Why Did C.S. Lewis Write Narnia?

By Rowan Williams | Mar 08, 2013 - PW

Concealed religious doctrine or old fashioned storytelling? Rowan Williams, author of The Lion's World: A Journey Into the Heart of Narnia, picks apart the legendary children's series.

Below is an excerpt of the book's introduction.

Not every reader has been charmed by C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, and the recent release of high-earning film versions of several of the books has renewed the controversy. Critics of Christian faith have been predictably vocal--though their comments often suggest at best a superficial reading of the books. But even among Christian readers, the reaction has not always been friendly. Notoriously, Lewis’s friend, J. R. R. Tolkien, found them intolerable. He hated the random mixture of mythologies (classical Fauns and Dryads, Northern European giants and dwarfs, and, to add insult to injury, Father Christmas) and the failure, as he saw it, to create the kind of fully coherent imaginative world that he had spent his energies on for so long.

Narnia is a very long way from Tolkien’s Middle Earth. And Lewis seems to have had little or no interest in filling out the details in the way Tolkien--or Terry Pratchett--loves to do. He pays no attention to questions of what language his imagined people speak (Narnians and their neighbours in Calormen do not seem to need interpreters). He spends little time in elaborating details of culture or tradition (the Calormenes are taken over almost wholesale from the Arabian Nights, or so it seems at first; there are some qualifying factors, as we shall see). Very occasionally, as at the end of The Horse, there is reference to this or that episode of semi-legendary Narnian history, but these are casual moments. Lewis wants only to create a brief illusion of some extra dimension. And, as at least one reported conversation shows, he was blithely indifferent to breaches of internal consistency in the stories. His good friend, the poet Ruth Pitter, challenged him about how the Beaver family in The Lion manage to produce potatoes for their meal with the children, given the wintry conditions that had prevailed for most of living memory; not to mention oranges, sugar and suet for the marmalade roll . . . Tolkien, one suspects, would have produced an appendix on the history and architecture of greenhouses in Narnia. But this is not Lewis’s way. Some have impatiently concluded that he is not taking seriously enough the job of creating an alternative world – and thus of being too preoccupied with writing a piece of apologetic.

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Reprinted from The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia by Rowan Williams with permission from Oxford University Press USA. Copyright © 2013 by Rowan Williams.