What makes narnia a fantasy

To help the children with the task Aslan gives them certain signs to look for, all of which the children miss—except the last one. A Marsh-wiggle is tall and thin, with webbed feet, and takes a very serious view of life. And The Silver Chair is the most amusing, entertaining, and perhaps philosophical of all the tales. Once more Aslan calls Scrubb and Pole to Narnia, this time not to save the country but to fight in its last battle.

King Tirian and his companions die along with Narnia. But at death they find themselves in a land of bright sunshine, green grass, and blue sky. Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands—dead. How does he accomplish this in Narnia? And what does Narnia offer children? I must emphasize, as Lewis does, that his books were written for adults as well as children.

Perhaps it would be better to say that Lewis wrote Narnia for the childlike. Not all children will like Narnia, since not all like fairy tales or fantasies.

Some people, like Lewis himself or Tolkien or me, may gravitate to fantasy in adulthood. Lewis understood that there were as many different types of child readers as adult readers. I think parents should read fairy tales to their children.

That genre requires, at least initially, oral, rather than silent, reading. The excitement comes from hearing the story, as though it were happening at that instant.

Also, the author must touch something within a child, so that the two separate personalities understand one another. Sympathy was instantaneous. Neither of us thought it was funny. We both knew that prunes are far too nasty to be funny.

That is the proper meeting between man and child as independent personalities. Lewis wrote for children because he had a story to tell. It seemed to him that most of the adult reading population was more interested in psychological characterization than in a ripping good tale, while children still were able to enjoy a story.

Educational and moral, as well as commercial, motives may come in. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion.

Writing for children brings necessary restrictions on vocabulary, reflective passages, digressions, and descriptions of erotic love. And Lewis tried to write chapters of equal length for convenience in reading aloud. Those limitations paradoxically provided Lewis the right amount of freedom to create a world that the reader can see and smell and almost touch. There are no wasted words or chapters or ideas. Form and content meld into a compact, artistic unity.

Lewis did not think it wrong for a story to contain a moral; all his do. But he did think it wrong to put in morals as medicine. If a writer wants a moral in his story, he should include one he needs. That gives some immediacy. Even so, Lewis thought starting with didacticism was sure to produce a bad moral as well as a bad story. In letters and essays Lewis wrote much about the requirements of good writing, no matter what the form.

Write for the ear, not the eye. Use simple, straightforward language. Describe a situation or an emotion. Read as many good books as possible, but avoid nearly all magazines the one the reader now has in hand is, of course, an exception. And always write about what interests you. Following the last suggestion an author will never write down to anyone but will find those universal interests or dislikes, as with prunes that bridge the gap between the author, the printed page, and the reader.

That is particularly important when the author is an adult and the reader a child. Lewis certainly follows his own advice in the Narnia tales. Though the simple vocabulary under less talented hands would sound stilted, he manages to explain situations and describe scenes clearly and vividly. That small detail is a contact point between the reader and the writer. Each of us remembers rainy days and dead bugs, and that simple sentence conveys well how empty the room is. Lewis uses the technique repeatedly.

Lucy opens the wardrobe and two mothballs drop out. The dialogue, too, flows naturally. The children get tired and cranky, and the older ones lord it over the younger ones. Lewis spends a lot of time talking about such basics as food and drink. Narnians celebrate victories with sumptuous feasts. But during wars, food and water are scarce.

What type of fantasy would Narnia be? Surely most of the narrative takes place in Narnia which is a secondary world but since the main characters basically live in the primary world it can be considered an 'intrusion'. As pointed out in the comments to this question, there can't be a definitive answer because genres are a fluid thing. I wasn't aware that some commentators regard the idea of a link between the real world and the magical one as archetypal of high fantasy, and I'm not sure why,as for me at least, the distinction between high and low is about the dichotomy between a focus on heroism or realism, either of which can be present regardless of a real world link.

I would say that the difference between high and low fantasy is tonal. High Fantasy takes its inspirations from the historical epics, by way of Tolkien, which of course drew on classical literature heavily for many of its tropes.

Low fantasy is more gritty, and in some sense a response to the limitations of the kind of stories that can be told in the high fantasy mould. The two genres are not entirely distinct and some works may have elements of both. Lewis was writing at the time of Tolkien, and was in fact friends with him, so it would not be surprising if there were some stylistic similarities.

I would argue that Narnia is in fact high fantasy because. Using your definition, the Chronicles of Narnia does technically straddle the line. However, the vast majority of each story takes place in the secondary world. With the exception of The Horse and His Boy , each novel does have some sort of magical intrusion into the real world. In most cases this is minor: in some it's more significant Jadis' actions while on Earth in The Magician's Nephew ; the scaring off of the bullies at the end of The Silver Chair , but never to an extent that it alters the history we know.

Travers' Mary Poppins books are another excellent example, where we follow the impact of a magical person on our world. And, as long as I'm talking about old children's books, I have to point out again that Dodie Smith's sequel to Dalmatians , The Starlight Barking , which may also be low fantasy in effect , but might also be categorized as science fiction, of all things. Sign up to join this community. If he wanted fauns he put fauns in. If he wanted Santa Claus—well, here comes Santa Claus!

As sloppy as it is, people—myself included—believe in it utterly. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom as it stands among fantasy writers today—which is that you have to be very, very careful. People talk a lot about the ecology of [George R. What are the climate patterns?

How does it function as an ecosphere? You have to think about the economy, too—have I got a working feudal model? This is the school of thought that extends from Tolkien, and his scrupulously-crafted Middle Earth. Lewis was of a different school from that. Magic, to him, was a much wilder, stranger thing. It was much less domesticated. Maybe we want to worry less about thermodynamics and work harder to get that sense of wonder he achieves with such apparent effortlessness.

And then, there are things that he does that are simply not replicable. In some ways, you read Lewis and think: I can learn from this guy. To me, it looked like an ordinary lamppost. I would not have seen that lamppost, and gone home and to write The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. You had to be Lewis to see it for what it was. It was her senior year, and she was on her way to her final exams, which were oral exams.

As one does, she stopped into a pub to have a pint and stiffen her resolve. There was this old guy at the other end of the bar. Well, up until that point in her life, my mom had never had any brandy. And the guy at the bar, of course, was C. He bought her a brandy. She drank it. And she claims to have no memory of anything else that happened that day. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic.