Symbols

Today I finished The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and moved on to Prince Caspian. It's been entertaining so far. It's obviously a story for children, and told in the tone of a story teller, as if C.S. Lewis himself were speaking to you.

It's also quite obviously a morality tale of some sort. If I didn't already know that C.S. Lewis wrote about Christian ideas, even in his fiction, it would be easy to determine from these books. The parallels are striking, and he draws from European legends as well, particularly Norse and Greek. We have such Norse elements as the bitterly cruel winter, the White Witch, sledges, reindeer, dwarves, and so forth. We also have such decidedly Christian elements as a lion (the Lion of Judah, and St. Mark the Evangelist), eagles (St. John the Evangelist), a bull with a man's head (St. Luke the Evangelist), and humans (St. Matthew the Evangelist), the last being explicitly referred to as the Sons of Adam and the Daughters of Eve. There's enough symbolism to make your head spin.

And then we come to Aslan himself. Supposedly Steinbeck's The Old Man and the Sea included a Christ figure in the form of Santiago, the old fisherman. Please! Aslan is a Christ figure if there ever was one. His actions parallel the Passion and the Rapture. All the fisherman did was cut his hands on his fishing net.

Despite the fact that the Chronicles of Narnia was written for younger readers, I have the idea I'm going to enjoy it immensely.