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In a column I wrote 12 years ago (“For C. S. Lewis on His 101st,” Analog, November 1999) I mentioned, among several things, how much I like the works of both C. S. Lewis and Robert A. Heinlein, and how those two make up the entire set of My Favorite Authors. In those 12 years I haven’t changed my opinion—they are still the only two authors whose books I know I will return to again and again until the day I die.
It’s true that other writers have produced works that are certain to get a thorough rereading from me. I know I will not make it through the rest of my fifties without reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings again, and the same goes for J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter canon. But in both cases those books constitute one long story. I don’t know if I’ll ever seek out anything else by either of them in the years ahead, whereas returning to Lewis and Heinlein will always be only one whim away from happening over and over again.
In my earlier Lewis column I discussed two essays he’d written, one of which was “On the Reading of Old Books.” In that essay I felt that Lewis had said some important things, about one of which I said this: “Lewis decried the idea common in his, and our, time, that to, say, study Plato, one might best go to a book about what Plato said, rather than to take a good translation of Plato off the shelf and see what the man had to say on his own, unfiltered by others. Lewis makes the point that Plato, by nature of having such a fine mind, is usually much easier to understand than almost any of the people who write the books about what Plato said.”
This very point applies to Lewis. Why read a book about C. S. Lewis or his work when one could read the man himself? It is unlikely that anyone writing about Lewis will be able to write as well as Lewis, let alone display his uncanny wit and clarity of thought. But suppose someone uncovers a secret about C. S. Lewis and his works that Lewis never disclosed, and writes a book (actually, two books) about it? In my case, I risked disappointment and bought them (in Kindle editions).
I’m glad I did. The two books are Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis (ISBN-10: 0195313879) and The Narnia Code: C. S. Lewis and the Secret of the Seven Heavens ( ISBN-10: 1414339658) by Michael Ward. Ward writes very well, and explains the “secret” behind the Narnia tales that he has uncovered both thoroughly and eloquently. Indeed, while reading the books I found myself transported into Narnia, inhaling the atmosphere of the stories and living in them, the same way I do when I revisit the tales themselves.
So what is the secret? Why, it is the answer to the question, as I like to put it: “What is Santa Claus doing in Narnia?”
In that earlier column I pointed this out about the Narnia stories: “This series is often wrongly called an allegory of the Christian gospels. It is not. It is an alternate world fantasy in which Lewis described a redemption story as it might have occurred in a fantasy world called Narnia (and then only in the first volume).” Although Ward’s books discuss the entire “Narniad” (as he calls it), it is the matter of Father Christmas appearing in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (LWW) that the ordinary reader of the stories is most likely to think is a gaffe. So I’ll discuss that apparent problem in detail.
Early in LWW, Narnia is a land in which it is “always winter and never Christmas,” locked into that condition by the evil White Witch. Midway through the tale, Peter, Susan, and Lucy, along with Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, are on their way to the Stone Table to meet the Great Lion Aslan, and on this journey they wake one morning to find Father Christmas greeting them. He gives each of them gifts (which figure prominently later in the story and in several of the other tales) and tells them that Aslan has made it possible for him to finally get into Narnia again. The White Witch’s power is broken.
But, ummm, Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus in our world. When exactly was it that Jesus was born in Narnia? If Aslan is the Christ figure, shouldn’t there be a celebration of the birth of Aslan? But nowhere in any of the stories is there any mention of Jesus being incarnated. There is a sacrifice and resurrection scene in LWW that is evocative of the Easter story, but that involves Aslan. So it seems that, although Narnia had long had winter without Christmas, it does have Christmas (with St. Nick even) without Christ. (Come to think of it, that’s what Christmas is like for most people in our world.)
Narnia is a rather strange fantasy world, as such worlds go. Tolkien found LWW largely unreadable, a hodgepodge of disparate elements all thrown together for no apparent reason other than the author’s whim. Narnia is a world filled with talking animals, creatures from Earthly mythology, werewolves, dragons, stars that manifest as beings, and even assorted gods and goddesses. Narnia itself isn’t even a round world, but a flat one. Even Lewis’s good friend Roger Lancelyn Green (who wrote the wonderful Myths of the Norsemen), who liked the stories very much, thought Father Christmas was best left out and advised Lewis to do so.
Yet, despite having had the problem pointed out, Lewis insisted on keeping Father Christmas in. Despite the stories being (according to Tolkien and others) a hastily written mishmash, they have become classics of children’s literature, read and reread and beloved by millions the world over for more than half a century. How can this be? Adding to the mystery is how Lewis—who according to those who knew him, had a brilliant and highly organized mind, and a passion for logical consistency abundantly evident in his professional and apologetic writings—could have produced an inconsistent mishmash in the first place and been satisfied with it?
Fans have argued that Lewis would have done no such thing, so there must be a plan he had in mind with each of the seven tales. The obvious place to look first is along the Christian allegory angle, but it falls apart in that, at best and with some straining, only three of the stories fit. You can sort of see Easter in LWW, Genesis in The Magician’s Nephew, and Revelation in The Last Battle. But then what are we to make of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader? Some have thought Lewis had no plan other than to put in things both kids and adults liked, that being faeryland elements from faery stories. So even if Father Christmas makes no sense for a Narnia with no Christmas event, the children reading the story exist in our world and they darn well have certain feelings when it comes to Father Christmas and they know what it means when he appears. Still others tried to link the stories to the seven deadly sins or even more far-fetched ideas, but no one ever put forth a convincing “explanation” that was generally accepted.
But Michael Ward thinks he has, at long last, discovered the plan for Narnia and I believe him. The “seven heavens” in the titles of both books are none other than the seven planets of the medieval worldview, and each story evokes the “influence” or “sense” or “atmosphere” of each planet, not as a Twenty-first Century man would understand them, but as a Medieval man would.
One thing that makes me deeply appreciate Ward and his books becomes apparent in the description he gives of how he arrived at his eureka moment and what he did afterward. The version of the account he gives in chapter three of The Narnia Code is the more suited to the general reader.
Ward was not in a bath like Archimedes, but in his bed near midnight. At a time in his life when he was already deeply steeped in Narnia and all things C. S. Lewis, he happened to be reading from a long poem Lewis wrote in 1935, 15 years before he began writing the Narniad. The poem was “The Planets,” which Ward says “is all about how the planets were understood in medieval times, when it was believed there were only seven planets and that they exerted influences over the Earth, affecting people, events, and even the metals in the Earth’s crust.” Ward did a double take while reading a section about Jupiter (or Jove). “Jupiter, according to the poem, influenced the Earth by bringing about:
. . . winter passed
And guilt forgiven.
Those five words leaped off the page at me. I rubbed my eyes. “Winter passed and guilt forgiven?” Ward realized he’d come across those together as two of the main events in LWW. Indeed, the passing of winter is signified by the arrival of Father Christmas.
Looking more closely at the poem, “A suspiciously large amount of the imagery in the poem seemed to link up with the things in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It mentioned kings and the lionhearted and royal robes and rulers who were ‘just and gentle’ (like King Edmund the Just and Queen Susan the Gentle). Could I possibly, after all these years, have stumbled upon Lewis’s secret code?”
He sure did.
Immediately thereafter Ward looked at the rest of the poem and saw how each medieval planet section matched up with the rest of the Narnia stories, “. . . one Chronicle for each planet.” After walking around in a daze for two weeks, he set everything else aside, reread everything Lewis had ever written, wanting to “check and double-check and triple-check this theory,” then spent four years writing the Planet Narnia book (The Narnia Code is just a shorter version more suited to nonscholars).
Those of us who appreciate thorough scholarship are richly rewarded, for by the time Ward is finished there is simply no room left to doubt that LWW represents Jupiter; The Horse and His Boy, Mercury; The Silver Chair (my favorite), the Moon. Ward dives deeply into Lewis’s poetry, non-Narniad fiction, personal history, and academic works to prove his case, and by the end we are reminded not of Archimedes, but Pythagoras, for this is how proving a hypothesis is supposed to be done. Ward makes his case so thoroughly and with such exquisite attention to detail that I will, henceforth, never believe any other explanation than this one.
Lewis loved the medieval worldview, and as he constructed “Planet Narnia” he wanted his readers to breathe in the atmosphere, to be enveloped inside the influence of each of the medieval planets. Thus, we experience the Joviality of a Christmas morning in Wardrobe and Saturnine sadness at the end of Narnia in Last Battle. Michael Ward’s books put us under the influence of Lewis’s eighth medieval planet, Narnia itself. Because of that, his books are the only ones about C. S. Lewis that I can guarantee I’ll read again.
Copyright © 2011 Jeffery D. Kooistra
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