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lion witch and wardrobe

PostPosted: December 8th, 2007, 6:52 pm
by columbia
I have to relate CS Lewis' Lion Witch and Wardrobe with mythology.
Help!

PostPosted: December 8th, 2007, 7:04 pm
by john
The first questions I must ask are these:

Have you read the book?
What have you already come up with on your own?

Lion Witch and Wardrobe

PostPosted: December 8th, 2007, 7:23 pm
by columbia
I have read the book and seen the film.

It is full of characters and ideas from Greek and Roman mythology- for example the fauna, centaurs from Greek mythology and dwarfs Norse mythology.
Good against evil - spells of witches - Narnia itself is populated by a wide variety of creatures most of whom would be recognisable to those familiar with European mythologies and British fairy tales.

I found the following from Google:
Satyrs, fauns, centaurs, dwarves, giants, and even the pagan god Bacchus and the Maenads are depicted in a positive light, although they are distinctly pagan motifs. Even an animistic "River god" is portrayed in a positive light (Chattaway 2005), (Berit 2005). According to Josh Hurst of Christianity Today, "not only was Lewis hesitant to call his books Christian allegory, but the stories borrow just as much from pagan mythology as they do the Bible" (Hurst 2005).

Lewis himself believed that pagan mythology could act as a preparation for Christianity, both in history and in the imaginative life of an individual, and even suggested that modern man was in such a lamentable state that perhaps it was necessary "first to make people good pagans, and after that to make them Christians" (Lewis, Calabria & Moynihan 1998). He also argued that imaginative enjoyment of (as opposed to belief in) classical mythology has been a feature of Christian culture through much of its history, and that European literature has always had three themes: the natural, the supernatural believed to be true (Christianity) and the supernatural known to be imaginary (mythology).

Can u recommend anything else? Thanx

PostPosted: December 8th, 2007, 7:55 pm
by Sven
Welcome, Columbia. You've got a pretty good grip on it, if you understand what you've copy-and-pasted. If you'd like to know how Lewis understood Myth, and applied it, you might want to read his essay 'Myth Became Fact', collected in the book God in the Dock.

PostPosted: December 9th, 2007, 2:20 am
by A#minor

Re: Lion Witch and Wardrobe

PostPosted: June 3rd, 2008, 1:32 am
by splashen