Volume 2 Number 4 Article 4 Winter 1-15-1972 An Introduction to Narnia - Part III: The Genre of The Chronicles Joe. R. Christopher Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Christopher, Joe. R. (1972) "An Introduction to Narnia - Part III: The Genre of The Chronicles," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 2 : No. 4 , Article 4. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol2/iss4/4 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 The third part discusses the genre of fairy-tale in general and the Chronicles in relation to it, in addition to other children’s books of the 20th century. Additional Keywords Frye, Northrop—Theory of literature; Hough, Graham—Theory of literature; Lewis, C.S. Chronicles of Narnia; Lewis, C.S. Chronicles of Narnia—Literary classification 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/vol2/iss4/4 AN INTRODUCTION TO NARNIA Part IIP The Genre of The Chronicles by Joe R. Christopher In his essay "Sometimes Fairy Stories May' Say Best What's To Be Said," C.S, Lewis de­ scribes the way the Chronicles of Narnia came to him firs t: In the Author's mind there bubbles up every now and then the material for a story. For me it invariably begins with mental pictures. This ferment leads to nothing un­ less it is accompanied with a longing for a Form: verse or prose, short story, novel, play or what not. When these two things click you have the Author's impulse com­ p lete........................................................................... ... Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then collect­ ed information about child-psychology and decided what age group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out 'allegories' to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way at all. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn't even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord. It was part of the bubbling. Then came the Form. As these images sorted themselves into events (i. e., became a story) they seemed to demand no love interest and no close psychology. But the Form which excludes these things is the fairy tale. And the moment I thought of that I fell in love with the Form itself: its brev­ ity, its severe restraints on description, its flexible traditionalism, its inflexbile hostility to analysis, digression, reflections and 'gas'. I was now enamoured of it. Its very limitations of vocabulary became an attraction; as the hardness of the stone pleases the sculptor or the difficulty of the sonnets delights the sonneteer. -— Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966, pp. 35-37.) Althought I shall in the next installment of this series consider other ways of looking at the literary type to which the Chronicles belong, let us begin with the fairy tale. Fairy tales are, of course, folk tales in origin—"folk followed by such collectors as Sir Walter Scott and John Ley­ stories of supernatural events" suggests one reference book. den, whose Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border appeared in The precise definition does not matter greatly, for (as with 1802 and 1803. The popularity of these ballads led to artistic folk ballads) the type is recognized by the person who has imitations, suggested by the title of William Wordsworth's listened to the saying, of the tales or the singing of the ballads. and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's combined volume, Lyrical (Or, in these days, who has read the tales or heard the baL- Ballads, in 1798. In this volume, Wordsworth imitated lads on record.) The comparison of the fairy tales and the the style of the broadside ballads of the Renaissance and folk ballads is not an idle one, for collectors began their Seventeenth Century in such poems as "The Idiot Boy" and compilations of both types of popular literature about the "Goody Blake and Harry Gill: A True Story", while Cole­ same time, as public taste began to shift in the latter part ridge (with better taste) imitated the folk ballad in "The Rime of the eighteenth century toward a fascination with the prim ­ of the Ancient Mariner". Other English poets followed later itive which is one characteristic of the Romantic Movement. with other imitation ballads: John Keats in 1819 with "La Not the first but the most influential collection of English Belle Dame sans Merci", Alfred Tennyson in 1830 with. "The ballads appeared in 1765: Thomas Percy's Reliques of An­ Lady of Shalott", and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1851 or 1852 cient English Poetry. Percy (later an Anglican bishop) was with "Sister Helen" and in 1881 with "The King's Tragedy" (the latter in the manner of the Border Ballads). And, of 17 m f course, the wide-spread popularity (since my above list only names the most obvious examples) provoked less serious imitations: W.S. Gilbert's "The Yarn of the Nancy Bell (1866), Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussycat’ 1 (1871), and Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" (1872) and The Hunting of the Snark (1876)—the prevalence of sea stories in these parodies may suggest the influence of Coleridge's work on later imaginations. When discussing the fairy tale, unfortunately the pat­ tern cannot be traced so precisely. The first collector of importance was Charles Perrault (1628-1703), a Frenchman, whose volume of stories in 1697 was written in a sometimes polished style, with Morals added in verse which were often slightly cynical. He was, after all, writing at the time of Moliere and Racine, when Louis XIV was on the throne. The ies are very important in the development I am tracing, for history of the fairy tale in France in the eighteenth century they mark the shift from folk tales to literary tales. They is one of sophisticated retellings of folk m atter, Perrault, also had made their author famous by the early 1840's, and however, is important for giving us such stories as "Sleep­ in the course of visits to a number of European countries, ing Beauty", "Red Riding Hood", "Bluebeard", "Puss in he visited England, staying with Charles Dickens—hence his Boots", and "Cinderella"—it is, indeed, Perrault's version influence came quickly into England. of "CindereHa", not the more bloodthirsty version of the One other aspect of Anderson's fairy tales deserves Brothers Grimm, which we find established in our own day, notice, as preparation for the next step: this is that his stor­ ies vary greatly in length. Many are extremely short, being with the TV musical by Rogers and Hammerstein and the shorter than the average of those coUected by the Brother cartoon movie supervised by Walt Disney. (For more infor­ Grimm, but some are also extremely long, and often divided mation on these matters, with analysis of some of Perrault's into chapters. The longest I have read (but I have not read stories, see Goeffrey Brereton's introduction to his trans­ lation of Perrault in the Penguin Classics series.) nearly all) is "The Ice Maiden", which runs forty pages of fairly smaU print in the Modern Library Giant edition of The Brothers Grimm have just been mentioned: they Grimm and Anderson stories. But a better example of the were Jakob Grimm(1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786- type of story which points toward the Chronicles of Narnia 1859). Of the two, Jakob was the more scholarly and Wil­ helm the more literary, but they were complementary in is "The Snow Queen" (twenty-eight pages in the same edit­ their study of the German language and literature; they col­ ion). "The Ice Maiden" is too adult in its characters and lected folktales between 1807 and 1814, and published two too theological in its climax to be much like Lewis's stories: volum es, in 1812 (containing eig h ty -six sto rie s) and 1815 it is a Charles Williams fairy tale, if such can be imagined. (containing seventy). Their coUection contains such stories On the other hand, "The Snow Queen" has children as its as "Hansel and Gretel", "Briar Rose" (the German version protagonists and a series of adventures as its plot: the boy hitches his sled to the back of the Snow Queen's sleigh by of "Sleeping Beauty"), "Snow-White", and "Rumplestiltskin". mistake, and is taken off by her to her castle in the north Their stories were first translated into English in 1824 under and kept there; the girl goes in search of him and ultimately the title Popular Stories—presumably in the root meaning of rescues him.