“It’s – it’s a magic wardrobe. There’s a wood inside it, and it’s snowing, and there’s a Faun and a Witch and it’s called Narnia; come and see.”
Lucy, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
At the start of the Chronicles of Narnia, Lucy steps into an apparently ordinary object and finds herself in a wonderful world – a world full of wonder and full of wonders. “Come and see,” she tells the others when she returns.
Again and again in the Chronicles, we see the same pattern: the ordinary opens out onto the extraordinary. At the end of Prince Caspian, Aslan sets up what appears to be “a doorway from nowhere into nowhere,” except, in fact, it leads the children to “an island in the Pacific” and then onto “a platform in a country station” in England. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, it is a picture on the wall in Eustace’s house through which the children enter Narnia, while the door to another world in The Silver Chair was set into “a high stone wall” in the grounds of Experiment House, the terrible school Eustace and Jill attend.
The route from the ordinary to the extraordinary changes in The Horse and His Boy and The Magician’s Nephew. In the former, Shasta “could see nothing but a grassy slope running up to a level ridge and beyond that the sky with perhaps a few birds in it.” However, like Lewis himself in his youth, Shasta knew that the North held some great secret: he “thought that beyond the hill there must be some delightful secret which his father wished to hide from him.” Later, he discovers that the way to the North lies through another kind of opening:
“He that would find that way,” [a wise Raven says], “must start from the Tombs of the Ancient Kings and ride northwest so that the double peak of Mount Pire is always straight ahead of him.”
In The Magician’s Nephew, Polly is tricked into touching Uncle Andrew’s ring, which takes her to the Wood between the Worlds, but there she and Digory discover the pools that are portals to other worlds.
So what’s going on here? Why are there gateways to wonder in each of the chronicles? The answer comes in the final book, The Last Battle, in which the stable door leads those who love Aslan to the new Narnia:
“It seems, then,” said Tirian, smiling to himself, “that the stable seen from within and the stable seen from without are two different places.”
“Yes,” said the Lord Digory. “Its inside is bigger than its outside.”
“Yes,” said Queen Lucy. “In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.” It was the first time she had spoken, and from the thrill in her voice, Tirian now knew why. She was drinking everything in even more deeply than the others. She had been too happy to speak.
Lucy’s discovery of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was no accident. Rather, it was a sign of a greater truth. What is inside – He who is inside – is greater than what is outside, and we can follow if we choose.
So, in these posts, I will be inviting you to join me on a series of journeys into the wardrobe and beyond. I will be exploring each of the stories in turn, asking (and, I hope, answering) a whole load of questions as I go. Those questions will take us further up and further in.
They will, for example, take us into some of Lewis’s other wonderful books, because the Chronicles of Narnia shouldn’t be seen in isolation. By looking at Surprised by Joy & That Hideous Strength, Mere Christianity & The Abolition of Man, The Discarded Image & Out of the Silent Planet, Spenser’s Images of Life & The Great Divorce, Studies in Words &The Four Loves, A Preface to Paradise Lost & Perelandra, The Oxford History of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century & The World’s Last Night, we shall see that there is always a great deal more to the Chronicles of Narnia than meets the eye.
I’m hoping that, ultimately, these posts may form the basis of a book, so I very much hope that you will help me along the way by asking questions, making suggestions, and pulling me up short if I go off track. Any help would be most gratefully received!
But because this work may turn into a book, I’m also going to have to take sensible precautions. The first few posts will appear on this Substack as normal, but then I’m going to move all the Narnia posts to a new Substack, Into and Beyond the Wardrobe: the Worlds of C. S. Lewis. Some of those posts will be free to view but I’m also going to offer a (reasonably priced) paid option for those who want to explore ideas further. Rather than share all this work for free on the internet and so scupper my book before it’s written, I’d rather keep some of it back for anyone who’s really keen to dive deeper into Lewis’s wonderful books. I very much hope you’ll join me!