Eight Children in Narnia. Jared Lodbell

is (as I have pointed out recently in The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy), from Thackeray in The Rose and the Ring (1854) to Andrew Lang in Prince Prigio (1889) and Ricardo of Pantouflia (1893), to Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1906). And part of the progress along this line is from the comical and fantastical to the slyness and slipper-talk and mocking humor of Lang (which nevertheless can conceal neither his real taste for fantasy nor something real in his humor) to the humorous fantasy of the Five Children.

      Lewis was witty but not, like his father, a comic. In his critical work, he praises what we have come to regard as the English humor of detail He praises the poet Layamon’s description of Arthur, turning alternately red and white when he learns that he is the King. He praises the description of Mordred bleeding “both over the upper sheet and the nether sheet”—and observes “Best of all, we are told how much it cost (£20,000) to send the expedition in search of Sir Lancelot.” Similarly, he rejoices in Gavin Douglas’s prologues in the Middle Scots XIII Bukes of Eneados, with (for example) Douglas, on a frosty morning, leaving the window “a lytill on char” and crawling back under the “claythis thrinfauld.” (This example is from English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, p. 88.) Not only did he recognize the trait; he obviously welcomed it. Moreover, it was a part of a lot of the stories and books in parts he read in The Strand—and it was a part of what Lewis wanted in the novels he read.

      If to love Story is to love excitement then I ought to be the greatest lover of excitement alive. But the fact is that what is said to be the most “exciting” novel in the world, The Three Musketeers, makes no appeal to me at all. The total lack of atmosphere repels me. There is no country in the book—save as a storehouse of inns and ambushes. There is no weather. (On Stories, p. 7)

      Yet there were many novels (and short-story collections) available with both story and atmosphere, with the humor of detailed observation—and not just Trollope, his father’s favorite. Somerville and Ross have it, especially with The Irish R.M. and Further Adventures, and Mr. Knox’s Country. Thackeray has it with Henry Esmond and The Virginians (which are ancestors of Buchan’s Salute to Adventurers), if not with The Rose and the Ring.

      But it is not something Lewis seems to have used much in the Narnia stories, though he certainly used it in That Hideous Strength. What he does use in the Narnia stories is the comic vision he learned in his youth—a touch of caricature (in Professor Kirke, “Bless me! What do they teach them in these schools?” in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)—the dogginess of the Talking Dogs in several of the Narnian stories and especially in The Last Battle (which touches on English humor)—the Monopods (“Dufflepuds”) in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”—all likely to be throwbacks to Punch. There is no question that Punch was a huge influence in the Lewis household, and those who have read the collection of one hundred of Albert Lewis’s dicta that the Lewis brothers put together in 1922 (Pudaita Pie, in the Marion Wade Collection at Wheaton College) will have seen how often Albert Lewis’s comments ended with a genuine Punch-line.

      This may help explain the discordant view of Narnia taken by Lewis’s old friend Ronald Tolkien. He thought it something of a jumble, everything put in, as in the chorus of the old song “Widdecombe Fair”—“with Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney, Peter Davy, Dan’l Whidden, Harry Hawk, old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all, old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all.” That jumble is characteristic of the comic or of comedy (even in Northrop Frye’s definition of the mythos of comedy): the point is that the jumble is to be straightened out and resolved—everything will be drawn together and then everything will be set right. Even, in miniature, set right by a Punch-line.

      But the jumble, in Tolkien’s view, ought not to extend to the cast of characters, and, in his view, here—at least in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—it does so extend. What he saw was the combination of classical mythology, fauns and satyrs and all, with Father Christmas, and then (especially in Prince Caspian) with dwarfs and other figures out of Norse mythology, and then a fairy-tale element, and Talking Beasts and other creatures out of children’s literature—exactly what we might expect from story beginning with pictures (in this case, meaning in effect visions) following the logic of dream and vision rather than waking logic.

      This takes us back to Novalis and the Blue Flower, and away from the ordinary—though associational—logic of childhood. Remember the famous dictum by Novalis: “Our life is not a dream—but it shall, and maybe must, become one” (Novalis Schriften 1977, vol. III, p. 281, aphorism no. 237). Novalis’s doctrine of the dream is the basis for George MacDonald’s use of dreams, as his doctrine of the Bergmann and the Earth is the basis for much that is in the Curdie books. The miner, the Bergmann, is the priest of Earth, the third cave into which the Bergmann leads Heinrich von Ofterdingen is a symbolic stopping place on the way to the Golden Age in which all time is at once, through the door of the timeless. This gives the clue to the importance of dream and Marchen (fairy-tale) in which Novalis finds Romantic truth.

      In both dream and Marchen, as in the child’s world, orderly operation of time is suspended (Novalis Schriften 1977, vol. III, p. 452, aphorism no. 959): “Dreams are often meaningful and prophetic because they are natural effects of the soul—and are thus based on the order of association. They are meaningful like poetry—but for that reason also irregularly meaningful—absolutely free.” And this ties in with the nature of Märchen, which we translate (badly—it is really untranslatable) as fairytale or folk-tale. The time of a true Marchen is a time of freedom, when everything is miraculous and mysterious, a time before time. The true Marchen must be prophetic depiction, and the genuine poet of Märchen (or teller of Märchen) is a seer of the future as well as an ideal and ironic child (summarizing Novalis Schriften 1977, vol. III, pp. 280–81, aphorism no. 234).

      The freedom Novalis finds in dream derives from what we may call the associational and non-linear progress of dream. As we have noted, childhood also has something of that freedom—but childhood also has a different (associational) logic. Moreover, that freedom is, in Novalis’s view, the freedom of the Golden Age—which is Arcadian. It may be ironic that the Curdie books are miner’s pastoral in the harsh land of Scotland, but they are pastoral and they are children’s books. And when Novalis says that life is not a dream but should and must become one, he is also saying that we must be free of time, not only as a dream is free, but as a Marchen or childhood or Arcady is free. The ironic child is the prophet; the prophecy is the Marchen. Here we begin to see a possible key to considering the Narnian stories as Comedy as well as comedy, and a true connection of fairy-tale (if defined as Marchen) with children’s stories.