Zoe Sandvig, Cracking the Narnia Code

From time to time, another scholar arrives on the scene claiming to have cracked the code to Lewis’ Narnia. Try these on for size. Narnia is an abbreviation of Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. No, it represents the seven Catholic sacraments. Or how about the seven deadly sins?

Others say that there is no coherent connectivity between the books. J.R.R. Tolkien, one of Lewis’ closest friends, claimed that Lewis must have been imaginatively confused while writing the series. In contrast to Tolkien’s intricately developed Lord of the Rings trilogy, Narnia seems like a mish-mash of folklore and Arthurian legend. In particular, many have criticized the appearance of Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as tacky.

Enter Cambridge scholar Michael Ward claiming to have found a key to a code, like everyone else.

I believe him.

I just don’t know how it could have taken 50 years to crack it. Maybe, because you’d have to have to know a little something about medieval mythology, and that’s one subject most of us never signed up for in college.

In his 2008 release Planet Narnia, Ward claims that Lewis’ “imaginative strategy” for Narnia was the medieval concept of the seven planets. After all, Lewis was a medieval scholar.

For Lewis, though the concept of the planets as gods and goddesses is false, it didn’t keep him from appealing to its conceptual beauty. As a Christian, he believed that there were plenty of valuable things in paganism, if not taken as a whole. For him, “ideas could be entertained for their beauty, not just their truth.”

In medieval thought, planets were not far-off orbs rotating around the sun; they were like gods endowed with personalities, passions, likes and dislikes: Luna the “drizzling glamour,” Mercury with “skilled eagerness,” Venus the “beautiful and amorous,” Sol the “clear and cloudless,” Mars the “cold and strong,” Jupiter the “jovial and kingly,” and Saturn the “old and ugly.” (They hadn’t discovered Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto yet, and I guess they counted the sun and moon as planets back then.) To Lewis, the planets were spiritual symbols with permanent value.

Each of the Chronicles, Ward claims, takes on the disposition of one of the planets, not as an obvious move on Lewis’ part, but almost like a secret game he was playing with himself. He did not intend for readers to know that Saturn weaves throughout The Last Battle or Mercury throughout The Horse and His Boy. Rather, it was his personal template.

 Space, and the fact that I read just the first three chapters, only allows me to dig into one of the planets and its corresponding Chronicle, so Jupiter and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe it will be.

Lewis’ poem “The Planets” could be considered the key to cracking the code. Here’s how the poem describes Jupiter, also known as Jove:

 
Of wrath ended

And woes mended, of winter passed

And guilt forgiven, and good fortune

Jove is master; and of jocund revel,

Laughter of ladies. The lion-hearted,

The myriad-minded, men like the gods,

Helps and heroes, helms of nations

Just and gentle, are Jove’s children,

Work his wonders. On his wide forehead

Calm and kingly, no care darkens

Nor wrath wrinkles: but righteous power

And leisure and largess their loose splendours

Have wrapped around him—a rich mantle

Of ease and empire.

Jupiter is the god of kingliness, new life, and heroism. His personality, or Jovial spirit, permeates all of LWW.

Lewis says of Jupiter, “We may say it is Kingly; but we must think of a King at peace, enthroned, taking his leisure, serene. The Jovial character is cheerful, festive, yet temperate, tranquil, magnanimous. When this planet dominates we may expect halcyon days and prosperity.”

If anything in Narnia resembles Jupiter, Aslan as described in the first Chronicle does. He is kingly, he is “lion-hearted,” and he melts winter.

Mr. Beaver tells the four Pevensie children, “When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death, And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.”

When Aslan returns to Narnia, spring arrives. Similarly, when he rises from the dead he breathes new life into the stone statues.

At his death on the stone table, Aslan mends woes and forgives guilt, particularly Edmund’s, who betrayed his siblings to the White Witch. Again, Mr. Beaver explains: “Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight, At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more.”

Then, Aslan’s royalty alights on the four children to turn them into the “helms of nations,” and we get “Peter the Magnificent,” “Susan the Gentle,” “Edmund the Just,” and “Lucy the Valian.” By the way, look back at the poem—justice and gentility are two other distinct traits of joviality.

The Jovial spirit even explains the seemingly superfluous appearance of Father Christmas, who, as Ward explains, is “the Jovial character par excellence, loud-voiced, red-faced, and jolly.”

There are plenty of other Jupiter-esque cues in LWW, down to the fur coats that the Pevensies wear, but you’ll have to pick up your own copy of Planet Narnia to find out.

Oh, and, by the way, the inside of my signed copy reads: “with Jovial regards, from Michael Ward.”

Comments

[Allison]

Oh, that's fantastic! Thanks for letting me know about it...I wrote a senior thesis paper on Lewis in college and was always puzzled about just what was driving his use of the seeminly mis-matched characters, symbols, and figures! I'll have to read this!

[John]

great post! seems like ward makes a pretty good case. i have been looking at his book on amazon, mulling over whether or not i should buy it. i think you made my mind up!

[GL]

Zoe,

I'm back from vacation and now catching up with stuff, including CGO posts. I love what you've done here! And I'm buying the book, too! Thank you. Hope you're having a Narnia like spring in Virginia/DC.

[Aarib]

Michael Ward came and spoke at Hillsdale while I was there--thanks to a Cambridge grad, Lewis/Tolkien obsessed professor in our English department. I was initially skeptical of his claim and thought we had another person trying to jump on the recently en vogue Tolkien & Lewis bandwagon. However, after listening to Ward for about fifteen minutes I thought, "my goodness, I think this guy is completely spot on." I haven't looked at his book--I don't think he had written it at that point--and I can't remember all the details. But it was refreshing to see a serious scholar with something to add to the debate about Lewis's literary qualities. All too often he's dismissed for his "fantasy." But the fact that people are still arguing about "children's books" and a "mere sci-fi series" speaks volumes that critics can't avoid.

[louis]

enthusiasts of Michael Ward's book PLANET NARNIA may be interested to know that this Easter BBC TV are screening a documentary film called THE NARNIA CODE, based on Ward's book. the director is Norman Stone, who also directed the CS Lewis BBC film, SHADOWLANDS.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec/02/cslewis-booksforchildrenandteenagers