Laura Miller

by The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

  In his legendarium, Tolkien transformed these beings into the noble, ethereal elves who are migrating out of Middle-earth throughout The Lord of the Rings. (He conceived of his elves as a real historical race, of which Celtic myths and legends are a fanciful, degraded memory.) But in folklore, the Otherworld was never entirely detached from this one; it was like an alternate Britain, a different layer of reality, often contiguous with our own and occasionally accessible at certain points of convergence: a rabbit hole, perhaps, or a mirror, or a wardrobe.

  Sometimes the Otherworld was said to be underground, its entrances in the barrows and other prehistoric sites that dotted the countryside. Most of these legends probably arose from attempts to explain how the ruins got there in the first place and from ancient rumors of the people who preceded the Celts. The stone spearheads found near their old haunts were called “elf-shot,” and the fairies were reputed to fear cold iron, possibly a memory of Stone Age natives subsiding before better-armed invaders. According to the peculiar mythology of Ireland, the land was home to a succession of five different “races” (some human, some giants, some much like gods) before the ancestors of the present occupants arrived.

  The closest relation to the Sidhe in the Chronicles is the Lady of the Green Kirtle in The Silver Chair. Her dress is the same color as both the Queen of Elfland’s gown and the sash worn by the Green Knight, who, acting under the secret orders of Morgan Le Fay (whose surname means “the fairy”) tests Sir Gawain’s honor. The Lady of the Green Kirtle abducts Prince Rilian from Narnia and carries him off to her underground kingdom, where she detains him by enchantment, a typical act of fairy mischief. She is also a shape-shifter, specifically a lamia (a monster originating in Greek mythology), a child-devouring serpent that can transform itself into a beautiful woman. The Lady of the Green Kirtle is called a witch, but in many old tales the figures we now know as witches were originally described as fairies. She seems fair, but plays foul, tricking Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum into seeking shelter with the giants of Harfang, who intend to eat them at their Autumn Feast.

  If The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the most medieval of the Chronicles, The Silver Chair has the most in common with traditional fairy tales. It shares their primal preoccupations with giants, kidnapping, and the prospect of being devoured, anxieties that are, if not peculiar to small children, then at least the most intense in them. Rereading the scenes at Harfang, where the giants are among the few characters in any of the seven books to treat the child characters like children, I was reminded of the time my three-year-old friend Corinne looked at me appraisingly and announced, “I don’t think you’ll eat me.” Until then, it hadn’t occurred to me just how menacing the world must sometimes look from her perspective or that I myself might constitute a kind of giant.

  The Lady of the Green Kirtle does differ from traditional fairies in her imperial ambitions; she plans to conquer Narnia with her army of enslaved gnomes and to install Rilian as a puppet monarch. Why she should need to do this when he is already the rightful heir to the throne is never explained, and it would be more fairylike of her to simply capture the prince on a whim, much as a human being would decide to keep a caged bird as a pet. This is how the capricious “gentleman with the thistledown hair” in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell collects certain choice Londoners, exceptionally attractive human specimens whom he forces to attend exhausting nightly balls at his decrepit castle. The rest of humanity doesn’t interest him much. The Lady of the Green Kirtle is deliberately, rather than incidentally, wicked. A Narnian dwarf, upon learning of the lady’s scheme, pronounces her “doubtless the same kind as that White Witch… . those Northern Witches always mean the same thing, but in every age they have a different plan for getting it.”

  In truth, the White Witch — either how she first appears, as a variation on Hans Christian Andersen’s Scandinavian Snow Queen in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or as the vaguely Babylonian Empress Jadis in The Magician’s Nephew — seems at best a remote relative of the Lady of the Green Kirtle, who is so entirely British. To the Green Witch, Lewis gives the most persuasive argument against faith in all the Chronicles, making her the mouthpiece of both his own youthful skepticism and the materialist beliefs held by the modernist contingent at Oxford. Though she is less overtly menacing than Jadis, this makes her a much more dangerous figure.

  Realizing that the children and Puddleglum have broken her spell over the prince, the lady casts a drugged powder into the fireplace, strums a mandolin, and commences to argue away not only their god, but the entire aboveground world: “You have seen lamps, and so you imagined a bigger and better lamp and called it the sun. You’ve seen cats, and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it’s to be called a lion. Well, ’tis a pretty make-believe… . Look how you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world.”

  The heroes are saved when Puddleglum stamps out the fire, cutting the incense with the pronounced smell of “burnt Marsh-wiggle.” He announces that the witch may very well be right, but so what? “Four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.”

  The Marsh-wiggle’s defiance affected me profoundly as a child — not as a defense of theism, of course, but as a defense of fairy tales; I agreed that sometimes make-believe really did lick real life. As an argument for religion, however, Puddleglum’s speech is feeble; he is saying, in effect, I don’t know whether what I believe is true, but I’d rather live in a world where it is than in a world where it isn’t, so I’m going to believe it whatever the evidence to the contrary. This is a variation on Lewis’s “argument from Joy,” the assertion that the human hunger for God is enough to demonstrate that God really does exist; if you want it enough, it’s as good as true. You might as well decide that you prefer the medieval universe to the Newtonian one, and adjust the physics textbooks accordingly.

  Like the Green Lady’s underground kingdom, the medieval universe had its ceiling, its (false) limits. Did Lewis ever feel that he was running around in circles? He shared my attraction to “twilight” and “undiscovered byways,” wayward forces that eluded the moral polarities of the great monotheistic religions born in the Middle East. But to admit such things into his picture of the world would undermine the very quality that made that picture so comforting: its comprehensive, celestial harmony. Fairies, neither angels nor men, neither good nor evil, have no place in God’s plan. That is the real source of their appeal and their threat, and the reason why fundamentalists object to witches, wizards, and other occult elements in children’s books. It’s not that these figures lure readers to Satanism, but that they introduce the possibility that God and Satan are not your only options. Whether or not you believe in fairies, they stand for that choice, for the third road.

  Lewis certainly felt the appeal of such figures, the imaginary companions of his boyhood’s secret life and the native spirits of his homeland, so much more captivating than men in sandals and robes. Perhaps he felt sometimes that his own trumpeted faith was a bit claustrophobic. Otherwise, why include a whole chapter on the Longaevi in The Discarded Image, and why characterize them as a source of relief? Lewis’s delight in the subject is evident in the reading of that chapter, but his own enthusiasm may also have troubled him a little. When he wrote a fairy into the Chronicles, she had to be made to embody all the most perilous spiritual traps — sensuality, the dominance of the female, materialism, pride.

  But even the Green Witch’s subterranean kingdom has its own otherworld, an alternate reality, a third road. It is the “Really Deep Land,” known to the gnomes as Bism. When Rilian kills the witch, the floor of her kingdom cracks open, and the way to Bism is revealed. This, as the gnome Golg explains, is the true homeland of the Green Witch’s former slaves, and our heroes snatch a glimpse from the brink of the chasm:

  They could make out a river of fire, and, on the banks of that river, what seemed to b
e fields and groves of an unbearable, hot brilliance — though they were dim compared to the river. There were blues, reds, greens and whites all jumbled together: a very good stained-glass window with the tropical sun staring straight through it at midday might have something of the same effect… . “Yes,” said Golg, “I have heard of those little scratches in the crust that you Topdwellers call mines. But that’s where you get dead gold, dead silver, dead gems. Down in Bism we have them alive and growing. There I’ll pick you bunches of rubies that you can eat and squeeze you a cupful of diamond juice.”

  In Bism, salamanders, “too white-hot to look at,” swim in the fire river and talk to the gnomes. They are “wonderfully clever with their tongues: very witty and eloquent.” The prince and Eustace can barely restrain themselves from accepting the gnome’s invitation to adventure there (at this moment, Eustace recalls the example of Reepicheep), but duty to Narnia restrains them, as it does Caspian at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. “I fear it must be so,” says Rilian, when he agrees to return to the overworld. “But I have left half my heart in the land of Bism.”

  So did I, and so, I believe, did Lewis. Bism remains one of Narnia’s tantalizing loose threads, the dozen or so untold stories that he alludes to from time to time. How did Doctor Cornelius obtain Queen Susan’s horn? How did the Lone Islands become a Narnian protectorate? Why was the star Coriakin demoted to mere magician status and why does he hang, in his hallway, a little mirror with hair on the top and a beard on the bottom? How did Fair Olvin turn the giant Pire to stone? And so on. These hints are part of what creates the impression that Narnia, as Neil Gaiman puts it, is “an infinite number of stories waiting to happen.” It is permeable and fluid, a realm where anything might occur.

  Narnia is itself, of course, a vision of Faerie, as evidenced in the way Narnian time passes differently from the time of our world. Like Faerie, it mostly consists of a great forest. Where the imagery of the Bible is Mediterranean — vineyards, roads, and villages — the landscape of Narnia is northern, thick with trees. The wilderness of the Middle East is the desert, an empty, harsh, barren place; trees there are few and carefully nurtured, the obedient bearers of figs and olives. In northern Europe the wild is woods; the very world itself, according to Norse mythology, is a tree: Yggdrasil, the World Ash. There, the uncivilized world is not empty but full, populated by any number of strange creatures and people going about their unfathomable, ancient business. The biblical wilderness offers little more than death and deprivation; the tribes of Israel wandered there, their lives and history in suspension. But the British wilderness is where stories begin, where the old gods live, where young men go to seek their fortunes, where nature and humanity resume a long and exciting conversation.

  “Wildness” is what Lewis names the welcome note that fairies introduce to the medieval universe, and “wild” is a word to conjure with in Narnia. Aslan, we’re repeatedly told, is “not a tame lion,” the music the fauns play is wild, and so are the red dwarves and everything else Narnian that the Telmarines are at war with at the beginning of Prince Caspian. Wildness is Bacchus and his rampaging girl followers, so joyful, so untrammeled, and ultimately so enticing that Lewis knew he’d gotten carried away and felt obliged to have Susan nervously remind his readers (and possibly himself) that they aren’t very safe.

  This is not the real wildness of, say, the backcountry of California’s Sierra Nevada, the woods of my own girlhood, beautiful but vast, harsh, and inhospitable; that is not wildness but wilderness. Lewis never set foot in such a place. Narnia’s wildness is the wildness of Rostrevor Forest, where I got lost in the fog on one miserable and eventually rainy afternoon. I tramped around in soggy circles before I finally found my way out, but at no point was I as truly frightened as I would have been if I were in Yosemite. I knew that the woods were so small that if I walked long enough I’d come to the edge. I would meet neither bears nor mountain lions; large predators vanished along with all the substantial forests in England many centuries ago. You can die in the wilderness where I come from; hikers do all the time. In Britain, you might catch a bad cold.

  But the wildness of Lewis’s Britain is no less vivid for being notional and poetic. It is an idea about the natural world, not nature itself, the product of the Britons’ long, interpenetrating relationship with their environment. The people got into the land — draining it, plowing it, shaping it, tending the woods almost as diligently as they tended the fields — and the land got into the people. The memory of the lost forest is all the more potent because it is a memory and has graduated into the realm of myth. It has become the emblem of the oldest of the old religions, which, as every Briton knows, worshipped the trees. So, in Puck of Pook’s Hill, a book in which the eponymous fairy acquaints two children with England’s historical roots, Rudyard Kipling includes a song:

  Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,

  Or he would call it a sin;

  But — we have been out in the woods all night,

  A-conjuring Summer in!

  And we bring you news by word of mouth —

  Good news for cattle and corn —

  Now is the Sun come up from the South,

  With Oak and Ash and Thorn!

  Ostensibly, Lewis chose the priest in this standoff, but he was a great fan of Puck of Pook’s Hill, too. Half his heart, and much of Narnia, would always belong to the woods and the road that runs through them.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  A Formula of Power over Living Men

  Stories leave themselves open to a much wider spectrum of interpretation than theology does. As the Iranian academic and writer Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, once observed, “Stories are wayward. They never remain within the control even of their own creators.” This is a problem for the orthodox, but Lewis felt that certain important truths could be fully communicated only via stories. What was captured, or was meant to be captured, was ineffable. “To be stories at all,” Lewis wrote, “they must be series of events; but it must be understood that this series — the plot, as we call it — is only really a net whereby to catch something else. The real theme may be, and perhaps usually is, something that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like [a] state or quality.”

  Everyone is available, is susceptible, to the spell of story. That is one reason critics have generally found it unworthy of study; Lewis observed that the more story predominates in a book, the less intellectuals think of it. The appetite for and appreciation of story requires no training or cultivation; it is a common denominator lower even than titillating descriptions of sex, because children are usually not very interested in those. But it is potent. The word “spell,” as Tolkien mentions in his essay “On Fairy Stories,” once meant “both a story told, and a formula of power over living men.” Where does this power come from and what is it made of? Tolkien thought that to ask this question was to speculate about the very origins of language and the mind.

  Not long ago, I heard an ornithologist on the radio, explaining that for birds, singing is a learned behavior. Young larks, for example, listen to adult larks sing and then practice until they perfect the skill. The scientist then played recordings of two birds singing to illustrate his point. The mature lark ran confidently through a succession of repeating, fully developed motifs, while the youngster’s song skittered around, jumbling together fragments of different songs in patterns that didn’t resolve. The ornithologist called this “babbling,” and to illustrate his point further, he played a recording of his own eighteen-month-old daughter babbling in baby talk, that is, making sounds that approximated language without quite being language. Human children, it seems, learn to speak in much the same way that birds learn to sing. The ornithologist’s daughter rattled off a series of nonsense syllables, mimicking the inflections of adult speech, occasionally tossing in familiar phrases from nursery rhymes: “Wee, wee, wee, all the way home.”

  When my friends Desmond and C
orinne were learning to talk, they too went through a babbling phase. Corinne is a particularly canny impressionist, and before she could command many useful real words, she would fix a nearby adult with a confiding look and chatter in her pretend language, perfectly reproducing the cadences of real conversation. Eventually, after she acquired more words, she and her brother learned how to use and arrange them properly: “this” for an object close at hand; “that” for the thing on the other side of the room you want the grown-up to bring to you. For a while, they both stopped answering yes-or-no questions with a “yes” or a “no” and responded only in full sentences: “Did you like the circus?” “I did.” “Is the Cat in the Hat making a mess?” “He is!” It was as if, having finally sussed out a few of the occult powers of grammar, they wanted to exercise them as often as possible.

  Now that the twins are three, they seem to be practicing another kind of grammar. Just as they absorb the words they hear every day and learn to make sense of the patterns they form, so they are soaking up stories. Corinne has begun to spin out what I think of as story babble, buttonholing sympathetic adults à la Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, and treating them to endless, rambling narratives that all seem to run together into a single infinite saga. (Since Corinne’s nickname is Nini, her parents call this epic the Niniad.) Her characters are lifted from Beatrix Potter and Dr. Seuss, from the people and animals in her world and from the figures that populate the imaginary life she has built with her brother. At present, these characters don’t do much more than eat, hide, and throw things out the window, but every so often, a shard of fully formed story language pops into the narrative. A turtle and a tadpole will be engaged in a perpetual cycle of looking for food and dodging the predatory “big fish” when suddenly “the moon came up and shone on the quiet fields of snow and they got into their warm, soft beds and fell fast asleep.”