|
50 years ago, C.S. Lewis created a land of wonder and enchantment called Narnia, and since then millions of readers have discovered his wondrous world that exists just beyond the back of the wardrobe ...
But what is the story that lies behind Narnia's creation? Who was C.S. Lewis and how did he first begin to imagine The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe? What was it about this book that moved Lewis to tell the entire history of this fantastic world, and that has gone on to inspire artists such as Pauline Baynes to recreate the images of Narnia and its people? Find out More by reading on.
CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS was born in Belfast in 1898. As a child, he was fascinated by the fairy tales, myths and ancient legends recounted to him by his Irish nurse. The image of a faun carrying parcels and an umbrella in a snowy wood came to him when he was sixteen.
However, it was not until many years later as a professor at Cambridge University, that the faun was joined by an evil queen and a magnificent lion. Their story became The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, one of the best loved books of all time. Six further Chronicles of Narnia followed and the final title, The Last Battle, published in 1956, was awarded the highest mark of excellence in children's literature - the prestigious Carnegie Award.
You can find out more about C.S. Lewis's other books at CSLewisClassics.com.
The Chronicles of Narnia began as a series of pictures in the author's head. "At first," wrote C. S. Lewis, "they were not a story, just pictures." The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe began with a mental image of a snowy wood with a little goat-footed faun scurrying along carrying an umbrella and a pile of parcels. "This picture," he later recalled, "had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then, one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: 'Let's try to make a story about it . . .' "
Clive Staples Lewis (or as he was always known to his friends, "Jack") was already an established writer of serious books on literature and religion, but, as a bachelor who didn't know many children, he had never thought of writing a book for young readers. Then, during the Second World War, when children from London were being evacuated to the country, four youngsters were billeted at Jack's home, the Kilns. Surprised to find how few imaginative stories his young guests seemed to know, he decided to write one for them and scribbled down the opening sentences of a story about four children -- then named Ann, Martin, Rose and Peter -- who were sent away from London because of the air raids, and went to stay with a very old professor who lived by himself in the country.
That's all he wrote at the time, but, several years later, he returned to the story. The children (now named Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy) found their way into another world -- a land he would eventually call Narnia. As Jack wrote, more pictures came into his mind: one was of "a queen on a sledge"; the other was of "a magnificent lion." He wasn't sure for some time what the story was about. "But then," as he later put it, "suddenly Aslan came bounding in . . . I don't know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once he was there, he pulled the whole story together."
As a boy, C.S. Lewis (or as he was always known to his friends, "Jack") had always drawn pictures for the stories he wrote. So when The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe was to be published, he did consider illustrating it himself, but eventually decided to use a professional artist. Pauline Baynes, a young illustrator then in her mid-twenties, had recently illustrated J.R.R. Tolkien's latest book, Farmer Giles of Ham, and Jack thought she might be just the person to cope with the variety of creatures and people in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.
Although Jack had not given much thought to the way the illustrations would look, he had envisaged something rather grand. Pauline Baynes once said candidly, "If he'd had his way, they would have been full-colour plates by Arthur Rackham." It turned out that Pauline was to draw hundreds of wonderfully detailed black-and-white line drawings for the seven Chronicles of Narnia. In 1998 she added colour to every one of the approximately 350 original drawings, and these are the illustrations you see here today.
The relationship between Jack's stories and Pauline's illustrations was so successful that, right from the beginning, the words and pictures seemed to belong together. C.S. Lewis did send Pauline a sketch of what a Dufflepud should look like, but his descriptions of creatures and places were so detailed that she rarely had to refer to him for advice. When Pauline asked him how to draw a Marsh-wiggle, he replied, "Draw him however you like." She did, following Jack's description in the story, and that's how he's looked ever since!
Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country, but for most of us it is only an imaginary country. Edmund and Lucy were luckier than other people in that respect. Their secret country was real. They had already visited it twice; not in a game or a dream but in reality. They had got there of course by Magic, which is the only way of getting to Narnia. And a promise, or very nearly a promise, had been made them in Narnia itself that they would some day get back ...
Just as Lucy steps into the enchanted and frozen world of Narnia in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, so will you be drawn into this world, where a witch decrees eternal winter; where there are more talking animals than people; and where battles are fought by Centaurs, Giants, and Fauns.
"Out of the trees wild people stepped forth, gods and goddesses of the wood; with them came Fauns and Satyrs and Dwarfs. Out of the river rose the river god with his Naiad daughters. And all these and all the beasts and birds in their different voices, low or high or thick or clear, replied:
"Hail Aslan."
C.S. Lewis once wrote that the idea for the Narnia books came to him from images: "a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen in a sledge, a magnificent lion." From these mental pictures he created the Land of Narnia, a land populated with a rich diversity of beings, some very like their counterparts in our world, some derived from his knowledge and love of myth and fairy tale, and some, like Puddleglum, purely his own invention.
HERE YOU CAN MEET THEM ALL
|
