Planet Narnia

I am a big Narnia fan.  Really big.  As in, “I named my firstborn after a character in the series” big.  As in, “When I saw a guy playing Prince Caspian in a parade at Disneyland I cried and wanted to kneel” big.

I knew there were other fans out there, but I guess I assumed I was unique.

(I should hasten to add that when I say I am a Narnia fan, I am referring to the books.  I like the movies, but they are, in my mind, a separate entity.)

Imagine my delight when I learned that there are other fans out there–fans who are much more serious than I.

Michael Ward must be such a fan.  (Though I can’t picture him crying at the site of an actor playing Prince Caspian in a parade.  I’m pretty sure I’m the only fan weird enough to do that.)  His newest book is called Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis and it’s well worth a read.

There have been numerous attempts to discover the theme that unifies the seemingly incoherent Chronicles.  These attempts have always puzzled me because, while I understand the objections, Lewis’ work feels coherent to me.  Not being a fan of feelings-based literary criticism, my reaction saddened me a little, but I’ve never been able to shake the impression that the Narnia tales do tie together in some way I can’t quite express.

As it turns out, this intuition of mine has a lot of very strong textual backing.

Ward suggests that the each of the Narnia books was written to illustrate one of seven ancient planetary archetypes; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for example, was written to exemplify the traditional character of the planet Jupiter.  Prince Caspian is a Mars story, and so on.

In a recent address to the Torrey Honors Institute Ward stated that his first inkling of this theory came while reading over The Planets, one of Lewis’ poems.  The following lines in the poem’s description of Jupiter caught his eye:

Of wrath ended

And woes mended, of winter passed

And guilt forgiven, and good fortune

Jove is master…

Sound familiar?  It should–these lines very effectively summarize the first volume of the Chronicles.  What if Lewis did this on purpose?  What if he carried out this cosmological theme through every volume in the series?  Decades after the publication of these books it appears that that is exactly what he did.

Why did it take so long for someone to figure this out?  For the same reason that my intuition discussed above was so vague.  But in the words of the immortal Levar Burton, “Don’t take my word for it.”

Go read the book–and let me know what you think.