Focus on the Family Radio Theater Chronicles of Narnia

Book EXCERPT

Introduction to Inside Narnia

By Devin Brown
Baker Publishing Group

CBN.com – Excerpt from Within Narnia, Baker Publishing Group

In the summer of 1948, Clive Staples Lewis, like near men his age, must have paused more than than once to consider his upcoming fiftieth birthday, just months away. Every bit he looked out from his rooms in Oxford, surely he must have felt that the boy from the suburbs of Belfast, Northern Ireland, built-in on November 29, 1898, the son of a police force court lawyer and an educated rector's girl, had done pretty well—all things considered.

Those fifty years began well but soon took a turn for the worse. After a somewhat idyllic babyhood, Lewis faced the death of his female parent when he was ix, and subsequently that came the disastrous serial of individual schools where bullying frequently seemed to be more in way than learning. Only when he was 15, his begetter had allowed him, later on a great bargain of persuading, to complete his final two years of preparing for university with a wonderful tutor. Those studies resulted in a scholarship to the nigh prestigious academic institution in the country, perhaps in the globe—Oxford University.

Then came 6 years equally a student at Oxford: six because a cursory stint in the trenches of France during World War I intervened; vi because he had gotten 2 degrees—one in philosophy and ane in literature—with firsts on all his exams, the highest marking possible. Finally on May twenty, 1925, at the age of 20-six, Lewis had been chosen to be a young man at Magdalen Higher.

There at Magdalen College, Oxford, Lewis was given his own set of rooms, rooms he had been using for twenty-3 years now for pupil tutorials, for preparing lectures, for meetings with his friends, and, whenever he could squeeze it in, for writing.
Lewis's first two works, extensive volume-length poems, had gone nowhere afterward they were published. No affair how he had tried, he was not a poet, at to the lowest degree not a critically acclaimed one. Merely his subsequently works had succeeded where these had not, and his writing had taken off in directions he would never have predicted—that no one would have predicted.

Over the by x years, he had published a science fiction trilogy, a philosophical book on the problem of pain, a satirical novel about the afterlife, a treatise on miracles, and a book of letters from a devil named Screwtape—all successes. In add-on, he had broadcast a serial of talks on the BBC, had received an honorary Physician of Divinity caste from St. Andrews, and, to top it all off, had even been featured on the cover of Fourth dimension magazine.
Of course, besides his blood brother, he had no family unit to speak of—no wife or children, at least not however. But by manner of compensation he had a family unit of some other sort, the Inklings, his writing and conversation group which included his closest friends. Among them was his colleague J. R. R. Tolkien, who had just finished a long fictional epic almost a ring and a race called hobbits and was now working on getting it published.

And and so in the summer of 1948, as Professor Lewis looked back over his fifty years, he must have found much to exist proud of. But with the greater part of his life backside him, his thoughts must also have turned to all he still hoped to accomplish.

One project kept forcing its mode back into his reflections: a story he had started ix years agone during the state of war . . . a story he had written the opening paragraph for, and then put away . . . a story about four children who went to stay with an old professor . . . a story based on a picture which had been in his head since he was sixteen, the paradigm of a faun from Greek mythology, carrying an umbrella and parcels as he walked home through a snowy wood. . . .

In the summer of 1948, as he approached his fiftieth birthday, C. Due south. Lewis picked up pen and paper and resumed the story he had started ix years earlier, soon after a group of schoolgirls evacuated from London had come up to stay with him.
What he could not take known was that he was first what many would after consider to be 1 of his greatest accomplishments.

---

On Oct 16, 1950, half dozen weeks earlier Lewis'southward fifty-2nd birthday, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was released in England by Geoffrey Bles Publishers. Three weeks later, Macmillan issued the U.S. version of the novel. Although he had supported Lewis's other works, fellow author J. R. R. Tolkien did not like the book, responding, "It really won't do, you know!" (Green and Hooper 241). Tolkien's biggest complaint was Lewis's "jumble of unrelated mythologies"—the Roman fauns and nymphs, the Germanic dwarfs, Father Christmas, and the new characters of Lewis's own invention—all in the same work (Sayer 312).
Despite Tolkien's misgivings, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was an instant success and has remained widely popular over the years, with copies of the individual volumes and the boxed set of the Chronicles of Narnia selling into the tens of millions. Afterwards the initial volume, Lewis published one Chronicle each year until the seven-book set was complete. When The Terminal Battle came out in 1956, it won the Carnegie Medal, an award given by children's librarians to the year'south virtually outstanding volume for young people, though in Lewis's instance perhaps given as much in recognition for the whole series as for the final book.

The Panthera leo, the Witch and the Wardrobe was the first of the seven Chronicles of Narnia that Lewis wrote. While he was alive information technology was ever listed equally the first book in the series. In 1980, seventeen years afterward Lewis's expiry, Collins, part of what would later go HarperCollins, starting time published the stories with a somewhat different numbering; The Wizard's Nephew—originally listed sixth—was moved to first, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was numbered 2d. This revised order appears on all editions published today along with this statement on the copyright page: "The HarperCollins editions of The Chronicles of Narnia have been renumbered in compliance with the original wishes of the author, C. S. Lewis."

The change was in part based upon a letter Lewis wrote in 1957 to a immature boy named Laurence Krieg. In response to a question about which order the Narnia books should be read in—the manner they were originally numbered, which corresponded with their guild of publication, or their chronological order—Lewis came downwardly in a qualified mode slightly on the side of chronology, which was the way Laurence Krieg had proposed. Maybe Lewis really felt renumbering the Chronicles would exist an improvement, just quite possibly he was but trying to be supportive of a immature fan's suggestion, equally he went on to add together, "perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone reads them" (1995, 68).

In his volume Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis, Hope College professor Peter Schakel includes an essay which questions the meaning of the phrase from the copyright folio "the original wishes of the author." He writes, "Does original mean from the time at which The Magician's Nephew was completed? If and so, why did Lewis non request the Bodley Head to include this renumbering in the new book, or in The Last Battle the following yr, or have Geoffrey Bles alter the order in afterward reprints of the other books?" (Schakel 2002, 43). Schakel takes a house stand regarding Lewis's statement to Laurence Krieg, arguing that the reading order in fact "matters a peachy deal" (44) and that if readers are going to share the wonder and suspense of the children in the story, they need to read the Chronicles in the club they were published. This means reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe get-go.

Lewis's letter to Laurence Krieg is famous amongst Narnia enthusiasts for another reason. From information technology we learn about Lewis's plans, or rather his lack of plans, for farther Chronicles. Lewis told Krieg, "When I wrote The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe I did not know I was going to write any more. So I wrote Prince Caspian equally a sequel and still didn't think at that place would exist whatsoever more, and when I had washed The Voyage of the Dawn Treader I felt quite certain it would be the last" (1995, 68).

Questions, controversy, and mixed opinions about the Chronicles of Narnia notwithstanding abound today. An article headlined "Narnia books attacked every bit racist and sexist" appeared in the June 3, 2002, upshot of the British newspaper The Guardian. In it John Ezard quotes Philip Pullman, the Whitbread Volume Laurels–winning author of the His Nighttime Materials trilogy, who calls Lewis's piece of work "propaganda" and accuses it of being "monumentally disparaging of girls and women" and "blatantly racist." Laura Miller, senior editor for the online magazine Salon, has also been disquisitional of the Narnia books in sure ways. In an article titled "Personal Best" which appeared in the September 30, 1996 issue, Miller described an feel shared by a number of readers as they grew older. She states, "Lewis'southward books are very, very English and very Christian, in a item way. The latter I didn't realize until I was a good bargain older, and this discovery filled me with anger and bitterness. I had been tricked into giving my heart to the very baneful, twisted religion I had tried so hard to elude."

Children'south literature scholar Peter Hunt has also bandage a less-than-favorable eye on Lewis'southward serial for immature people, claiming that "not far beneath the genial surface of the books lie some very sexist, racist, and violent attitudes" (2001, 200). About the widely varying responses which the books have generated, Hunt claims, "If there is a unmarried, central instance of the divergence of popular and critical sense of taste, and then the seven books concerning the mythical land of Narnia . . . must qualify" (199).

Another anti-Narnia vocalization comes from a very different source—the radical right of central Christianity, a somewhat strange frequenter of other critics. A website titled Balaam's Ass Speaks includes a section called "C. S. Lewis: The Devil'due south Wisest Fool." In information technology Mary Van Nattan claims, "The Chronicles of Narnia are 1 of the most powerful tools of Satan that Lewis ever produced. Worst of all, these books are geared toward children." The leading criticism raised in the essay, one which given its source may not be completely unexpected, is that the series is an "indoctrinating tool of witchcraft."

While opponents ofttimes raise strong, even vehement, objections, fans' support for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has remained unwavering. In British bookseller Waterstone'south voting for "All-time Books of the Century," The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe finished twenty-first, alee of works by such acclaimed authors every bit Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, John Steinbeck, and Toni Morrison. In The Big Read serial sponsored by the BBC in fall 2003, voters ranked The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as their number nine choice.

To coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, HarperCollins released a special deluxe hardcover edition with 19 full-color plates by the original illustrator Pauline Baynes. In the U.s., the Focus on the Family Radio Theatre has produced sound adaptations of all 7 of the Narnia stories, with Douglas Gresham, Lewis's stepson, serving as host. Some of the famous voices include Paul Scofield equally the narrator and David Suchet every bit Aslan.
The kickoff picture show adaptations of the stories were fabricated by the BBC in the late 1980s. Rather low-budget projects, they nonetheless accept their share of devoted fans, though many viewers see them now as somewhat dated. The major motion picture version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, directed by Andrew Adamson and scheduled for release in December 2005, builds on the positive reception given to the Harry Potter films and Peter Jackson'southward Lord of the Rings.

Anyone looking at the fairy tale Lewis put to paper effectually his fiftieth birthday must wonder at its enduring popularity and broad acceptance. How is it that its appeal has not waned over the years but has remained steady and fifty-fifty grown?

For one answer, we can turn to a distinction used by Lewis himself. In an essay titled "On 3 Ways of Writing for Children," Lewis described what he called a Boy's Book or a Girl'due south Book. In it, he says, we find "the immensely popular and successful schoolboy or schoolgirl," the one who "discovers the spy'south plot or rides the horse that none of the cowboys can manage" (Lewis 1982e, 38). The trouble with this book, he claims, is that while we find pleasure in reading information technology, we always return to our own world feeling equally though our own life can never measure out up. Nosotros will never catch the spy; nosotros volition never ride the unrideable pony; we will non be friends with magicians. We run to this book, Lewis states, to escape from "the disappointments and humiliations of the existent world" just then afterwards render "undivinely discontented" to reality, to a world and to a life in that world which take been made a fiddling less wonderful than before.

A 2nd type of book, Lewis suggests, wipes away the film of the ordinary from our world and makes the events of our daily lives and the people we encounter more special, not less. After reading this type of volume, nosotros do not despise our friends, our robins, or our wardrobes for being unmagical. These stories cast a spell over our world and make all robins and wardrobes a little marvelous, a little more than wonderful than before. We run across with a new perspective that indeed our friends in a sense are magicians. As Lewis states, the reader of this second kind of book "does not despise real forest because he has read of enchanted wood: the reading makes all real wood a fiddling enchanted" (1982e, 38).

While Lewis intended this stardom to refer to immature people's books in general, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe certainly fits his description of this second type of book rather than the first, and one of its chief functions is to re-enchant a disenchanted earth.

Lewis biographer A. N. Wilson has observed that since the publication of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950, "a whole generation has grown up of people who read the Narnia stories in babyhood" (1991, 220) so passed them on to their ain children and even to their grandchildren, making the stories a function of the cultural heritage for three generations of readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Another explanation for the enduring popularity of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is that the Narnia stories stand for, equally Greenish and Hooper note, "a new mythology" (1994, 251) and every bit such tin can play an integral role in the personal growth and development of those who read them. Roland Hein, author of Christian Mythmakers, has argued, "With Lewis, myth was a vehicle by which supernatural reality communicates to man" (1998, 206).

The difficulty in achieving worldwide recognition in fifty-fifty a single genre makes Lewis's power to switch from the expository writing in his early works to the mythic-style fiction seen in the Chronicles of Narnia all the more remarkable. Clearly Lewis understood the need for a creative format rather than a discursive 1 in guild to address life's nearly fundamental questions. Speaking of himself equally well every bit of others writing in a similar vein, he said that "there may be an author who at a detail moment finds non only fantasy but fantasy-for-children the exactly right form for what he wants to say" (Lewis 1982e, 36). Lewis believed that by conveying vital insights through an imaginary mode, i could make them "for the start time appear in their existent potency" (1982f, 47).

Lewis saw myth non as "misunderstood history, . . . nor diabolical illusion, . . . nor priestly lying, . . . but, at its best, a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human being imagination" (Lewis 1996d, 134) and as a form which "enables man to express the inexpressible" (Kilby 1964, 81). In the preface to the anthology of George MacDonald that Lewis compiled, he wrote that myth "gets under our skin" and "hits us at a level deeper than our thoughts" (MacDonald 1996, xxviii).

Lewis farther clarifies what he saw equally the function of myth for its readers by saying, "In the enjoyment of a great myth we come up nearest to experiencing equally a concrete what tin can otherwise exist understood only as an brainchild" (1996e, 66). In some other context Lewis wrote that the experience of myth "is not only grave but awe inspiring. . . . It is as if something of great moment had been communicated to us" (1996a, 44).

Clyde Kilby, one of the starting time scholars to write about Lewis, has noted Lewis'due south recognition of the importance of myth-making as "ane of human'due south deepest needs and highest accomplishments" (Kilby 1964, 80). Kilby argues that Lewis wrote "hardly a single book in which he does not, in ane way or some other, discuss and illustrate this subject." What, according to Lewis, was behind myth-making? Kilby explains that Lewis envisioned a "great sovereign, uncreated, unconditioned Reality at the core of things" (81) and viewed myth as "a kind of picture-making which helps human to understand this Reality" as well every bit a response to "a deep telephone call from that Reality."

In describing Lewis'due south determination to write in a fictional rather than expository mode, Donald Glover states that Lewis did and then because he believed that this "indirect" arroyo could "bring the reader closer to the truth" (1981, 3). In his volume C. S. Lewis: The Fine art of Enchantment, Glover suggests that Lewis was well enlightened of the power of myth "to present in understandable class concepts which could exist approached in no other direct fashion" (51).

---

"Let us suppose that this everyday world were, at some signal, invaded by the marvelous" (Lewis 1982b, 21). C. S. Lewis penned these words to describe the feeling evoked by the novels of his friend Charles Williams. However, Lewis's description could as be used to describe the upshot produced by his own stories. More than fifty years later on it was first published, readers from all over the earth, young and sometime, go on to share the perception that every bit they read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, their everyday world truly is invaded by the marvelous.

This excerpt is from the Introduction of Devin Dark-brown's "Inside Narnia," and is reprinted with permission.

• Interpret
• Print Page
• Electronic mail to a Friend

---

CBN IS Hither FOR YOU!
Are y'all seeking answers in life? Are yous hurting?
Are yous facing a difficult situation?

• Observe your way to peace with God
• Send u.s.a. your prayer request online
• Call The 700 Club Prayer Center at one (800) 700-7000, 24 hours a twenty-four hour period.

A caring friend volition be there to pray with you in your fourth dimension of need.

mclainstimplus.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.cbn.com/special/Narnia/excerpts/insideNarnia_Introduction.aspx

Share this post