*Kool-Aid crashing in with my inevitable Narnia opinions even though I haven't re-read the complete series myself since 2009*
I also cannot remember a time that I did not know that the big lion was supposed to be Jesus.
I feel it is telling of my childhood understanding of comparative religion how much of the death and rebirth of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe I accepted as solstitial myth and how few of the Christian implications registered on me until some re-reads later. Obviously I had encountered Christianity because who in this country gets to miss it, but thanks to Lewis' modus operandi of throwing all the mythologies and literary influences that resonated with him into a blender and dumping the results out on the page, the layer of sun-slain-by-winter-rising-after-the-longest-night got there first and was so clear to me: thus if it was supposed to acclimate me to the concept of the Passion, sorry, Jack.
(By the time the Lamb came around in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, however, come on.)
Jill and Eustace and Puddleglum, by contrast, have personality coming out their ears. I cherish every one of them. The dark Arthuriana vibes when they meet the knight and his lady out riding ... the whole haunted sequence underground .... Puddleglum's Big Speech .... this is, was, and will ever be peak Narnia to me.
The Silver Chair was my light-years favorite as a child. It was superseded in adulthood by The Magician's Nephew on account of that book's head-snapping combination of pastiche Nesbit, full-throttle weird fiction, numinous creation myth, and one of the veneers of metafiction it took me decades to look at properly, plus some eerily beautiful images which Lewis intermittently kneecaps with his notion of comic timing. But I continue to love Puddleglum, in other predictable facts about me, and as a child the scenes of Rilian in the Silver Chair upset me incredibly.
the whole 'we came back to a place we used to know and a life we used to have and even as we're remembering the people we used to be there we're realizing it's all fundamentally changed' melancholy of it all.
The deep time of Prince Caspian is one of the parts of that book that has always stayed with me: the Pevensies' realization that Cair Paravel has been ruined a thousand years and they are haunting it like an Arthurian quartet in knee socks. I love also the waking of the trees and the breaking of the river-god's chains, although the last time it came up in conversation asakiyume suggested that the Narnian Dionysiac should have broken back into our world instead of the England-expy of Telmarine Narnia like Jadis in London or Jill and Eustace at Experiment House and I haven't been able to shake that AU.
I expect people will want me to fight me on this though because I know a lot of people have Dawn Treader as their favorite ....
Alas, I love the Lewtonesque island of dreams and the glass-shining eastern sea in which Lucy has her one moment of wordless connection with the sea-girl and the immram style of the whole thing. And although nothing more is ever done with it, I really love the reality check of Edmund's "You were only an ass, but I was a traitor." (I would read your Edmund at the magician's tower stat.) I can take or leave a bunch of the other bits.
Anyway, what I really want now is an AU where Susan does marry out of Narnia sometime in the Golden Age and instead of becoming the One Who Never Comes Back becomes the One Who Never Leaves
I'll read it.
- Last Battle still fills me with secondhand embarrassment
I unironically love the four-armed apparition of Tash even though it does an immense disservice to Assyrian apkallû and the astronomically apocalyptic image of Time squeezing out the red supergiant sun like an orange. Otherwise The Last Battle has always been somewhere from nonsensically confusing to dead to me, it contradicts its own series theologically, and I will kick Lewis in the shins over Emeth if I ever meet him in this life or its supposedly better substitute I don't believe in and actually find rather frightening as an ideal for all the inescapably obvious reasons.
no subject
I also cannot remember a time that I did not know that the big lion was supposed to be Jesus.
I feel it is telling of my childhood understanding of comparative religion how much of the death and rebirth of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe I accepted as solstitial myth and how few of the Christian implications registered on me until some re-reads later. Obviously I had encountered Christianity because who in this country gets to miss it, but thanks to Lewis' modus operandi of throwing all the mythologies and literary influences that resonated with him into a blender and dumping the results out on the page, the layer of sun-slain-by-winter-rising-after-the-longest-night got there first and was so clear to me: thus if it was supposed to acclimate me to the concept of the Passion, sorry, Jack.
(By the time the Lamb came around in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, however, come on.)
Jill and Eustace and Puddleglum, by contrast, have personality coming out their ears. I cherish every one of them. The dark Arthuriana vibes when they meet the knight and his lady out riding ... the whole haunted sequence underground .... Puddleglum's Big Speech .... this is, was, and will ever be peak Narnia to me.
The Silver Chair was my light-years favorite as a child. It was superseded in adulthood by The Magician's Nephew on account of that book's head-snapping combination of pastiche Nesbit, full-throttle weird fiction, numinous creation myth, and one of the veneers of metafiction it took me decades to look at properly, plus some eerily beautiful images which Lewis intermittently kneecaps with his notion of comic timing. But I continue to love Puddleglum, in other predictable facts about me, and as a child the scenes of Rilian in the Silver Chair upset me incredibly.
the whole 'we came back to a place we used to know and a life we used to have and even as we're remembering the people we used to be there we're realizing it's all fundamentally changed' melancholy of it all.
The deep time of Prince Caspian is one of the parts of that book that has always stayed with me: the Pevensies' realization that Cair Paravel has been ruined a thousand years and they are haunting it like an Arthurian quartet in knee socks. I love also the waking of the trees and the breaking of the river-god's chains, although the last time it came up in conversation
I expect people will want me to fight me on this though because I know a lot of people have Dawn Treader as their favorite ....
Alas, I love the Lewtonesque island of dreams and the glass-shining eastern sea in which Lucy has her one moment of wordless connection with the sea-girl and the immram style of the whole thing. And although nothing more is ever done with it, I really love the reality check of Edmund's "You were only an ass, but I was a traitor." (I would read your Edmund at the magician's tower stat.) I can take or leave a bunch of the other bits.
Anyway, what I really want now is an AU where Susan does marry out of Narnia sometime in the Golden Age and instead of becoming the One Who Never Comes Back becomes the One Who Never Leaves
I'll read it.
- Last Battle still fills me with secondhand embarrassment
I unironically love the four-armed apparition of Tash even though it does an immense disservice to Assyrian apkallû and the astronomically apocalyptic image of Time squeezing out the red supergiant sun like an orange. Otherwise The Last Battle has always been somewhere from nonsensically confusing to dead to me, it contradicts its own series theologically, and I will kick Lewis in the shins over Emeth if I ever meet him in this life or its supposedly better substitute I don't believe in and actually find rather frightening as an ideal for all the inescapably obvious reasons.