Chronicles of Narnia - Who was the man behind these stories?
During World War 11, London’s evacuee children were sent to the country to avoid the London air raids. Professor C. S. Lewis, (author of the Chronicles of Narnia,) a bachelor who valued privacy, and authored many books on Christian theology, was one who opened his quiet home to groups of children during the time of war. In letters to his brother ability to create imaginary games to amuse themselves during the visit. He wrote to a friend in 1935, “They have been treated with so much indulgence yet so little affection, with so much science and so little mother-wit. Neither a fairy tale nor a nursery rhyme.”
His solution came in the form of a fantasy world that would create the background of the book series; the Chronicles of Narnia. The magical land in which the Chronicles of Narnia took place, all began with the popular adventures in the special book that both adults and children love, the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Biographer A.N. Wilson, says of the Chronicles of Narnia, “ It is as though Lewis…has managed to get through the wardrobe door himself; to leave behind the world of squabbles and grown ups and to re-enter the world which was the deepest part of himself he never left, that of childhood reading.”
Born in 1898, C.S.Lewis, (author of Chronicles of Narnia,) Christened Clive Staples, was known as ‘Jack’ to family and friends. When Lewis was young child, he wrote stories of a Medieval Animal-Land in which his imagination combined “dressed animals”, and “knights in armor” in his own fantasy world. The first book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in the Chronicles of Narnia series, began as images “haunting his imagination” as a child. Pictures of a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, and a magnificent lion stayed on his mind. All future characters in Chronicles of Narnia. At the age of 9, after his mother died of cancer, he was left alone with his brother & imagination in various lonely English boarding schools. This time in Lewis’s life revolved around “huge waves of Wagnerian music and Norse and Celtic mythology.”
As an adult in the early 1920’s, he became a tutor at Oxford, and soon after one of the brilliant Christian writers of the century. His long-time friendship with Lord of the Rings author, J.R.R. Tolkien, influenced Lewis greatly in his religious writings.
The Christian allegory of the Chronicles of Narnia leaves adults wondering, but Lewis denied the books were written as a way to introduce Christianity to children. In a way, the Chronicles of Narnia series could really sum up C.S. Lewis’s life. A publisher once asked why he wrote the Chronicles of Narnia, “I wrote the books I should have liked to read if only I could have got them. That’s always been my reason for writing. People won’t write the books I want, so I have to do it for myself; no ‘rot about self-expression’. This helps us understand why a man who remained unmarried, (until later in life), and childless would begin writing children’s stories in middle age. Now, we are privileged to see on screen the long anticipated movie based on the Chronicles of Narnia, which will continue to inspire generations of children to use their imaginations.