It is likely not very much more than coincidental that in the Boxen stories, the province originally named Frog-land became Piscia, the first Roman place name in Lewis’s fiction, as Narnia is pretty much the last. Piscia is, I believe, a small town near Portovecchio on the south coast of Corsica—which has nothing much to do with Narnia (Nequinum) in Umbria. But its appearance in Boxen does suggest that at some time in the first decade of the twentieth century, Lewis was reading something with Latin (Roman) names—and if it was a text rather than simply a map, I believe it is very likely to have been The Lays of Ancient Rome, perhaps an edition (like the Harper 1894) with notes. That being said, I doubt if it is coincidental that a good bit of the sentiment of the Lays is in the Narnian stories—along with a love of ships and seafaring (though medievalized rather than contemporary, as happened in 1906 with Lewis’s childhood creation of Animal-Land). In what way does Tirian at the Stable differ from Horatius at the Bridge—“To every man upon this earth / Death cometh soon or late / And how can man die better / Than facing fearful odds / For the ashes of his fathers / And the temples of his gods?”?
I do not base any argument on the claim that the return of the Four Children in the Year of Narnia 2303 is akin to the coming of the Great Twin Brethren at The Battle of Lake Regillus—though it is akin. But Lake Regillus is simply Macaulay’s version of a story told of many divine returns by many hands (‘“The gods who live forever / Have fought for Rome to-day / These be the Great Twin Brethren / To whom the Dorians pray”), and Lewis’s turn on the story in Prince Caspian is like his turn in “Yellow-Hair” or “After Ten Years”—as we shall see. That is, in this case, he looks at the event from the generally unregarded point of view of the “divine” entities who are being summoned (or of the soldiers inside the Trojan Horse, to take another example).
In any case, whatever were the first stirrings of Narnia, part of what went into that world or country after it stirred was the books Lewis read in those long-gone days, written by E. Nesbit, or Andrew Lang, or even perhaps Thackeray, Kipling, Kenneth Grahame (and in Warnie’s case certainly, G.A. Henty). Then—as he said in 1956—he thought that new books after the manner of E. Nesbit (or Andrew Lang)—his own newly written books—could be used to “get past the watchful dragons” guarding modern children from the heritage of the past. Of course, we need to ask, in fact, “Were there watchful dragons?” And what, indeed, were they watching? The implication of Lewis’s remark in the New York Times Book Review is that they were watching for tell-tale signs of Christian belief. We shall see. In the meantime, the phrase gave Walter Hooper a title for his little book on Narnia, Past Watchful Dragons, based in part on that argument, which introduces some very interesting matter, as we shall also see.
Chapter 3 of this present book is entitled “The House in the Country and the First Larger Life,” referring both to the house in the country—Professor Kirke’s house—where Narnia lies (sometimes) behind the coats in the wardrobe in the spare room and to the house in the country (in the far north of Scotland) where Lewis’s mentor George MacDonald may be said to have begun his writing career and which appears in his novel Phantastes (and in at least six others of his novels). Here’s what Mr. Cupples in Alec Forbes says of the library and the house (quoted from M.R. Phillips, George MacDonald, Minneapolis: Bethany 1987, p. 117): “‘Efter I had ta’en my degree . . . I heard o’ a grit leebrary i’ the north . . . Dinna imaigin’ it was a public library. Na, na. It belonged to a grit an’ gran’ hoose—the Lord hae respec’ till’t!” [“After I had taken my degree, I heard of a great library in the north. Don’t imagine it was a public library. No, it belonged to a great and grand house, the Lord have respect to it!”] Greville MacDonald—George MacDonald’s son—suggested that the great and grand house with the great library where his father spent 1842–43 was the Castle of Thurso in the far north of Scotland, in Caithness. But whether there or at Dunbeath (also in the far north of Scotland, in Caithness), the important thing was the great and grand house and its great library and the “jump start” its books gave MacDonald in the realm of imagination—books by authors like Novalis, one of the founders of German Romanticism. Professor Kirke’s house in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is as much the great house in the north that led MacDonald to the realms of Faerie as it is anything like Little Lea. A great and grand house in the north would have empty rooms and long corridors (and tourists), much more than the book-crowded Little Lea.
For the life of Faerie, or the life of the imagination, is the First Larger Life, and it is into this life that Lucy first steps through the wardrobe. And indeed, I see in Professor Kirke (and think of the ramifications of that name in Lewis’s mind, and the figure of Mother Kirk in The Pilgrim’s Regress!) a teacher not unlike George MacDonald, as he was in Lewis’s mind. For Professor Kirke is a Platonist and a rational man and a Romantic—and more than that, he is opening the children’s minds to that first larger life, as Phantastes, in 1914 or 1915, opened the mind of C.S. Lewis. And then, eventually, to the second larger life. The Wardrobe in the great and grand house of Digory Kirke (Father Kirk?) is a gate to the first larger life and eventually to both.
This chapter looks also at “the pictures it all began with” (in reference to Lewis’s Times Book Review essay “It All Began with a Picture”), then at the name of Narnia (which we first look at in this Introduction), then at The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with its beavers, fauns, Father Christmas, Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve, witches, [Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh] and all. The key point here, I think, is that the pictures it all began with are literary pictures. Lewis had never seen in his quotidian life the Queen on the Sledge, or the Great Lion. Jadis, the White Witch, sometime Queen of Charn, the Queen on the Sledge, is out of E. Nesbit. The Great Lion bears the name Aslan (but shouldn’t it be Arslan?), and He is essentially a lion rampant (as he is indeed on Peter’s shield), an heraldic lion, a medieval lion, as Alp Arslan was a medieval warrior-king (though not on the Christian side). Now why did these particular pictures produce Narnia—the country and the world by whatever name we call it—we’re not asking about the name itself. The question, why the name Narnia?—that will be considered later in this Introduction and in Chapter 3.
But how did the world come out of the pictures? Certainly the pictures that started The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe must include the Lion and the Witch (as Lewis said they did), though not perhaps the Wardrobe, which was part of the furniture of Lewis’s mind and perhaps of his past when he began to write the Narnian books. There has been considerable argument as to which wardrobe was (or is) The Wardrobe? one at Wheaton College? one out in California? Let me recall here a remark made by Edmund Burke, back in the eighteenth century, and quoted by the twentieth-century scholar Russell Kirk: “in Burke’s rhetoric, the civilized being is distinguished from the savage by his possession of the moral imagination—by our ‘superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our estimation.’” I’m not suggesting that the wardrobe in Professor Kirk’s house is solely from Burke—we know there were wardrobes in the house at Little Lea, and presumably in the earlier house at Dundela Villas—but I believe nonetheless that it is the “wardrobe of moral imagination” from which the children take the coats that