I read The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe when I was young enough I didn't realise it was Christian allegory (helped by having atheist parents & not studying the Bible at all until I was a teenager), and the rest as soon as my pocket money stretched.
I think Lewis is writing in a tradition of English children's lit that stretches back to the Victorian era, cosy fantasy (and non-fantasy) that's always rooted in the domestic, with a firm narrator's voice that doesn't shrink from directly addressing the reader (E. Nesbit is an obvious early example). It's not a tradition that I'm particularly fond of now, as an adult, but it dominated the older children's fic I read as a kid. It's entirely different from what Tolkien is doing in LotR, which was written for adults and draws on Norse myth rather than Victorian/Edwardian children's fantasy. (The Hobbit is more in the other tradition.)
I never much liked Susan because she's beautiful -- I've always had a problem with beautiful heroines.
Lewis's intention, afaik, is that Aslan is the Narnian incarnation of Jesus, which makes Aslan's rejection of Susan in The Last Battle utterly incomprehensible to me & many others -- hence the minority fanon that Aslan is actually evil.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2014-10-01 08:26 pm (UTC)I think Lewis is writing in a tradition of English children's lit that stretches back to the Victorian era, cosy fantasy (and non-fantasy) that's always rooted in the domestic, with a firm narrator's voice that doesn't shrink from directly addressing the reader (E. Nesbit is an obvious early example). It's not a tradition that I'm particularly fond of now, as an adult, but it dominated the older children's fic I read as a kid. It's entirely different from what Tolkien is doing in LotR, which was written for adults and draws on Norse myth rather than Victorian/Edwardian children's fantasy. (The Hobbit is more in the other tradition.)
I never much liked Susan because she's beautiful -- I've always had a problem with beautiful heroines.
Lewis's intention, afaik, is that Aslan is the Narnian incarnation of Jesus, which makes Aslan's rejection of Susan in The Last Battle utterly incomprehensible to me & many others -- hence the minority fanon that Aslan is actually evil.