Narnia: Magic and Allegory

I remember the first time I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and how completely it took hold of me. It was, technically, the first of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories that I ever encountered, whatever later decisions were made to reorder the series. At the time, none of that mattered. What mattered was the wardrobe.

The idea that something so ordinary, a battered piece of furniture, standing quietly in a spare room,could conceal an entire world thrilled me beyond belief. I didn’t read the book looking for allegory or meaning. I read it with the wide-eyed hunger of someone who desperately wanted magic to be possible, who wanted wonder to exist just beyond the thin surface of the everyday. Narnia felt like a promise: that adventure might be closer than we think, that all it might take is the courage to step through the coats and into the snow

Even two years later, when I reread the book, that magic hadn’t faded. If anything, it had settled deeper. I still didn’t see,or perhaps didn’t want to see,the heavy Christian symbolism that so many people now associate with the story. The fantasy was enough. Talking animals, a land locked in endless winter, a great lion who felt both terrifying and kind,these things mattered far more to me than any hidden message.

It wasn’t until much later that the Christian framework became impossible to ignore. Reading it as an older reader, the parallels began to line themselves up whether I liked it or not. Aslan’s sacrifice on the Stone Table at the hands of the White Witch clearly mirrors the death of Jesus. His resurrection follows the same pattern, clothed in myth but unmistakable once you know where to look. Even his name,Aslan, Turkish for “lion”, suddenly felt less like an exotic flourish and more like a deliberate symbol.

The title Emperor-Over-the-Sea took even longer to resonate. When I first read it, it was just another mysterious phrase, the sort of grand, half-understood authority that fantasy worlds are full of. Years later, I realised it was meant to refer to God. By then, that revelation landed softly rather than sharply, partly because I wasn’t particularly invested in belief anyway. I hadn’t read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a religious text. I had read it because it was interesting, because it was strange, because it was set in a land called Narnia.

Looking back, I think I’m glad I missed the Christian subtext the first time around. Had I noticed it sooner, the overworked message might have put me off entirely. Lewis is subtle at first, but not always gentle, and later readings make that increasingly clear. Naivety, in this case, was a gift. It allowed me to fall in love with the story on its own terms, without feeling preached at or guided toward conclusions I hadn’t asked for.

Despite Lewis later insisting that The Magician’s Nephew should come first, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe will always feel like the true beginning to me. It introduces Narnia not through explanation, but through discovery. It doesn’t tell you what the world means; it invites you inside and lets you decide what to do with it. Even the relationship between Aslan and the Emperor-Over-the-Sea,clearly meant to echo Jesus and God,passed me by at first, and I’m grateful for that. It meant I encountered Aslan not as a symbol, but as a character.

Of all the Narnia books, this is still the one I enjoyed the most. Probably because of my naïveté. Probably because I was young enough to believe in wardrobes as doorways. Probably because the fantasy came first, unburdened by meaning. Even now, long after the symbolism has revealed itself, that initial sense of magic hasn’t entirely left me. Somewhere, I still half-expect that if I push past the coats, I’ll feel snow under my feet and see a lamppost glowing in the dark.