Pocket Companion to Narnia: A Guide to the Magical World of C.S. Lewis

Pocket Companion to Narnia

A Guide to the Magical World of C. S. Lewis

Paul F. Ford

Illustrated by Lorinda Bryan Cauley

for

Paul Ford

(my namesake)

his brother David and his sister Emily

his mother Laura and his father Raymond (my brother)

John Lake

(who dedicated his first book to me)

his brothers Erik and Thomas

his mother Silvia and his father Don

Nathan Blackmon

his brothers Andrew and Alex

his mother Sheri and his father Rick

Becky Cerling and Joshua Falconer,

without whom…

all, my companions in Narnia and in life

Contents

Abbreviations

List of Maps, Illustrations, and Diagrams

Using the Pocket Companion

Where to Begin

How to Find an Entry

How to Read a Sample Entry

Bibliography

Variants

Guide to the Most Important Entries

Advice to an Intelligent Reader from an Intelligent Reader or Reading This Will Make You Smarter

In Which Order Should the Chronicles Be Read?

How C. S. Lewis Wrote the Chronicles of Narnia

Sources for Further Help

The Pocket Companion from A to Z

appendix one

List of Comparative Ages of Principal Characters in the Chronicles of Narnia

appendix two

A Narnian Atlas

Where You Will Find More Information in the Full-Size Companion to Narnia

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Image

Eustace, Edmund, and Lucy bid farewell to Reepicheep, the courageous mouse, as his coracle skims the smooth green current and he rides the wave of eternity into Aslan’s country. (VDT 16)

Abbreviations

The books of the Chronicles of Narnia are abbreviated as follows:

List of Maps, Illustrations, and Diagrams

Maps

Narnia

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

The Silver Chair

Illustrations

Eustace, Edmund, and Lucy bid farewell to Reepicheep, the courageous mouse, as his coracle skims the smooth green current and he rides the wave of eternity into Aslan’s country. (VDT 16)

As Mr. Tumnus, the Faun, serves tea, Lucy looks over the curious books on the shelves. (LWW 2)

The stare of the White Witch makes Edmund uncomfortable: She is tall and beautiful, proud and stern; her red lips the only spot of color in a face pale as ice. (LWW 3)

Susan, Lucy, and Edmund help Mrs. Beaver prepare dinner as Peter and Mr. Beaver come in with the main course, fresh-caught trout. (LWW 7)

Susan and Lucy watch in awe as Aslan’s gentle face grows terrible to behold and the very trees bend before the power of his roar. (LWW 16)

While Nikabrik and Trumpkin argue about his fate, Caspian awakes to the smells of a sweet, hot drink being offered him by Trufflehunter, the Talking Badger. (PC 5)

Trufflehunter watches as the Three Bulgy Bears give Caspian the kisses he deserves as a Son of Adam and future king of Narnia. (PC 6)

It is the worst of nights: The Giant Wimbleweather weeps tears of failure; the bloodied bears, the wounded Centaur, and all the other creatures huddle in gloom under the dripping trees. (PC 7)

Eustace weeps huge tears when he sees his dragonish reflection. He wishes more than anything to be human again and back with his companions. (VDT 6)

Coriakin the Magician and Lucy can’t help laughing at the antics of the Duffers. Visible once more, they are hopping about on their monopods like enormous fleas. (VDT 11)

After their trek across the Great Desert, Aravis, Bree, Hwin, and Shasta plunge into a broad pool to cool off. (HHB 9)

The dwarf brothers Rogin, Bricklethumb, and Duffle serve the starving Shasta his first Narnian meal. (HHB 12)

Jill and Eustace talk to Puddleglum as the Marsh-wiggle explains—as Marsh-wiggles will—that he is fishing for eels, though he doesn’t expect to catch any. (SC 5)

When Scrubb, Jill, and Puddleglum discover the giants’ recipes for cooking Men and Marsh-wiggles, they realize they must flee Harfang before the giant cook wakes up and turns them into dinner. (SC 9)

The Queen of Underland transforms herself into a hideous, seething serpent and coils herself around Rilian. Scrubb and Puddleglum come to his rescue with swords at the ready while Jill looks on in horror and tries not to faint. (SC 12)

As the four Overlanders—Puddleglum, Jill, Eustace, and Rilian—look on, the gnomes rejoice at the news of the wicked Queen of Underland’s death. (SC 14)

Queen Jadis hangs on in rage as the magic rings transport Digory and Polly out of Charn and into the timeless Wood between the Worlds. (MN 5)

The animals of Narnia spring joyously from the earth, brought forth by Aslan’s song of creation. (MN 9)

Sorely tempted to disobey Aslan and eat a silver apple from the Tree of Protection, Digory wrestles with his conscience. He is watched by the evil witch and a wonderful, mysterious bird. (MN 13)

Tied to a tree by the Calormenes and left to be killed by the followers of the false Aslan, Tirian is fed by three mice, two moles, and a rabbit. (LB 4)

It is Aslan’s final coming. He bounds down the rainbow cliffs, a herald of power and glory. (LB 16)

Diagrams

The Narnian Continent

Narnia’s Lantern Waste

Narnia’s Eastern Peninsula

Eastern Edge of the Narnian World

Cross Section of the Narnian World

Basic Elemental Makeup of the Narnian World

The Wood between the Worlds

Aslan’s Country and Surrounding Worlds

Aslan’s Country in Relation to the Wood between the Worlds

Aslan’s Country, Topography

Aslan’s Country Meets the Narnian World

Using the Pocket Companion

A simplified version of this section

is available for printing as a bookmark at my website:

www.pford.stjohnsem.edu/ford/cslewis/narnia.htm.

Where to Begin

You have begun in the right place by coming to this page. If you have not read the Chronicles, read them first (in the order 245-3617—see below, 14–15).

After you have read each book, then come back to this page and read these few pages called "Using the Pocket Companion. Then read Advice to an Intelligent Reader from an Intelligent Reader or Reading This Will Make You Smarter."

For a more directed study of the Chronicles, see Guide to the Most Important Entries at the end of this section. Reading any of the Major Characters and Items (listed there) will also lead you into the heart of this Pocket Companion.

How to Find an Entry

Entries are in alphabetical order. Characters are listed by first name (e.g., Andrew Ketterley is listed under A for Andrew), and honorifics or titles are left off (e.g., Prince Caspian is listed under C for Caspian, and Mr. Beaver is listed under B for Beaver, Mr.).

How to Read a Sample Entry

ENTRY TITLES— Abbreviated book titles and chapter numbers indicate where the topic under discussion can be found in the Chronicles. For instance, SC 3 and 4 refers you to chapters 3 and 4 of The Silver Chair. Small Capitals are used to alert you to a cross reference, namely, a separate entry on this person, place, thing, or idea.¹ Singular and plural verb and noun forms of the entry title will both be set in small capitals (e.g., animal and animals, pray and prayer). Some longer titles, such as Seven friends of Narnia and Castle of the White Witch, are listed under the first word of that phrase, not the last (i.e., Seven… and Castle…). On those rare occasions when two cross references are run together, an asterisk functions as a divider between these cross references. For example, under Adults, the phrase Digory recognizes right away that Uncle Andrew is an evil* magician indicates that you will find more information at Andrew, at Evil, and at Magician. [SPOILER(S)] means Don’t read the next sentence/paragraph if you have not yet read the book in question because it tells you something very important to the story.

At the end of some entries you will find cross references not specifically mentioned in the text listed in [brackets].

[astronomy, narnian; providence.]

Bibliography

I use the following short titles and abbreviations in the notes. Here is more information:

The Abolition of Man

(first published in 1946; now available from HarperSanFrancisco, 2001)

Biography

Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974, and London: Collins, 1974)

Christian Reflections

Walter Hooper, ed. (Grand Rapids:

Eerdmans, 1967)

The Discarded Image

(London: Cambridge University Press, 1964)

Essays Presented to Charles Williams

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966)

The Four Loves

(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960)

God in the Dock

Walter Hooper, ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,1970)

The Great Divorce

(first published in 1946; now available from HarperSanFrancisco, 2001)

Hooper

Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and

Guide (London: HarperCollins, 1996)

The Land of Narnia

Brian Sibley, The Land of Narnia: Brian Sibley Explores the World of C. S. Lewis (New York: HarperTrophy, 1998)

Letters to an American Lady

Clyde S. Kilby, ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967)

Letters to Children

C. S. Lewis Letters to Children, Lyle K. Dorsett and Marjorie Lamp Mead, eds. (New York: Macmillan, 1985; Scribner, 1996)

Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964)

Letters II

C. S. Lewis: Collected Letters, Volume II: Books, Broadcasts and War 1931–1949 (London: HarperCollins, 2004)

Letters 1988

Letters of C. S. Lewis, W. H. Lewis, ed., revised and enlarged by Walter Hooper (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1988)

Mere Christianity

(first published in 1952; now available from HarperSanFrancisco, 2001)

Miracles

(first published in 1947; revised 1960; now available from HarperSanFrancisco, 2001)

Of Other Worlds

Walter Hooper, ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1966)

Past Watchful Dragons

Walter Hooper (New York: Macmillan, 1979)

Perelandra

(first published in 1943; latest edition from

Scribner, 2003)

The Problem of Pain

(first published in 1940; now available from HarperSanFrancisco, 2001)

The Screwtape Letters

(first published in 1942; now available from HarperSanFrancisco, 2001)

Surprised by Joy

(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955)

The Weight of Glory

(first published in 1949; revised in 1980; now available from HarperSanFrancisco, 2001)

The World’s Last Night

(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960)

Variants

The most significant differences between the pre-1994 American and the British editions (now the English editions for the world) of the Chronicles are noted in the entries Dream(s), Fenris Ulf, Secret Hill, and World Ash Tree.

In this Pocket Companion to Narnia, American edition(s) = Any edition of the Chronicles of Narnia typeset and printed in the United States of America before 1994. These editions have the changes Lewis made after he had proofread the second set of galleys sent to him by his American publisher. Since he rarely made any changes, these are significant. (See Advice to an Intelligent Reader, 11.)

British edition(s) = Any edition of the Chronicles of Narnia typeset and printed in Great Britain before 1994 and any edition in the English language published anywhere in the world after 1994; after this date the volumes are renumbered according to the order of the internal chronology. These editions do not contain the changes Lewis made after he had proofread the second set of galleys sent to him by his American publisher.

Guide to the Most Important Entries

Major Characters and Places. The following entries are major characters and places and are a good place to start your reading of this Pocket Companion to Narnia.

Aravis, Aslan, Bree, Cair Paravel, Caspian X (Prince Caspian), Digory Kirke, Edmund Pevensie, Eustace Clarence Scrubb, Hwin, Jill Pole, Lucy Pevensie, Narnia, Peter Pevensie, Polly Plummer, Puddleglum, Reepicheep, Shasta, Susan Pevensie, White Witch.

Another way to begin is by consulting the following essential entries.

For the Chronicles of Narnia in general:

Using the Pocket Companion, Advice to an Intelligent Reader, Aslan; Autobiographical allusion(s); Biblical allusion(s); Feeling(s); Imagination; Literary allusion(s); Magic; Mythology; Profession(s) of faith; Stock response(s).

If you have time, see also: Adult(s); Animal(s); Autobiographical Allusion(s); Children; For the first time; Geography, Narnian (plus the maps in the middle of the book); King(s), queen(s); Pain; Plato; Prayer; Providence; Silence; Sleep; Smell(s); Sound(s); Youth; and Appendices One and Two.

For Book One: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Aslan’s name; Aslan’s voice; Centaurs; Depravity; Domesticity; Dryad(s); Edmund Pevensie; Emperor-beyond-the-Sea; Hierarchy; King(s), queen(s); Lucy Pevensie; Magic; Numinous; Peter Pevensie; Plato; Son of Adam, Daughter of Eve; Susan Pevensie; Tree(s); Tumnus; White Witch.

For Book Two: Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia

Astronomy, Narnian; Caspian X; Courtesy; Dance; Dwarf(s); Fear; Greatness of God; Honor; Hope(s); Longing; Practical Notes; Revelry; Robe(s); School(s); Telmar; Time; Transition(s); Trufflehunter; Trumpkin.

For Book Three: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Adventure; Aslan’s country; Coriakin; Courage; Cowardice; Dark Island; DAWN TREADER, Dawn Treader, Dream(s); Duffer(s); Eustace Clarence Scrubb; Privacy; Reepicheep; Silence; Star(s); Vanity.

For Book Four: The Horse and His Boy

Aravis; Bree; Comfort; Cry(ing); Horse(s); Hwin; Obedience; Rabadash; Sexism; Shasta; Trinity; Youth

For Book Five: The Silver Chair

Cry(ing); Jill Pole; Memory; Puddleglum; Queen of Underland; Quest; Reductionism; Rilian; Underland; Youth.

For Book Six: The Magician’s Nephew

Andrew Ketterley; Charn; Curiosity; Digory Kirke; Greed; Humor; Polly Plummer; Positivity; Right and wrong; Wood between the Worlds.

For Book Seven: The Last Battle

Death; Dog(s); Door(s); Emeth; Eschatology; History; Jewel; Joy; Judgment; Last Battle(s); Puzzle; Railway accident; Shift; Stable; Tash; Technology; Term-time; Tirian; Universalism.

Advice to an Intelligent Reader

from an Intelligent Reader or

Reading This Will Make You Smarter

This book has many spoilers! Please read the Chronicles of Narnia first. Only then read this Pocket Companion. I can’t be your companion until you have gone there first.

C. S. Lewis wrote these books for you, and he meant you to read them with your head and your heart and your feelings. The books are so exciting that you will probably race through them the first time. OK.

But when you reread them, pay attention to the color words, the verbs, the adjectives, and the adverbs.

Try to avoid looking for hidden meanings, as if the Chronicles were codebooks.

C. S. Lewis was very careful not to decode the Chronicles for the children who wrote him about their meaning. Typical of his responses is the answer he made to Hila Newman when she wrote to him about the meaning of the ending of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

As to Aslan’s other name, well I want you to guess. Has there never been anyone in this world who (1) Arrived at the same time as Father Christmas (2) Said he was the son of the Great Emperor (3) Gave himself up for someone else’s fault to be jeered at and killed by wicked people (4) Came to life again (5) Is sometimes spoken of as a Lamb (see the end of The Dawn Treader). Don’t you really know His name in this world? Think it over and let me know your answer! (Letters to Children, 3 June 1953)

In Which Order Should the

Chronicles Be Read?

The Order by Year of First Publication—

the Canonical Order

Before 1994 there was only one reading order, what scholars have come to call the canonical order, the order in which the chronicles were first published, and they were numbered accordingly:

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (published 1950)

The Horse and His Boy (published 1954)

The Magician’s Nephew (published 1955)

The Last Battle (published 1956)

So, although C. S. Lewis completed The Horse and His Boy before The Silver Chair, the latter was published first, in order to keep together the triad of books in which Caspian is a major character.

The Order by Internal Chronology—

the Chronological Order

Very quickly, readers noticed that the stories were not in the order of their internal chronology, and some wrote Lewis about the issue. Here is a typical reply, written on 23 April 1957 but not published until 1985:

Dear Laurence

I think I agree with your order for reading the books more than with your mother’s.¹ The series was not planned beforehand as she thinks. When I wrote The Lion [, the Witch and the Wardrobe] I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote P.[rince] Caspian as a sequel and still didn’t think there would be any more, and when I had done The Voyage [of the Dawn Treader] I felt quite sure it would be the last. But I found I was wrong. So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone reads them. I’m not even sure that all the others were written in the same order in which they were published. I never keep notes of that sort of thing and never remember dates.

This letter suggested the change that HarperCollins implemented in 1994 when the decision was made to make the British editions the world English editions. This has come to be called the chronological order.

The Magician’s Nephew

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

The Horse and His Boy

Prince Caspian

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

The Silver Chair

The Last Battle

Most scholars and fans disagree with this decision and find it the least faithful to Lewis’s deepest intentions and to the meanings the books have acquired among the most devoted readers.

The Best Reading Order—the Order by Essential

Completion by Lewis Himself

Remember 245-3617

The Pocket Companion to Narnia studies the Chronicles in a slight adaptation of the canonical order, what I have called the order by essential completion. This order makes possible the reading of the book with the heart by attending to them in the order in which they came to Lewis’s own heart and mind.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (spring 1949)

Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia (fall 1949)

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (winter 1950)

The Horse and His Boy (spring 1950)

The Silver Chair (spring 1951)

The Magician’s Nephew (fall 1951)

The Last Battle (spring 1953)

I urge all readers of the Chronicles of Narnia to Remember ‘245-3617,’ that is, rearrange the post-1994 HarperCollins reordering before you read the books!

My worry is that the decision to reorder the books chronologically diminishes their impact on future readers, indeed, impedes readers from moving from The Magician’s Nephew to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and thus to the end, which is only the beginning of the real story.

Consider how The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe introduces the mystery of a world within a wardrobe and builds to the first use of the name Narnia in paragraph 10 of Chapter 2 and the revelation of Aslan in Chapter 7, A Day with the Beavers. Contrariwise, The Magician’s Nephew plops the reader unmysteriously into the plot of the whole series, using Narnia as the fortieth word a reader will now encounter.

But the pivotal insight that clinches the argument is found in the scene just cited: "None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different."² The five words I have emphasized show that we must read the books in the order in which they first came to the attention of the world of readers and rereaders, in the order in which the meaning of these glorious books grew beyond Lewis’s late-formed intention to revise them. His intention to emend the books—agreed to just two days before he died—is inferior to his attention to their meaning and their success at that level (his deeper intention).

If Lewis had been able to complete his intended revision, perhaps the chronological order would be the better. But the 245-3617 order or the canonical order is to be preferred. Why? Helping to avoid the ever-present danger of decoding the Chronicles, these orderings carry the reader along in a less logical, less factual mode and present the pictures and the meanings of Lewis’s stories in the way he first decided to tell them and in the way the first readers of the Chronicles enjoyed them.

How C. S. Lewis Wrote the

Chronicles of Narnia

You can save the following, final piece of advice for reading later. It helps you get an overview of what C. S. Lewis was doing. Warning: SPOILERS ahead!

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.

Lewis seems to have worked out of four separate spurts of creative energy left over from his having just finished a very important book of philosophy and theology called Miracles. The first spurt of energy produced The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and a rough draft of The Magician’s Nephew, named The Lefay Fragment.³ The second resulted in Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The third was responsible for The Horse and His Boy. And the final impulse saw The Silver Chair, The Last Battle, and The Magician’s Nephew (finished in that order).

Lewis’s First Burst of Narnian Creativity

(summer of 1948 to summer of 1949)

It could very well be that finishing Miracles and starting his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, in the spring of 1948, released in Lewis the energy to return to a book he had started and left off at the beginning of World War II with the arrival of the three girls evacuated from London.⁴ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is caught up in describing the new world of Narnia, its enchantment by the White Witch, the lot of the Talking Beasts and the mythological creatures under her rule, the transformation of the country by the intervention of the Great Lion, and its subsequent rule by the four English children. The Lefay Fragment⁵ seems to convey that Lewis wasn’t yet ready to write the creation story of Narnia because he had not lived long enough in the world and with the characters he had created⁶ and he wasn’t far enough along in the understanding of the meaning of his own life story to appreciate what was happening to him in his own writing. He set aside this rough draft of The Magician’s Nephew and paused.

Lewis’s Second Burst of Narnian Creativity

(summer of 1949 to fall of 1950)

The subtitle of Prince Caspian, The Return to Narnia, provides the most important clue as to Lewis’s intended meanings for the work (no other chronicle has a subtitle). The subtitle suggests that the book can be seen as a rough draft of The Last Battle in that both books ask the questions Is the Christian story real now or only something that may have happened long ago? and What does the effect of the passage of time have on the reality and experience of faith? (Prince Caspian twice refers to the events of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as the golden age.) In Prince Caspian there are also pre-echoes of a major theme in both The Last Battle and also The Magician’s Nephew: the right and wrong uses of nature and people.⁷ Prince Caspian concentrates even more on the geography, astronomy, and history of Narnia and adds considerably to the cast of characters. Aslan sends the boys and Trumpkin to war alongside Caspian while he and the girls will liberate Narnia through the ecstatic.⁸

Then, in almost an excess of imaginative energy, Lewis wrote—in less than three months—The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which takes the reader from the slave-trading intrigues on islands close to Narnia to the very threshold of Aslan’s country in a high point of what we would have to call mysticism.⁹ Lewis intended to end the Chronicles with The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, as you can see in the last scene of the book.

Lewis made the most significant change in all of the Chronicles when he revised the ending of Chapter XII of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Dark Island. Between the time he corrected the galley proofs of the British edition and the time he corrected the galley proofs of the American edition, he delivered the address On Three Ways of Writing for Children to the British Library Association. When someone objected that fairy tales are too violent for children, Lewis said: I suffered too much from nightfears myself in childhood to undervalue this objection. I would not wish to heat the fires of that private hell for any child. He seems to have had second thoughts about whether The Dark Island was too frightening¹⁰ and made the changes detailed in the entry Dream(s).

Lewis’s Third Burst of Narnian Creativity

(spring and summer of 1950)

After a pause of at least two months, Lewis, like a portraitist finished with his main subject, started The Horse and His Boy to fill in the background by telling a story that takes place in Calormen and Archenland.¹¹ Along the way, however, much as Shasta encounters Aslan in the fog (Chapter XI, a foreshadowing of Emeth in The Last Battle), Lewis was also overwhelmed.

Remember, Lewis was writing his autobiography at the same time. Imagine the effect on Lewis of taking the invitation Aslan makes to Shasta, Tell me your sorrows, as an invitation addressed to himself. What a process for all of us readers, and what a climax in the vision of Aslan that rewards Shasta’s honest dialogue!

Lewis’s Final Burst of Narnian Creativity

(summer of 1950 to spring of 1953)

So, after a second pause, of at least four months, Lewis plunged into the creation of the last three chronicles. He finished The Silver Chair first, labored at The Magician’s Nephew, leaving it with some threads untied, and went on to start and complete The Last Battle before finally completing The Magician’s Nephew.

The tone has changed when we enter the world of The Silver Chair.¹² The scene is Experiment House, the progressive school that Eustace Scrubb attends. In this fifth chronicle (published fourth), Lewis shows how aware he was of the two senses of the word spell. Tolkien had written, "Small wonder that spell means