Return to Narnia: part II – The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

This post is part of a series revisiting my favourite childhood reads.

I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe whilst battling a rotten cold and it really was as comforting as I’d hoped. In some ways it’s fitting that I was feeling decidedly under the weather, as the impulse to reread some of my childhood favourites started in 2020 when I was recovering from a bad bout of Covid. My frazzled brain reached for The Secret Garden and it began there.

So what can be said about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that hasn’t been said already? I certainly don’t intend to add any more words to the volumes that have already been written on the book as a Christian allegory. As Katherine Langrish says in her book From Spare Oom to War Drobe. Travels in Narnia with my Nine Year-Old Self:

To read this book and try and keep in mind that Aslan ‘is’ Christ is to flit between two worlds and inhabit neither.

Quite.

Instead, I want to concentrate on how Lewis conjures up the world of Narnia. Children encountering the book for the first time are immediately thrown deep into the heart of the story, Lewis is not one for hanging around, but they are also given concrete details to hold onto. The things I really noticed on this reread were the textures of Narnia, how things feel, how they taste and what they sound like.

Taste

Readers tend to remember the food in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It was published in 1950 when the rationing and deprivation caused by World War Two were still high in the popular consciousness. In fact, it wasn’t until 1953 that sweets, chocolate and sugar finally came off rationing. This is the backdrop to Lewis’s feasts.

Two passages centre on vividly imagined shared meals. When Lucy goes for tea with Mr Tumnus she is promised that ‘there’ll be a roaring fire – and toast – and sardines – and cake.’ She enjoys a nice brown egg ‘lightly boiled’, buttered toast, toast with honey and then a sugar topped cake.

Lucy having tea with Mr Tumnus as illustrated by Pauline Baynes.

Later, all four children sit down for dinner with the Beavers. There they are treated to fried trout, ‘put on the frying-pan and get the dripping hot’, and potatoes, followed by sticky marmalade roll. There is ‘a great big lump of deep yellow butter’ for the potatoes and a jug of creamy milk for the children to drink. These are, in many ways, very ordinary meals which are made to sound completely luxurious.

Dinner with the Beavers - illustrated by Pauline Baynes.

The meals are eaten in cosy rooms, Mr Tumnus has his pictures and books, the Beavers have ‘oilskins and hatchets and pairs of shears and spades and trowels and things for carrying mortar in and fishing-rods and fishing-nets and sacks.’ There’s a lovely linkage of the sharing of good food, home and safety being made in both of these scenes.

Which brings us to Edmund.

Edmund doesn’t enjoy the simple pleasures of eating with the Beavers because he is haunted by the desire for more Turkish Delight.

There’s nothing that spoils the taste of good ordinary food half so much as the memory of magic food.

When he first visits Narnia and meets the White Witch she gives him a drink, ‘It was something he had never tasted before, very sweet and foamy and creamy, and it warmed him right down to his toes’ and the book’s famous Turkish Delight which is described as ‘sweet and light to the very centre’. By the time he meets the Beavers he has forgotten that he ended up feeling sick from eating far too much of it. He will soon be disappointed though, when he reaches the castle all he gets is bread ‘so stale he could hardly get it down’ and water. Readers might reasonably think that is all he deserves.

There are later meals in the book but they are less explicitly described. There’s a ‘fine high tea’ and the great feast which follows the coronation of the children, but by this point in the story Lewis is in wrap-up mode and the plot needs to move along quickly to return the children to the wardrobe and England.

Sound

Lewis uses sound, music and noise in a number of different ways. One of the most evocative passages comes when he describes the thaw, the defeat of winter, in terms of the sounds of water:

All around them though out of sight, there were streams, chattering, murmuring, bubbling, splashing and even (in the distance) roaring.

And in the wood, the birds are singing. Spring has arrived.

Towards the end of the book, water once again adds to the soundscape ‘long miles of blueish-green waves breaking for ever and ever on the beach. And oh, the cry of the sea-gulls!’

There’s music too. Mr Tumnus plays the flute:

‘And the tune he played made Lucy want to cry and laugh and dance and go to sleep all at the same time.’

The dryads and naiads play stringed instruments. At the celebrations following the coronation ‘answering to the music inside, but stranger, sweeter and more piercing, came the music of the sea people.’ Jingling sleigh bells herald the arrival of both the White Witch and Father Christmas.

Some sounds are more threatening.

After that Edmund heard a strange noise – whizz – whizz – whizz. For a moment he couldn’t think what it was. Then he realized. It was the sound of a knife being sharpened.

The sounds of battle include ‘shouts and shrieks and of the clashing of metal against metal’ but perhaps the most chilling sound of all in the book is the great stone table breaking into two pieces:

At that moment they heard from behind them a loud noise – a great cracking, deafening noise as if a giant had broken a giant’s plate.

Later, Lucy and Susan’s ride on Aslan’s back contains a description which rather brilliantly hinges on what it doesn’t sound like as much as what it does sound like.

Have you ever had a gallop on a horse? Think of that; and then take away the heavy noise of the hoofs and the jingle of the bits and imagine instead the almost noiseless padding of the great paws.

Compare this to the cacophony in the courtyard of Cair Paravel when the statues are bought back to life:

Instead of the deadly silence the whole place rang with the sound of happy roarings, brayings, yelpings, barkings, squealings, cooings, neighings, stampings, shouts, hurrahs, songs and laughter.

It’s enough to give you a headache.

Touch

When Lucy first enters the wardrobe it’s the smell and feel of the fur coats that Lewis uses to evoke the scene. The ‘soft folds’ are contrasted with the ‘hard, smooth wood’ of the floor of the wardrobe. As Lucy enters Narnia the coats give way to snow which is ‘soft and powdery and extremely cold’, whilst the trees are hard, rough and prickly. Using the feel of the fur coats is a nice piece of foreshadowing for the most well remembered touch of all. Lucy and Susan, waiting with Aslan before he meets the White Witch at the stone table,

buried their cold hands in the beautiful sea of fur and stroked it.

It’s a perfectly judged moment of deep feeling, in all the senses of the word.

Lewis has a good eye for a telling detail, the little pieces of specificity that bring the world of Narnia to life. Whether it’s buttered toast, bubbling streams or beautifully thick fur, these are the things that make it real for children – and adults too.

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Next month – Return to Narnia: part III – The Horse and his Boy.

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