Iconic British Fantasy: Narnia And Middle-Earth
Light, Christianity, magic vs power, rings and darkness
“My Dear Lucy,
I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say but I shall still beyour affectionate Godfather,
C. S. Lewis”
— dedication to LLW
“You can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in.”
― Arlo Guthrie
PART ONE
When I first read the Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956) by C.S. Lewis in the 1970s I began with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) where the young children — Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy Pevensie — who have been evacuated from London in 1940 and are staying with Professor Digory Kirke, discover the magical world of Narnia through that portal in the wonderous wardrobe.
Lucy is the first here to discover the secret of another world connected to the wardrobe…
