Volume 6 Number 1 Article 2

12-15-1979

Children, Magic, and Choices

Dainis Bisenieks

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Recommended Citation Bisenieks, Dainis (1979) "Children, Magic, and Choices," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 6 : No. 1 , Article 2. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol6/iss1/2

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Abstract Reviews the portrayal of children in a number of contemporary fantasies (including those of Lewis) and analyzes their success or failure.

Additional Keywords Children in fantasy; Victoria de Nevyen

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/vol6/iss1/2 Children, Magic, and Choices

by Dainis Bisenieks

People this world, by chance created so, him, one to learn the patient and silent ways of Ogion, the w ith random p e rs o n s whom you do n o t know— other to go out into the world and to develop and use his powers. In time he w ill come to the end of the latter way, a s The Farthest Shore tells, and return to his master Ogion. But now he goes to the school for wizards on Roke Island Let the erratic couse they steer surprise where he meets an even stronger challenge to his pride, so their own and your own and your readers' eyes; that he summons the spirit of Elfarran and is felled by a Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair) Thing not summoned. When at last he wakes, that is the end Motive and end and moral in the air; of his childhood, though he is to learn time and again the Nice contradiction between fact and fact consequences of ill judgment. W ill make the whole read human and exact. The story moves me by its attention to the shape of a That is part of "The Devil's Advice to Story-Tellers"— life, spanning a dozen years from the first incident, and perhaps from the same lot of correspondence that another by its refusal to look away from death and terror. If Ged w riter drew on. I found it in the poems of Robert Graves. judges and chooses wrongly, the errors are natural ones for an unformed boy: they are h i s errors, and their con­ But we know that a well-made story works toward a sequences and his subsequent choices are the making of him. meaningful end; seeming chance has its part in a design. The economy of something like "Oedipus the King" (and how I can say much the same of Lloyd Alexander's Prydain effective that is!) may be too extreme for our kind of books, though The High King o n ly ta k e s me to a happy end story-telling; we like some detail of local color and be­ which is but a beginning. As Ged desired the power of magic, havior. Yet characterization is not an end in itself: a so Taran wants to be a hero—and is told "the three founda­ common story-pattern is "The Man Who learned Better", and tions of learning: see much, study much, suffer much". In who the man is affects what he learns. A choice w ill have The Book o f Three he is at first hasty to act and to judge, consequences no matter how trifling it seems; while it but at least in his foolhardiness there is courage. On his advances the plot it tells us about the man. wanderings with Eilonwy, Gurgi, and Fflewddur Fflam, he learns some circumspection. From Medwyn he gets the advice, Especially is this true in fantasy. Of course we like very useful in a magical realm, not to "refuse to give help it for the fantastic, the enchanting things in it: but it when it is needed, nor refuse to accept it when it is allows of the making of a story where choices are momentous, offered." He acts on it in saving the wounded young gwy- where all the hero's resources are called on: where men thaint, a bird of a species enslaved to evil—and good comes walk with destiny. of his deed which his companions deprecate. So the tale is rounded off. Suppose now they are not men and women but children. In The Black Cauldron Taran's quick pride has been The same growth from innocence to experience and to ac­ backed somewhat with his first achievements. "Do you love complishment is still called for. (The catastrophe of tra­ danger so much," asks Gwydion. "Before you are a man, you gedy would not be appropriate.) Some stage of maturity w ill learn to hate it." A contest of pride between him and must be reached. Yet children are, after all, children; Ellidyr runs through the story. The provocation is most they have been known to preserve a childlikeness through often the latter's, but Taran is as often reproved for re­ some of the most dreadful experiences that history affords. sponding to it and so endangering the mission of his com­ Some well-known novels—I w ill cite The Innocent Voyage and pany. A hard choice is put before him when Ellidyr exacts Lord of the F lies —have presented a dark side of the psy­ an oath to give h im credit for gaining the Cauldron: one chology of childhood. Now our type of story does not call of those choices typical of high fantasy. Taran swallows on such possibilities—but it is fitting to characterize his pride, as the mission must be accomplished no matter by children properly. If— i f children are more likely to act whom; and Ellidyr redeems himself at the last by giving his capriciously and to be immune to certain kinds of teaching, life to destroy the Cauldron. might this not conflict with the requirements of a well- made story? But above these earthly desires is the desire for Magic. Thus far, magic has been used as a tool: weapon, I w ill call this an exploration; I do not wish to pre­ shield, concealment. The brooch which passes to Taran at scribe, but only to record how certain stories have worked Adaon's death is that, too: but Taran sees that it can on me and to suggest reasons for what I felt to be short­ raise his being to a new plane. So when the engagingly comings. Let me start in the safe haven of one that worked sinister Three Fates ask their price for the Cauldron, only surpremely well: Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard o f Earthsea. this most precious of gifts is acceptable; and Taran weeps at its loss. Ged, as I'll call him from the start, is seen as a child only in the first few chapters. After his prideful So do tales of high fantasy put their heroes i n e x t r e ­ act of Summoning, he comes to a somber maturity: and at m is , granting them wisdom: and joy: and sorrow; and death. last to wholeness. He is gifted with the power to work (Death does not come to the principals in books that child­ magic. The first discovery of that gift, when he calls the ren w ill read; but it does in the works of authors as di­ goats to him, is frightening and prefigures the later dis­ verse as A. M erritt and Charles W illiams.) Now I have asked aster, as he cannot dismiss what he has called. But there­ how children fit these roles; and we may note that Fflewddur after the gift feeds his childish pride and eagerness to Fflam, who offered his harp for the Cauldron, sacrifices it excel above his fellows. in a later book. He wins thereby a gift of safety and great joy for himself and his friends. He is no child—and The daughter of the Lord of Re Albi challenges that that was for me the most moving incident in the five books. pride, so that he seeks for more power and looks in the Even so: it is the first experience of its kind that wizard Ogion's book, thus meeting the foreshadowing of evil. is most poignant. The heroes of these books are in their A fine moment of revelation here: two longings struggle in own worlds, where they must become kings and mages and so 13 ney from danger into danger is the story, except that p e r n a t u r a l danger gives the story its quality. It is in places a supreme test of courage, as in the escape through the tunnels. Garner does not shy at describing emotion, though (like at the end) he can be sparing of words. The children are made most real by their responses to the words, deeds, and sufferings of their allies and mentor. They are shaped less by their choices than by their exper­ iences—into what? The story gives no hint of the shape their mundane lives might take. Only The M agician's Nephew does so, to my recollection, and not satisfactorily for the adult reader. This book's sequel leaves the problem un­ s o lv e d .

The Moon o f Gomrath is the same in character; and even more intensely than The Black Cauldron it tells of the awakening of a longing for magic. Susan's spirit is just barely brought back from the Other World. At the end she is allowed to ride once more with the maidens, briefly; but her time is not yet; grieving, she remains on an Earth from which magic has once more departed. Her experience is matched by Helen's longing for the unicorn and its loss in G a r n e r 's E l i d o r . While helping bury the Treasures, she just misses recovering whole from the soil the unicorn jug.

"You can't really see the cracks" [said Mrs. Watson.] "But I know they are there," said Helen.

And after the encounter with Findhorn:

Helen began to cry silently. "I've broken it," she said.

With his deathly wound, the unicorn at last sings, working the magic that heals the realm of Elidor—and, as in the other books, magic departs from this world. get wisdom and joy and sorrow in full measure. There is a In the matter of choices: The Moon o f Gomrath a g a in way to high estate from low estate even in adult years: but portrays determination and courage. And there is the other from the middling estate of doctor or lawyer or merchant? matter of how to choose rightly where magical beings and That would be another kind of tale, whose hero would have to forces are involved. A choice innocently made with danger­ unlearn before he could learn... I am reminded of Poul ous consequences is a device to advance the plot: if in the Anderson's The Dancer From A tlantis, though that is science first book Susan had said to Cadellin, "The missing jewel? fiction and has no magic. Is this it?" there would have been no story. But what if a choice is influenced from without? It is no a c c i d e n t n o r I w ill leave Taran here, as he can hardly be called a pure childish heedlessness 'that Susan and Colin light a child any more. In Taran Wanderer he learns through fire in the right place, at the right time, and with the failure—and modest success—in making and doing: hardly right wood to call forth the Wild Hunt. This helps to es­ the kind of education that our schools provide. The choices tablish them not as agents but as vessels to receive the he had to make to become of "noble worth" were w ritten in magic. No wonder then that at the end we don't know what the Book of Three, but he had to make them him self. they w ill be able to do or what shape their mundane lives w i l l t a k e . In another kind of story, children of our world pass through a gate between worlds into Faerie, or are faced I n E l i d o r , four children are transported into another with an irruption of magic into theirs. The question "Why world for the fulfillm ent of a prophecy of salvation. children?" has the same answer here: because they have They are given four talismans to guard, which in their world little to unlearn, because unlike some adults they can have the guise of pieces of junk—except that they give off know enchantment. (Consider Mr. Watson in E l i d o r , who h a s emanations which hostile searchers can also detect. The a mundane explanation for every uncanny m anifestation that door of their own home has become a gateway for menace. he witnesses.) A hero just come into man's estate might do (like the narrators of L i l i t h and Phantastes) o r a The four are well characterized as children: that is dreamer dissatisfied with the mundane. But certainly child­ to say, their manners toward one another are abrasive. ren are receptive vessels for the enchantments of Faerie. They have enough of the spirit of adventure to do things, concealing the facts from their parents—of whom the father S till, the reader may be left wondering what else has a most determinedly mundane mind. Roland, who was the they are. It has been stated, and I accept, that many strongest in the other world, is the one who remembers personality traits are established at an early age. But they have known magic when the others try to push it out most often the children I meet in this class of story are of their memories or to explain away supernatural visita­ little more than names. I do not know w ho they are to be tions. And finally, all must accept that a unicorn has making the choices they make. In some cases these are no come from t h e r e i n t o h e r e and is being pursued by two more than accepting the magic as real and determining to warriors. With luck and determination they gain a lead on aid the quest. What, then i s to be expected of the stories? them, and so arrives the climax when the magic is taken back into the other world and they are left standing in a mundane The W eirdstone o f Brisingamen and The Moon o f Gomrath s t r e e t . by Alan Garner are tales of the irruption of the realm of magic into the mundane world. The wizard Cadellin guarding These four, especially, are a little less than real to the cave of the Sleepers who must defend the world in its me because their lives here are not real. School, as is direst straits; elves, dwarfs and their allies; the evil well known, is a device for keeping kids out of the way. forces and their creatures pitted against them; the Wild Hunt: Vacation offers lots of undirected activity. And the world all these make the strongest impression. The jewel Susan is largely hostile to the idea of magic. If the children wears, a family heirloom, is a talisman that must be kept are to find vocations and live, as Merry, Pippin, and Sam from the dark forces in the first book. Here the plot is did, strengthened by the magic, these books don't show me advanced by Susan and Colin's acting in ignorance. A jour­ 14 how. The loss of magic is the strongest feeling in Garner's books. (An exception, though of no great moment, is Edward E a g e r 's H alf Magic, a children's book showing nothing of evil. There the magic completes its work and is surrendered without sorrow.)

City and suburbs were the setting of E lid o r - , the other two at least had the English countryside and Gowther Mossock, the stout farmer who was convinced of the reality of magic In G r e e n w itc h is another kind of flawed choice. The and became Susan's and Colin's ally. His life was close to Greenwitch is a figure woven of fresh boughs which is yearly the soil and so to reality. Susan Cooper in her series, of made by the village women and cast into the sea by the men. w hich The Grey King was just published and Silver on the The tradition is to make a wish in its presence. T r e e w ill be the fifth and last, has tried to show a whole­ As sne came close to the Greenwitch she felt some family life in its setting of the life of an English again the unimaginable force it seemed to re­ village or small town. The Drew children, Simon, Jane, and present, but again the great loneliness too... Barney, are visitors in Trewisslck on the coast of Cornwall, "Oh, dear," she said impulsively, "I wish you whose rites, part of the round of work and play, we see in could be happy. Over Sea, Under Stone and in Greenwitch. Will Stanton is at home in his large family in an English village. All to the The consequences are momentous, but what if it had been a good—if only the books were not defective otherwise. harder choice, made in the conviction of certain loss? Jane is changed somewhat—so the author says—but I do In Over Sea, Under Stone the children find a manuscript not see the wisdom or joy or sorrow that should come. The with a map, and both the Good Guys, represented by their experience of magic, at least, is far better realized than "great-uncle" Merrimean Lyon, and the Bad Guys (described by in the first book. (The concluding books later disappointed him only in simplified terms) are after it. It leads to a me as did the others.) chalice, indeed to the Grail—but why should it be found so No one w ill doubt that choices in the Narnia books largely by mundane means? The children are kept from trust­ have consequences deriving from their moral nature. Time ing the agents of the Dark by premonitions of evil or a dis­ and again the children act wrongly and thereby injure trust of false affability __ but nothing really supernatural others, release evil into the world, or compromise their is manifest in them; even their final confrontation with q u e s t. In The Silver Chair, Jill shows off at the edge of Uncle Merry amounts to a lot of posturing. On the quest the precipice; Edmund gives in to spite and greed in T h e the children perform some detective work—and that was the Lion, the W itch, and the Wardrobe-, Eustace is a self- most mundane thing of all; the same kind of thing that centered snob in Voyage o f the Dawn Treader. Other choices annoyed me in A Midsummer Tempest. The defeat of a truly are made for the good, against temptation: Digory's obeying evil being should be a gift and a result of his peculiar the rules in bringing the magic apple to Aslan in T h e disability. Is it any wonder that the children are re­ M agician'8 Nephew. warded at the end not with wisdom, or joy, or sorrow, but with a check for a hundred pounds? I have no call to read It is quite apparent, too, that the behavior is that kid books which have mystery and manace but no magic! of children. It has been charged that Lewis did not know children, that he borrowed from decades-old children's books. The Dark is Rising presents another problem: the Well, yes: to some degree they are story-book children. powers of an Old One are awakened in Will Stanton on his Now what is apparent to me is that the faults are underlain eleventh birthday. Coming partly of themselves, partly with by the petty rivalries of family and school. These have the the aid of magical tutelage, the powers and knowledge are nature of games, Eric Berne's "ulterior transactions", t h e r e . The author brings in suspense when Will is yet unsure which need a certain number to play. Indisputably, such be­ in their use and gets into trouble. Some might say there is havior is "wrong": it contravenes the Golden Rule and is p le n ty o f m agic h e r e ; I am n o t so s u r e . Among th e e v i l likely to be answered in kind, petty ego against petty ego. forces too many act like just plain bogeys. But what most So it is unproductive, and like all childish behavior it troubles me is that Will turns from a child into something disregards more important realities. One does not toss else; and, whatever choices he makes, he has little tempta­ stones into dark wells or peer into purloined palantlri tion that X can see to choose a different path, much less without evil following; here Jill puts Eustace into danger; an evil one. He is a witness to betrayal: a matter that and so on. In a magical realm, though the children do not should be moving but did not touch me. Some ingredient is know it at first, one must be on guard; an evil prophesied missing here. is sure to come about, to grow from the tiniest seed. An offer of comfort and rest is to be treated with suspicion.

Why then, if Ursula Le Guin and Lloyd Alexander are no less explicit about the consequence of childish error, do I feel that C. S. Lewis is moralizing and they are not?

F i r s t , t h e i r characters are at home in their own worlds, making their own errors on the way to their dimly perceived goals. But what goals Lewis's children perceive in the midst of their round of school and summer holidays is not apparent. In no case do I see the adult in the child. Of course, Lewis thought children were largely miseducated: Eustace was the product of such education, and in The Silver Chair Lewis sets up and demolishes a straw "progressive school". And where we do hear of children being taken in hand by proper mentors, nothing is seen of the shape of the education. My ideal is of course W art's education in the r e v is e d Sword in the Stone. There too, the comic touches do not undermine the effect.

What, then, of the games children play, that is, ulter­ ior transactions? The natural way in a story as in real life would be to give them a task to perform with a non­ player as companion and guide. The futility of one-upchild- ship could then display itself, in small things and large. Some mundane stories suggest themselves here, but Taran's quarrel with Ellidyr in The Black Cauldron is a good para­ digm of this in the enchanted realm. 15 Second, Lewis pulled his punches...I w ill almost say, Narnia books. But Lewis, unlike Alexander, compromised the consistently. What he thought he was doing in writing effect of his stories by making some of his villains into for small children, I do not fully know (there is a touch of buffoons. Must they posture and declaim as Jadis does in self-justification in his published statements; I noted, too, The M agician's Nephew ? how often he went out of his way to clear up duplicity and double meanings. So I must call it distrust of the reader's What Lewis does best is, after all, the magic in his abilities. Loss and pain and death in his books have less tales. So we are back with the experiences of children impact on his characters and on me than they do in other rather than their choices—though preparation for these, books likely to be read by children no less small (unless too, is often needed. The creation of Narnia was one of they get bowdlerized or edited versions of the older works): the high points; and I found as many good things in T h e the fairy tales of Grimm, Andersen, and Wilde; Hoban's T h e Voyage o f the Dawn Treader. And y et...I wish it had been Mouse and His C hild ; and th e P ry d a in c y c le . ( I am n o t a t w ritten by Alan Garner instead! He would have made the all sure that Alan Garner wrote for children.) serious things more serious and improved the style.

The start of The Silver Chair is a minor case in Style is the last thing I will take up, and only in point. At the end of Chapter 1, Eustace falls over the in this one matter: what the author has to say about the cliff, but—"Fortunately [Jill] was given no time to think children's character and choices. Here the auctorial over what she had done..." since Aslan appears, changing presence is particularly dangerous. The choice is: tell Eustace's fall into flight. Jill does weep afterward, the tale or talk to the reader. Comment on Ged's choices is mostly in self-pity, but she does not for long know the con­ as often by the narrator—the ostensible author, at home in sequences of her action as painful. Earthsea—as by his mentors. But all the remarks are in the same mellifluous sytle as the rest of the story. So An interesting moment of choice comes when the prince at no point do I have a sense of being lectured to. Ged bound in the chair speaks the name of Aslan—the sign the is not a moral example: he is himself. children were to watch for. Both the Queen of the Under­ world and the prince in his other mind have warned them against freeing him. Lewis tries to milk the scene for What Taran is told about his conduct could hit slightly emotion—"It was a sickening moment"—but just such comment closer to home. The five books are more obviously is his weakness. Terror warned against is nothing to terror children's books and their characters more obviously models of a kind already known. The moment passes very quickly. of conduct. The lesson is not to be mistaken. But the characters are plainly themselves—often amusingly so—and I see that much more can be done with older characters I am not offended at any didacticism. who already have some power, but cannot attain with it all the good they desire. Taran as war leader failing to pre­ But Lewis's remarks are in no style that I can admire: vent the death of friends; Ged failing to save the dying far too often they are just plain auctorial intrusions. He child: their experiences are far more deeply affecting. seems concerned, time and again, with showing k i n d s o f s e l f - What are the lion-scratches of Aravis to these? I felt that centered conduct to be avoided: equally wrong in Eustace or even the sacrifice of Aslan had been softened. However, Jill or Edmund or his reader. I will not say this is still some scenes at the border between life and death are com­ good enough for children. Evidently the books have pletely successful—as in The Silver Chair and T h e L a s t pleased many; but as adult reading they are compromised. B a t t l e . If there is any lesson here for a writer, it is: let Humor is welcome in stories for children and adults your characters be themselves. Let them see much, study and has a place even in stories of high magic. The Lord o f much, and suffer much. The moral of such experience w ill t h e R in g s has its share, and so do both the Prydain and the take care of itself.