward's.
 
first of all...loyal as a badger, i love your post. lol! actually, your parallels make more sense than most of ward's! :p

anyway, regarding the allegory, lewis was clear that he had something else in mind:

"I don't say. 'Let us represent Christ as Aslan.' I say, 'Supposing there was a world like Narnia, and supposing, like ours, it needed redemption, let us imagine what sort of Incarnation and Passion and Resurrection Christ would have there.'"

"(Aslan) is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question 'What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?' This is not allegory at all."

lewis was very open about his work. he wouldn't have hidden anything. i don't doubt in the least that his work has references to the "virtues," as mentioned by inkling, or at least some of the attributes that are listed as being affiliated with the "heavens." to go so far as to say that each book is based on a specific sphere, however, is absolutely ridiculous. it was not unusual for lewis to use myth to teach certain concepts; therefore, if he wanted us to learn something from it, he wouldn't have kept it secret. furthermore, if each book was confined to the characteristics of one specific sphere, he would have been eliminating the benefits that could come from having them spread throughout the series.
 
So we have many skeptics. Fair enough. The lecturer I heard was Michael Ward himself. He prefaced his primary thesis with some rather interesting stuff, and gave a hand out that has some fascinating lines in it. Such as this poem Lewis wrote in 1935:

Soft breathes the air
Mild, and meadowy, as we mount further
Where rippled radiance rolls about us
Moved with music - measureless the waves'
Joy and jubilee. It is JOVE'S orbit,
Filled and festal, faster turning
With arc ampler. From the Isles of Tin
Tyrian traders, in trouble steering
Came with his cargoes; the Cornish treasure
That his ray ripens. Of wrath ended
And woes mended, of winter passed
And guilt forgiven, and good fortune
Jove is master; and of jocund revel,
Laughter of ladies. The lion-hearted,
The myriad-minded, men like the gods,
Helps and heroes, helms of nations
Just and gentle, are Jove's children,
Work his wonders. On his wide forehead
Calm and kingly, no care darkens
Nor wrath wrinkles: but righteous power
And leisure and largess their loose splendours
Have wrapped around him - a rich mantle
Of ease and empire.
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from 'The Planets' (1935), Collected Poems.

Note the underlined text in this poem. Lewis wrote this 20 years before he wrote LWW. This means that he had these themes percolating in his head for AT LEAST 20 years, and they found their way into LWW that many years later.

The point is the themes, not a bunch of happenstance bits and pieces of this and that. It's what the gods represented that Lewis was working into the stories. He only meant to write LWW when he began.

From 'The Alliterative Metre' (1935), Selected Literary Essays, Lewis said this:

'The characters of the planets, as conceived by medieval astrology, seem to me to have a permanent value as spiritual symbols - to provide a Phänomenologie des Geistes which is specially worth while in our own generation. Of Saturn we know more than enough. But who does not need to be reminded of Jove?'
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Of course, in 1935 Lewis's words, 'more than enough of Saturn' was a reference to World War One in particular and the tyranny that was already raising its ugly head in Germany.
 
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littlemanpoet said:
So we have many skeptics. Fair enough. The lecturer I heard was Michael Ward himself. He prefaced his primary thesis with some rather interesting stuff, and gave a hand out that has some fascinating lines in it. Such as this poem Lewis wrote in 1935:
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yes, that's interesting; but neither the fact that lewis enjoyed ancient mythology and medieval concepts and even wrote poetry about it, nor the fact that he used mythological elements to convey ideas that he felt were better expressed through such symbolism, means that each individual narnia book is thoroughly and completely formed and based around a certain mythological concept.
 
Littlemanpoet, I don't understand how that poem relates to the topic. Maybe I'm just dense, but just because he was facsinated by the planets, doesn't mean that he based each of the CoN on a different sphere, or whatever.
 
It is constuctive to note that a legitimate, longtime, and proven CS Lewis scholar, Paul Ford author of Companion to Narnia completely disagrees with Michael Ward. Here's a quote from his introduction to the most recent edition of his book:

Paul Ford said:
It is important to be aware of the fact that, unlike J. K. Rowling and her Harry Potter series, Lewis did not begin with any plan to write seven Chronicles of Narnia. (The series was christened The Chronicles of Narnia in 1952 by Lewis's dear friend, Roger Lancelyn Green)
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In a footnote, he adds:

This fact undermines Michael Ward's earnest but implausible assertion that Lewis intended the Chronicles as an embodiment of medieval astrology in his commentary, "Planet Narnia," in the April 25, 2003 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, 15. Ward strains to draw a comparison of the Chronicles with Lewis's 1935 poem, "The Planets".
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How could Lewis have secretly based his books on the 7 heavens if he didn't even originally plan on writing 7 books?

LMP, there's nothing wrong with finding Ward's thesis initially plausible, but if you read more about how Lewis wrote the books, I'm sure you'll see the impossibility of his thesis.
 
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Michael Ward said, in my hearing, that Lewis had only planned to write LWW. That is on record as fact, and he didn't deny it. His theory is that, once Lewis had finished LWW, he had found that he enjoyed it so much that he decided to keep at it, and so began The Magician's Nephew, which is apparently the second begun and the last finished, but sixth published, according to the records.

The poem, particularly the underlined text, was recapitulated point for point in LWW.

"Of wrath ended" - the White Witch's power was broken;
"And woes mended" - the White Witch's evil, particularly by the statues being brought back to life, was "mended";
"of winter passed" - well, this one's pretty obvious;
"And guilt forgiven" - Aslan sacrfices himself to pay for Edmund's guilt;
"and good fortune" - Aslan's deeper law than that known by the witch means that he rises from death;
"Jove is master" - Aslan is master (back to this one in a little bit);
"and of jocund revel" - think of "the romp";
"Laughter of ladies" - Susan and Lucy in the romp;
"The lion-hearted" - Jove is lion-hearted ~ Aslan IS a lion ~ thus Aslan is a Jovial figure, and is Lewis's "God incognito".

And further down, "Jove's children work his wonders" - the four children become the 2 kings and 2 queens of Narnia, doing Aslan's work for him, and in his name.

So far almost every negative reaction that I've read on this thread has dismissed it as so much nonsense without any valid defense of that dismissal. (Except for Charn Tim's) Consider it a challenge. ;)
 
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Well, I'll continue to carry the banner of challenger with a (hopefully!) reasoned defense of our disagreement with Michael Ward :)

After some further thinking and reading it’s clear to me (as a friend pointed out) that Michael Ward’s thesis is a perfect example of a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (meaning: "after this, therefore because of this"), which is just a fancy way of saying just because event A followed event B, it doesn’t mean that event A caused event B. In other words, just because there are references to the seven heavens within each book, it doesn’t mean that it was a deliberate attempt to secretly place these allusions there by Lewis (as Loyal as a Badger and Lady Liln have creatively expressed in previous posts). This implies that Michael Ward can come up with all the allusions that he wants to show that a given book seems like it would fit one of the seven heavens, but without any direct evidence (i.e. like Lewis saying he intended this which he had ample opportunity to do) we have no good reason to believe him-the evidence is merely circumstantial and many explanations could fit the "data" Ward presents.

Now besides the two arguments I and others have already given-the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy and the fact that Lewis never intended to write 7 books-I've come up with another one that I believe casts even more serious doubt on Ward's thesis. My claim is that Ward's thesis contradicts what Lewis has said elsewhere in his writings, particularly the afterward of his Pilgrim's Regress. (And remember by Ward's thesis, I mean that Lewis secretly intended to base all the books on one of the 7 heavens, not the more modest claim that significant parallels exist-which they obviously do as Ward has correctly pointed out.)

In The Pilgrim's Regress Lewis allegorically documented his intellectual and spiritual journey to Christianity. Ten years later, he wrote an afterward explaining its shortcomings. Lewis writes “I find its chief faults to be those two which I myself least easily forgive in the books of other men: needless obscurity and an uncharitable temper.” The relevant question is "what kind of needless obscurity was Lewis referring to?" Lewis goes on to give the following two reasons for the obscurity:
1) He assumed others knew the intellectual and Philosophical path which he tread to arrive at Christian theism, and
2) A private meaning given to a certain word (Romanticism). In other words, he used this word differently from its common usage.​

In the afterward, Lewis goes on to clear up his meanings and reduce the level of obscurity as low as possible, in order to make clear exactly what he was saying.

Now in my estimation secretly basing the Chronicles of Narnia off of the 7 heavens of the Medieval Cosmos would be giving private meanings to passages and words in his stories which most of his intended audience would not understand. This is exactly this kind of needless obscurity which Lewis finds so hard to forgive. How does Michael Ward reconcile this anti-obscurity philosophy of writing that Lewis clearly exhibits with the claim that Lewis had an underlying hidden meaning for his Chronicles?
 
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here, this is very interesting:

c. s. lewis blog

it's a more thorough explanation by michael ward. i still stand by what i've already said--many of the characters could very well have mythological counterparts (e.g. i would go so far as to say that it's very conceivable that the green witch could be somewhat based on the character of luna, which doesn't mean in the least that the silver chair is entirely based on her; and jadis could be, to some degree, an evil version of a venus-like character; and cor and corin could very well have some relation to castor and pollux, the twins of gemini.) therefore, some of the things ward says make sense. others are still very much of a stretch. if you research the mythological characters further, you will find that possible allusions to them can be found scattered throughout the series.

for example:

during saturnalia, "kings were...given ass ears, and then slain."

does a situation similar to this occur in narnia? yes, though the details are different. was this found in the last battle, which is supposedly based on saturn? no.

also:

apollo/sol is associated with music and curing diseases/healing/medicine. his symbol is the "egg of creation."

ward claims that the voyage of the dawn treader is based on sol. there's a little bit of music in vdt, but plays a it far greater role in mn, however, when it in fact brings about none other than...creation! also, i can't help of think of that juice of the fire flowers from the sun in lucy's vial--nowhere else in the chronicles does anything from the sun actually heal anyone but in lww, and then when the vial shows up again in pc.)
 
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Great points, lady liln. Especially this:

if you research the mythological characters further, you will find that possible allusions to them can be found scattered throughout the series.
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I was curious about this and I believe you have probably hit the nail on the head, although I'd still like to do that myself and show that this idea of there being allusions to only one planet (or even primarily one planet) per book doesn't hold water, contrary to Ward's thesis. I'll stand right there with him (and you) in saying that he's uncovered some parallels which may be helpful to some in understanding the Chronicles. But to say Lewis secretly based them off of the 7 heavens, which is the key "underlying scheme" is in my opinion pushing the envelope way too far and inconsistent with Lewis' philosophy as a writer and his own account of how he wrote the books.
 
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