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…