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Volume 8 Number 1 Article 1 4-15-1981 C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald: The Silver Chair and the Princess Books Michael C. Kotzin Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Kotzin, Michael C. (1981) "C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald: The Silver Chair and the Princess Books," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 8 : No. 1 , Article 1. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol8/iss1/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Mythopoeic Society at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To join the Mythopoeic Society go to: http://www.mythsoc.org/join.htm Mythcon 51: A VIRTUAL “HALFLING” MYTHCON July 31 - August 1, 2021 (Saturday and Sunday) http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-51.htm Mythcon 52: The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien Albuquerque, New Mexico; July 29 - August 1, 2022 http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-52.htm Abstract Examines The Silver Chair in the light of two George MacDonald works which it resembles in many ways and which Lewis included in his list of MacDonald’s six “great works,” The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. Additional Keywords Fairy tales—Influence on C.S. Lewis; airF y tales—Influence on George MacDonald; Lewis, C.S. The Silver Chair—Sources; MacDonald, George. The Princess and Curdie—Influence on The Silver Chair; MacDonald, George. The Princess and the Goblin—Influence on The Silver Chair; Barbara Mann; Tim Kirk; Edith Crowe This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol8/iss1/1 C.S. LEWIS AND GEORGE MacDONALD: THE SILVER CHAIR AND THE PRINCESS BOOKS MICHAEL C. KOTZIN Introducing a collection of selected passages from carnate in the whole story."5 This being Lewis' position, it George MacDonald in 1996, C.S. Lewis wrote: "I have never is worthwhile to begin by noticing ways that the story of concealed the fact that I regarded him as my masters indeed his book resem bles the stories of MacDonald’s books. I fancy I have never w ritten a book in which I did not quote from him. But it has not seemed to me that those who have Thus, not only do The Silver Chair and The Princess and received my books kindly take even now sufficient notice of the Goblin include action set in an underground world; the the affiliatio n ."1 It is a striking acknowledgement by a actions too are rather sim ilar. In MacDonald's book the modern w riter of his debt to a V ictorian forebear and of underground world is found in "hollow places" w ithin moun­ course the debt has not gone unobserved by a great many tain s, "huge caverns, and winding ways, some with water run­ critics. But it still has not been investigated as fully as ning through them, and some shining with a ll colours of the it might have been. For example, a book like The Silver rainbow when a light was taken in .... Now in these subter­ Chair, which, along with the six other Chronicles of Narnia, ranean caverns lived a strange race of beings, called by Lewis wrote soon after he made his statem ent, has many some gnomes, by some kobolds, by some goblins.The g o b ­ specific connections with MacDonald's work which have not lin s, led by their king and aggressive queen, are served by yet been "sufficiently noticed," even by Roger Lancelyn their beastly domestic anim als. Men, who are mining the Green and W alter Hooper, two major authorities on the mountains, know about these caverns, and one of the miners, Narnian books, who in th eir biography of Lewis turn many a boy named Curdie, discovers that a plot is being hatched stones in speculating that Underland in The Silver Chair by the goblins, who want to revenge them selves upon the might have been suggested to Lewis by books by Haggard, people on earth as a reprisal for the wrongs done to their Joseph O 'N eill, Verne, Bulwer Lytton, and even seventeenth ancestors. They plan to dig their way out of a certain and eighteenth century w riters such as Athanasius Kircher mountain so that they can enter a castle on it in which the and Ludwig Hol berg, but ignore MacDonald as a source of it kingdom's princess dw ells. Their aim is to steal her and or of any other specific aspects of the Lewis book.2 made her the wife of their prince, thereby gaining some power over the people. If they fa il in that scheme then Surely Green and Hooper are right to say of the Narnian they w ill flood the mines and drown the miners. But as series that "again and again one can find echoes from legend m atters develop Curdie, at one point rescued from the cav­ and litera tu re, ancient and modern—and those of us who have erns by the princess herself, helps thwart the plan to kid­ 'read the right books' w ill find more than those who have nap the princess and the miners block the water so that their not." But I do not think that they are equally right when mines are not flooded but instead the natural caverns are, they go on to say that "such echoes are of little impor­ and many goblins are drowned. tance, save to suggest what books Lewis had read or to make us marvel at his wide reading and retentive memory."3 Lewis' Underland is larger and more developed, allowing Lewis’ remark should make us realize that MacDonald is not for ship travel and holding entire cities, but it is a simi­ ju st any one of a great many w riters, some known, some ob­ lar underground kingdom, With a population which also in­ scure, whom we can find echoes of in Lewis if we happen to cludes soft-footed gnomes (who in th is case have been brought have read them. Lewis deliberately paid homage to MacDonald from an even lower underground world, and here serve the as his m aster, and to find the MacDonald in a Lewis work is queen because she has enchanted them), and a ruler who is to give the earlier w riter his due, as Lewis wanted us to. the enemy of the inhabitants of the daylight world outside. Nor is Lewis' connection with MacDonald to be treated as in­ Here the underground ruler is a queen, who a lready had cidental to our understanding of Lewis' "children's" books. succeeded in kidnapping R ilian, the Prince of Narnia, ten By elaborating on the connection we are able to see Lewis years before the action of the book begins. She h as h eld not only as a disciple of this one w riter but also as an him under a spell, and her plan is to take over Narnia, the author self-consciously working in a certain literary tradi­ outside kingdom, with him as figurehead king, m arried to tion, one which originated in the nineteenth century and has her. Here too the underground army is digging its way out continued to generate works of great power in our own age. of the underworld and is close to making a move when two We thus affirm Lewis' traditionalism and MacDonald's contin­ children, again a boy and a g irl but here with an additional uing value. We see Lewis in a literary context in which he helper, enter the underground world and make possible the belongs and we recognize that MacDonald is a w riter s till frustration of her designs. And here too a flooding of the well worth turning to in his own right. Finally, these underground caverns is a secondary plan; in this case the w riters are sim ilar but not identical, and by noticing dif­ flooding occurs as planned, but to no one's harm as the ferences between them we are able to see each of them more prince and children escape to above from the Underland and clearly. Therefore I propose to examine The Silver Chair in as the gnomes too escape, to their own world. the light of two George MacDonald works which it resem bles in many ways and which Lewis him self included in his lis t of Thus, Lewis might well have been drawing upon The Prin­ MacDonald's six "great works." The Princess and the Goblin cess and the Goblin when he was w riting The Silver Chair, and The Princess and Curdie.4 especially as he was planning its plot and designing its setting in the underworld, whence would come an enemy of the In praising MacDonald, Lewis sees him particularly as a "sunlit lands" whose evil plan, involving marriage of a day­ maker of "myths." "Most myths," Lewis says, "were made in lig h t prince to underground royalty, would be thwarted by prehistoric tim es, and, I suppose, not consciously made by brave children.

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