Yes. As a child I wished so hard that Narnia were "real". As a teenager I was dispirited to realize (as I thought) that "reality" meant this boring, ugly, profane and disturbing modern world. As an adult, I've been made boundlessly glad to learn that the modern world is an illusion, while that which Narnia symbolizes is more real than anything I can see with my waking eyes, touch, taste, hear or feel.....
"What if the only way to make the magic work, the true magic, was to make an immense personal sacrifice? Would you do it then? What if it required the sacrifice of everything you have, and took the rest of your life? And you had to give up everything and go live in a completely different way, in a different place... worth it?"
Sign me up. Without it, nothing is worth living for anyway.
"every day, eight times a day, starting very early in the morning, you had been asked to open the door and sit in the doorway and look through, and as long as you have sung the proper song in the proper language, that doorway would show you the world that you have longed all your life to go to, would you do that?"
The monastic life in a nutshell--and they do it not just to delight in looking, but to keep alive the knowledge of the way to get to that country, and help for everyone else to get there too. It's the realest kind of real. I'm still stunned and delighted to realize that we are unkowingly, living within reach of glories and mysteries that surpass anything in the best of myths and fairytales.
The reward for the sacrifice is that Aslan will come to the doorway on the other side and you get to walk through, and live with Him in His country forever.
Confessions of a quickly-recovering Lewis Illiterate:
My name is Drew Royals and I'm a Lewis Illiterate.
Thanks to Hilary's constantly referring over the years to Aslan and Old Narnia and other worlds and things like that, I finally realized I'm missing out on too much if I think I can go on appreciating The Real Things barely-equipped with only the faintest memory of my one-time reading in the Fourth Grade of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Lewis came up over dinner the other night with a friend, it was the eve of Tolkein's dies natalis, we had just finished drinking in honor of JRR when it somehow came up that we both, to our shame, were Lewis Illiterates. We resolved then to fix it.
So, four days ago I started reading—or rather I paid Kenneth Branagh and Co. to read to me—all of the Chronicles beginning with The Magician's Nephew. Sure enough, I'm plowing through them and loving them. I'm already half-way through, right in the middle of Prince Caspian. Then, yesterday, with just three days of literacy under my belt Hilary posted this one (above), and to my great satisfaction, I'm picking up so much more of what she's putting down. I'm not all the way there yet, but I'm moving in the right direction. What she means by "Old Narnian" is way more wonderful than I could have otherwise supposed.
Her previous "Do the Reading" post combined with this one, with Narnia references out the wazoo, turns out to be opening up horizons I never knew were there.
He made me a Christian. I still struggle with the undeniable fact that I have a greater emotional attachment to Aslan than to Jesus.
I know you're a newb, but for the love of all that's holy, DON"T do the American thing of reading them according to the internal chronology of the country of Narnia. You DON'T START WITH MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW, YOU POOR IGGORANT MURRICAN!! SHEE!!
C. S. Lewis wrote the Narnia books over a period of four to five years, starting with The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. This book was published first, and Lewis was not at all certain he would write anymore. Eventually, he wrote seven. After the last book was released, Lewis was asked about the best order for reading the books. He suggested that chronological order might be the easiest way to read the Chronicles (see Lewis’s letter of 21 April 1957 and corresponding footnote 43 in Lewis’s Collected Letters III, 847-48). Eventually, British editions of the series were numbered chronologically. In America, however, the books continued to be released in their original publication order into the 90s. For three decades, then, you could get the Chronicles of Narnia in editions numbered in two ways:
That said, I want to offer the following reasons for reading the Narnia books in their original published order:
The Magician’s Nephew doesn’t captivate new readers as well as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe does. I’ve heard stories of people reading Nephew and quitting the rest of the series! Wardrobe grabs readers more powerfully on a first reading.
Some bits in Wardrobe don’t make sense if you read Nephew first. Lines like, “None of the children knew who Aslan was anymore than you do…” (74) make no sense to readers of Nephew, and Aslan’s introduction in Wardrobe loses some of its mystery and power.
Reading The Horse and His Boy fifth punctuates the book’s major theme: Providence. The first four books (if read in published order) all contain quests which are defined fairly early in the story. When we come to Horse, we suddenly encounter a story which has no clear quest until it’s been fulfilled. Nor do we encounter familiar characters or places in the beginning of the book as we do in Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair. We feel as lost as Shasta does. There’s an “otherness” to Horse, a strong contrast between it and the first four books in the series. All this lends to the main point of The Horse and His Boy: that though real life looks meaningless, purposeless, quest-less, and confusing, God is operating behind the scenes toward amazing ends—the theme of Providence. There is a quality in Horse which mimics in theme and technique the biblical books of Ruth and Esther. Here we encounter almost secular stories which nevertheless show how God often operates in the world, behind the scenes. Horse is so very different from the other books in the Narniad because it is so very much like the common experience of lives in this (our) world. But it loses a lot of that quality if read second or third.
Nephew gains mythic power by being read in order of publication. By itself, Nephew is good, but what makes it wonderful is that we read about a world we’ve already fallen in love with (by reading the other books first). We meet the Aslan we’ve grown to love so dearly, the old professor as a boy (who will then reappear immediately in The Last Battle so that we feel the freshness of his presence there). We delight in learning where the wardrobe that started all the adventures comes from (but the wardrobe will mean nothing to the first time reader of Nephew who begins with that book). The power in Nephew is born out of its status as a true prequel. Its meaning is made deeper, more wonderful, because of the tales we’ve encountered before.
I did pause for half-a-second last Thursday morning. I was about to get into the car for the next 90-minutes and I wanted to download the Narnia audiobooks. It occurred to me, as I was gulping down a quick cup of coffee that there might be a right or, what’s worse, a wrong way to proceed through the seven books. I finished scrambling three eggs and actually took a look at the Wikipedia page on the Chronicles. I saw that one of the headings was “Controversy” surrounding reading order. I thought, “I ain’t got no time for this. I’m already ten minutes late and I don’t want to spend the next 90 minutes in traffic without making headway into these books.” I saw that Branagh was the first up in the “boxed set” that would only cost me one Audible-credit, so I said, “Done.” If it had been Branagh reading Wardrobe it would’ve been all the same—I’m always running late for my Thursday morning appointments up the road.
I’m shocked, shocked that you should have a strong opinion on reading order. Still, what’s done is done. At least, thankfully, their awesome enough on their own to withstand our state-side shuffling. And while a Lewis Illiterate, I was—not proudly—a functional one. I had read Wardrobe first a hundred years ago and knew enough of the outlines and a couple spoilers to keep me from swerving off, too far.
One thing I love about these audiobooks, so far, is that it emphasizes that these are children’s books and perhaps even meant to be read aloud. What talent these actors have of switching from badger, to prince, to dwarf, to giant, to Peter.
Your warning may still have come in time to rescue my dinner partner from the same catastrophe. I've already told him to watch out. I'm not sure, though, if it's too late for him or not.
Your "He made me a Christian" story is one that'd be awesome to hear. But didn't Aslan also say something like "no one has a right to anyone else's story" (I'm butchering it, whatever he said)? If you do share, know it'll be appreciated.
And, I did get to my pal in time; he'll read them in the *correct* order while I continue feeling my way through to the end, when we'll compare notes. Although, I did finish Caspian last night, on the very eve of Back-to School here; so that was cool.
Just finished Narnia. Kenneth Branagh, Derek Jacobi, Patrick Stewart & pals made it that much more fun.
Of course, without a hard copy handy I’m totally at a loss for where any of my favorite lines are. So, that’s not good. I guess, I’ll have to do it again, slowly, the old fashioned way.
I love this portrayal of surface reality opening up to greater reality. There was a line—again, sorry, don’t know where it was—describing the awareness of never being able to ‘go back’ once having seen Narnia. And the reverse being a huge problem—ignorance of deeper realities makes it harder and less likely ever to know them. “To those who have more will be given…”
The good versus evil is also quite refreshing. Warfare, battle, struggle, suffering and loss are integral to going deeper into reality. I love that Lewis delivers this truth directly to children. We shelter them these days so much from even the possibility of ever knowing there’s a difference between good and evil.
Right now, I’d say “Horse” was my fave. I’m sure it’ll change. I love his almost throwaway description of the upshot for Shasta and Aravis, at the end, about the resolving of their quarrels.
I think it was that idea - that the surface of things hides something much much greater, that there are better and better worlds hidden away just around the corner - that has informed my entire religious interior life. As I understand it now, it's NeoPlatonism, but as a child it just seemed intuitively right. Of COUrse there is something more real hiding behind this world.
Yes. As a child I wished so hard that Narnia were "real". As a teenager I was dispirited to realize (as I thought) that "reality" meant this boring, ugly, profane and disturbing modern world. As an adult, I've been made boundlessly glad to learn that the modern world is an illusion, while that which Narnia symbolizes is more real than anything I can see with my waking eyes, touch, taste, hear or feel.....
"What if the only way to make the magic work, the true magic, was to make an immense personal sacrifice? Would you do it then? What if it required the sacrifice of everything you have, and took the rest of your life? And you had to give up everything and go live in a completely different way, in a different place... worth it?"
Sign me up. Without it, nothing is worth living for anyway.
"every day, eight times a day, starting very early in the morning, you had been asked to open the door and sit in the doorway and look through, and as long as you have sung the proper song in the proper language, that doorway would show you the world that you have longed all your life to go to, would you do that?"
The monastic life in a nutshell--and they do it not just to delight in looking, but to keep alive the knowledge of the way to get to that country, and help for everyone else to get there too. It's the realest kind of real. I'm still stunned and delighted to realize that we are unkowingly, living within reach of glories and mysteries that surpass anything in the best of myths and fairytales.
The reward for the sacrifice is that Aslan will come to the doorway on the other side and you get to walk through, and live with Him in His country forever.
Confessions of a quickly-recovering Lewis Illiterate:
My name is Drew Royals and I'm a Lewis Illiterate.
Thanks to Hilary's constantly referring over the years to Aslan and Old Narnia and other worlds and things like that, I finally realized I'm missing out on too much if I think I can go on appreciating The Real Things barely-equipped with only the faintest memory of my one-time reading in the Fourth Grade of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Lewis came up over dinner the other night with a friend, it was the eve of Tolkein's dies natalis, we had just finished drinking in honor of JRR when it somehow came up that we both, to our shame, were Lewis Illiterates. We resolved then to fix it.
So, four days ago I started reading—or rather I paid Kenneth Branagh and Co. to read to me—all of the Chronicles beginning with The Magician's Nephew. Sure enough, I'm plowing through them and loving them. I'm already half-way through, right in the middle of Prince Caspian. Then, yesterday, with just three days of literacy under my belt Hilary posted this one (above), and to my great satisfaction, I'm picking up so much more of what she's putting down. I'm not all the way there yet, but I'm moving in the right direction. What she means by "Old Narnian" is way more wonderful than I could have otherwise supposed.
Her previous "Do the Reading" post combined with this one, with Narnia references out the wazoo, turns out to be opening up horizons I never knew were there.
I'm digging it.
One day at a time.
He made me a Christian. I still struggle with the undeniable fact that I have a greater emotional attachment to Aslan than to Jesus.
I know you're a newb, but for the love of all that's holy, DON"T do the American thing of reading them according to the internal chronology of the country of Narnia. You DON'T START WITH MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW, YOU POOR IGGORANT MURRICAN!! SHEE!!
https://www.cslewis.com/the-narnian-order-of-things/
Some Background
C. S. Lewis wrote the Narnia books over a period of four to five years, starting with The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. This book was published first, and Lewis was not at all certain he would write anymore. Eventually, he wrote seven. After the last book was released, Lewis was asked about the best order for reading the books. He suggested that chronological order might be the easiest way to read the Chronicles (see Lewis’s letter of 21 April 1957 and corresponding footnote 43 in Lewis’s Collected Letters III, 847-48). Eventually, British editions of the series were numbered chronologically. In America, however, the books continued to be released in their original publication order into the 90s. For three decades, then, you could get the Chronicles of Narnia in editions numbered in two ways:
Original Release Order
The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
Prince Caspian
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Silver Chair
The Horse and His Boy
The Magician’s Nephew
The Last Battle
Cease doing it wrong!
~~
That said, I want to offer the following reasons for reading the Narnia books in their original published order:
The Magician’s Nephew doesn’t captivate new readers as well as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe does. I’ve heard stories of people reading Nephew and quitting the rest of the series! Wardrobe grabs readers more powerfully on a first reading.
Some bits in Wardrobe don’t make sense if you read Nephew first. Lines like, “None of the children knew who Aslan was anymore than you do…” (74) make no sense to readers of Nephew, and Aslan’s introduction in Wardrobe loses some of its mystery and power.
Reading The Horse and His Boy fifth punctuates the book’s major theme: Providence. The first four books (if read in published order) all contain quests which are defined fairly early in the story. When we come to Horse, we suddenly encounter a story which has no clear quest until it’s been fulfilled. Nor do we encounter familiar characters or places in the beginning of the book as we do in Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair. We feel as lost as Shasta does. There’s an “otherness” to Horse, a strong contrast between it and the first four books in the series. All this lends to the main point of The Horse and His Boy: that though real life looks meaningless, purposeless, quest-less, and confusing, God is operating behind the scenes toward amazing ends—the theme of Providence. There is a quality in Horse which mimics in theme and technique the biblical books of Ruth and Esther. Here we encounter almost secular stories which nevertheless show how God often operates in the world, behind the scenes. Horse is so very different from the other books in the Narniad because it is so very much like the common experience of lives in this (our) world. But it loses a lot of that quality if read second or third.
Nephew gains mythic power by being read in order of publication. By itself, Nephew is good, but what makes it wonderful is that we read about a world we’ve already fallen in love with (by reading the other books first). We meet the Aslan we’ve grown to love so dearly, the old professor as a boy (who will then reappear immediately in The Last Battle so that we feel the freshness of his presence there). We delight in learning where the wardrobe that started all the adventures comes from (but the wardrobe will mean nothing to the first time reader of Nephew who begins with that book). The power in Nephew is born out of its status as a true prequel. Its meaning is made deeper, more wonderful, because of the tales we’ve encountered before.
I did pause for half-a-second last Thursday morning. I was about to get into the car for the next 90-minutes and I wanted to download the Narnia audiobooks. It occurred to me, as I was gulping down a quick cup of coffee that there might be a right or, what’s worse, a wrong way to proceed through the seven books. I finished scrambling three eggs and actually took a look at the Wikipedia page on the Chronicles. I saw that one of the headings was “Controversy” surrounding reading order. I thought, “I ain’t got no time for this. I’m already ten minutes late and I don’t want to spend the next 90 minutes in traffic without making headway into these books.” I saw that Branagh was the first up in the “boxed set” that would only cost me one Audible-credit, so I said, “Done.” If it had been Branagh reading Wardrobe it would’ve been all the same—I’m always running late for my Thursday morning appointments up the road.
I’m shocked, shocked that you should have a strong opinion on reading order. Still, what’s done is done. At least, thankfully, their awesome enough on their own to withstand our state-side shuffling. And while a Lewis Illiterate, I was—not proudly—a functional one. I had read Wardrobe first a hundred years ago and knew enough of the outlines and a couple spoilers to keep me from swerving off, too far.
One thing I love about these audiobooks, so far, is that it emphasizes that these are children’s books and perhaps even meant to be read aloud. What talent these actors have of switching from badger, to prince, to dwarf, to giant, to Peter.
They’re just fantastic.
(Apart from the wrong order) you're getting them much the same way I first did. My mum read them to me, of course.
Your warning may still have come in time to rescue my dinner partner from the same catastrophe. I've already told him to watch out. I'm not sure, though, if it's too late for him or not.
Your "He made me a Christian" story is one that'd be awesome to hear. But didn't Aslan also say something like "no one has a right to anyone else's story" (I'm butchering it, whatever he said)? If you do share, know it'll be appreciated.
And, I did get to my pal in time; he'll read them in the *correct* order while I continue feeling my way through to the end, when we'll compare notes. Although, I did finish Caspian last night, on the very eve of Back-to School here; so that was cool.
I'm happy for you. I hope the move works out. Umbria is beautiful.
Just finished Narnia. Kenneth Branagh, Derek Jacobi, Patrick Stewart & pals made it that much more fun.
Of course, without a hard copy handy I’m totally at a loss for where any of my favorite lines are. So, that’s not good. I guess, I’ll have to do it again, slowly, the old fashioned way.
I love this portrayal of surface reality opening up to greater reality. There was a line—again, sorry, don’t know where it was—describing the awareness of never being able to ‘go back’ once having seen Narnia. And the reverse being a huge problem—ignorance of deeper realities makes it harder and less likely ever to know them. “To those who have more will be given…”
The good versus evil is also quite refreshing. Warfare, battle, struggle, suffering and loss are integral to going deeper into reality. I love that Lewis delivers this truth directly to children. We shelter them these days so much from even the possibility of ever knowing there’s a difference between good and evil.
Right now, I’d say “Horse” was my fave. I’m sure it’ll change. I love his almost throwaway description of the upshot for Shasta and Aravis, at the end, about the resolving of their quarrels.
The whole thing’s a treasure.
I think it was that idea - that the surface of things hides something much much greater, that there are better and better worlds hidden away just around the corner - that has informed my entire religious interior life. As I understand it now, it's NeoPlatonism, but as a child it just seemed intuitively right. Of COUrse there is something more real hiding behind this world.