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Aslan
Aslan (Turkish: lion) is a speaking character in C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia. A noble lion and the King of Narnia, he appears in all seven books of the series and acts as an allegorical Christ figure. In the course of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Aslan is put to death in the place of a traitor, is subsequently resurrected, and makes occasional appearances in the remaining books of the series. He appears as the creator of Narnia in the prequel The Magician's Nephew. Throughout the series it is often repeated that he is "not a tame lion"; although at many times he is very gentle, loving and lovable, he is also powerful.
Those who have read the Chronicles with a faintly analytical eye have seen the correlation between Aslan and Christ. Lewis himself, in response to a young reader's letter, made comments that all but declare an Aslan / Christ correlation. Much of what Aslan says and does has some Biblical reference point.
The king and god of Narnia. The noble lion sacrifices his life so that the Witch will spare Edmund. After being resurrected the next morning, Aslan rises and defeats the White Witch once and for all. In the context of the book's Christian allegory, Aslan represents Christ.
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Peter Pevensie
Peter is the oldest of the Pevensie children, and he is noble and courageous. He matures into a young man during his first few days in Narnia. He immediately proves himself after protecting Susan from a ferocious wolf. Aslan knights him, and eventually crowns him the High King of Narnia. During his reign he is known as King Peter the Magnificent.
Peter Pevensie is a major character in C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia and is the oldest of the four Pevensie children. He appears in four of the seven books: in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian he is a principal character, and he makes brief but significant appearances in both The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle.
Even before entering Narnia, Peter demonstrates his strong moral fiber. Perhaps for this reason he undergoes the least development of the major characters; his experiences in Narnia serve primarily to strengthen his innate tendency towards humility and courage. Allegorically, he represents Christian maturity and discernment, as befitting his position as King Peter the Magnificent, High King of Narnia.
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Susan Pevensie
The second oldest of the Pevensie children, Susan is the beauty among the Pevensies. She is sweet and kind, and perhaps a little bland. Santa Claus gives her a horn to blow if she ever finds herself in a dangerous situation. When she becomes queen at Cair Paravel, she is known as Queen Susan the Gentle.
She was known for her great beauty and was sought after by Prince Rabadash of Calormen. After going to Narnia to help Prince Caspian she was told she would not return again. After some years she began to believe that Narnia was just a game and found her siblings silly to remember such childhood fancies.
In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Susan shows her excellence at archery, but is instructed to stay out of the battle unless it is absolutely necessary. Together with Lucy, she witnesses Aslan's death and resurrection. In The Horse and His Boy, Susan has a very minor part. As Queen Susan, she is courted by the Calmorene prince Rabadash. Her spurning of him provides the Tisroc with an excuse for war against Narnia.
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Edmund Pevensie
The third oldest Pevensie child, Edmund is a brat for most of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Edmund is spiteful and mean, and likes to tease his sister, Lucy. His greed for the enchanted Turkish Delight leads him to act as a traitor against his siblings. Edmund joins forces with the White Witch, but eventually sees the error of his ways and returns to the good side.
In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Edmund is one of the main characters. The omnipotent narrator, who seems rather sympathetic to Edmund in spite of himself, notes for the reader's benefit that he started to be mean and rather unbearable after he started attending a new school. He was cruel to Lucy when she first found the entrance to Narnia through the wardrobe, and was the second to go to Narnia after following Lucy to tease her. While there he met the White Witch and ate some enchanted Turkish Delight, which prompted an addiction in the person who ate it, causing him to promise the Witch that he would bring his siblings to her house, not knowing that she intended to kill them all.
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Lucy Pevensie
The youngest Pevensie is cheerful, kind, and brave. This curious, happy-go-lucky girl is the first of the children to venture into Narnia. Later, she urges her siblings to search for her friend, Tumnus, when they find that the faun's home is ransacked. In the beginning, she is the protagonist, although Aslan fills that role later in the novel. We view much of the action through her optimistic eyes, as a foil to the skeptical eyes as Edmund. Santa Claus gives Lucy a cordial, which she uses to heal the wounded following the battle with the Witch's troops. She is known as Queen Lucy the Valiant.
Lucy Pevensie is one of the major characters from C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. She is the youngest of the four Pevensie Children, and the first to find the Wardrobe entrance to Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Her siblings Peter Pevensie, Susan Pevensie, and Edmund Pevensie do not believe her at first, but later they all travel to Narnia and have wonderful adventures. She again travels to Narnia with her three siblings in Prince Caspian, and with Edmund and Cousin Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. As an allegorical figure she symbolises the Christian expression of the natural virtues of humankind, whether manifested as "childhood innocence" or in its more mature forms as depicted in the later stories.
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The White Witch
This evil queen of Narnia places a spell on the land so that it is winter and never Christmas. The Witch is the "Emperor's hangman," as Mr. Beaver says, and she has the right to kill any Narnian traitor. She wields a wand that turns creatures and people to stone. The wand also produces the Turkish Delight that enslaves Edmund and makes him greedy. The Witch kills Aslan, and it is only after he rises from the dead that he defeats her. Like any malicious character, the Witch, an embodiment of evil, could represent Satan, or she may be a servant of Satan.
The White Witch is the chief villain of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first published book in the Chronicles of Narnia. (The sixth published book was a prequel and is often called the "first" book of the series in modern editions.) The White Witch is the tyrant who has usurped power over the land of Narnia. She magically forced Narnia into a never-ending winter during her reign, which at the beginning of the book had lasted for 100 years (indeed, an alternate title for the book was The Hundred Year Winter). Even though it had been winter for 100 years, there had never been a Christmas in those 100 years. A common lament of the Narnians in that time was that it was "Always winter, but never Christmas!"
The White Witch was very magically powerful in her own world, but found her magic largely useless in other worlds. In Narnia she got her magic power mostly from a wand. With her wand, she could turn anyone to stone. Her Castle, the seat of her rule over Narnia, was littered throughout with stone statues frozen in horrified poses, which on closer inspection were people and animals that she had turned to stone.
The White Witch's minions were composed of a large variety of evil magic creatures, but predominant among them were the wolves (which, like many animals in Narnia, can talk) and the black-bearded dwarves.
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Mr. Beaver
Mr. Beaver is Tumnus's friend, and he aids the Pevensie children in the search for the petrified faun. Mr. Beaver introduces the Pevensies to Santa Claus and ultimately brings them to the Stone Table and Aslan.
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Tumnus
Lucy meets Tumnus, a faun, on her first excursion into Narnia. He initially intends to kidnap her and bring her to the White Witch. Tumnus does not go through with it, and he spares her life. For his crime, the Witch ransacks his home and petrifies him. Later, Aslan rescues Tumnus from the spell. Kind, sensitive, and caring, Tumnus and Lucy become fast friends once it is settled that he is not going capture her. He also makes a mean cup of tea.
Mr. Tumnus - In the C.S. Lewis's fictional world of Narnia, Mr. Tumnus is a faun in the story The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. He is sometimes referred to as 'Faun Tumnus', and is described as having reddish skin, curly hair, horns on his forehead, cloven hooves, and a long tail that he carries over his arm.
Tumnus is an advisor to the four Kings and Queens of Narnia during the Golden Age. He travels with Susan and Edmund to Tashbaan in The Horse and His Boy where, when necessary, he is able to devise a plan by which they can escape from the city back to Narnia. He greets Lucy in the New Narnia in The Last Battle.
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C. S. Lewis: A Modest Literary Biography
Dr. Bruce L. Edwards
Department of English
Bowling Green State University
Reprinted with permission from the author
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland on November 29, 1898, Clive Staples ("Jack") Lewis was reared in a peculiarly bookish home, one in which the reality he found on the pages of the books within his parents' extensive library seemed as tangible and meaningful to him as anything that transpired outside their doors. As adolescents, Lewis and his older brother, Warren, were more at home in the world of ideas and books of the past, than with the material, technological world of the 20th Century. When the tranquility and sanctity of the Lewis home was shattered beyond repair by the death of his mother when he was ten, Lewis sought refuge in composing stories and excelling in scholastics. Soon thereafter he became precociously oriented toward the metaphysical and ultimate questions.
The rest of his saga and the particulars of his writing career might be seen as the melancholy search for the security he had took granted during the peace and grace of his childhood. By Lewis's testimony, this recovery was to be had only in the "joy" he discovered in an adult conversion to Christianity. Long-time friend and literary executor of the Lewis estate, Owen Barfield has suggested that there were, in fact, three "C. S. Lewises." That is to say, during his lifetime Lewis fulfilled three very different vocations-- and fulfilled them successfully. There was, first, Lewis the distinguished Oxbridge literary scholar and critic; second, Lewis, the highly acclaimed author of science fiction and children's literature; and thirdly, Lewis, the popular writer and broadcaster of Christian apologetics. The amazing thing, Barfield notes, is that those who may have known of Lewis in any single role may not have known that he performed in the other two. In a varied and comprehensive writing career, Lewis carved out a sterling reputation as a scholar, a novelist, and a theologian for three very different audiences.
No brief summary can thus do justice to the many and varied works Lewis produced in his lifetime between 1919-1961. Indeed, more Lewis volumes--collection of essays, chiefly--have appeared after his death than during his lifetime. A sampling of the range and depth of his achievements in criticism, fiction, and apologetics might begin, however, with the first books Lewis published, two volumes of poetry: Spirits in Bondage, published in 1919 when Lewis was but 23, and his long narrative poem, Dymer, published in 1926. Neither were critical successes, convincing the classically trained Lewis that he would never become an accomplished poet given the rise of modernism; subsequently he turned his attention to literary history, specifically the field of medieval and renaissance literature. Along the way, however, Lewis embraced Christianity, and in 1933, published his first theological work, The Pilgrim's Regress, a parody of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, that details Lewis's flight from skepticism to faith in a lively allegory.
In 1936, Lewis published the breakthrough work that earned him his reputation as a scholar, The Allegory of Love, a work of high-calibre, original scholarship that revolutionized literary understanding of the function of allegory in medieval literature, particularly Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. Between 1939 and 1954, Lewis continued to publish well-received works in criticism and theory, debating E. M. W. Tillyard on the objectivity of poetry in The Personal Heresy, published in 1939, and in that same year publishing a collection of essays under the title Rehabilitations--a work whose title characterized much of Lewis's work, as he attempted to bring the fading critical reputation of authors he revered back into balance. In 1942, his A Preface to Paradise Lost attempted to rehabilitate the reputation of John Milton, while in 1954, he offered a comprehensive overview of 16th-century British poetry and narrative in his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.
Lewis is best known, however, for his fiction and his Christian apologetics, two disciplines complementary to each other within his oeuvre. In 1936, Lewis completed the first book in a science-fiction space trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, that introduced the hero, Edwin Ransom, a philologist modeled roughly on Lewis's friend, J. R. R. Tolkien. Perelandra, a new version of Paradise Lost set in Venus, followed in 1943, and That Hideous Strength completed the trilogy in 1945; the latter Lewis billed as "a fairy tale for adults," treating novelistically of the themes Lewis had developed in his critique of modern education in The Abolition of Man, published two years earlier. Lewis's most notable critical and commercial success, however, is certainly his seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia, which he published in single volumes from 1950-56. These popular children's fantasies began with the 1950 volume, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a tale centered around Aslan the lion, a Christ-figure who creates and rules the supernatural land of Narnia, and the improbable adventures of four undaunted British schoolchildren who stumble into Narnia through a clothes closet. Lewis's own favorite fictional work, Till We Have Faces, his last imaginative work, published in 1956, is a retelling of the Cupid/Psyche myth, but has never achieved the critical recognition he hoped it would.
Lewis's reputation as a winsome, articulate proponent of Christianity began with the publication of two important theological works: The Problem of Pain, a defense of pain--and the doctrine of hell-- as evidence of an ordered universe, published in 1940; and The Screwtape Letters, a "interception" of a senior devil's correspondence with a junior devil fighting with "the Enemy," Christ, over the soul of an unsuspecting believer, published in 1942. Lewis emerged during the war years as a religious broadcaster who became famous as "the apostle to skeptics," in Britain and abroad, especially in the United States. His wartime radio essays defending and explaining the Christian faith comforted the fearful and wounded, and were eventually collected and published in America as Mere Christianity in 1952. In the midst of this prolific output, Lewis took time to write his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, published in 1955. In the two decades before his death, Lewis published more than eight books that directly or indirectly served him in the task of apologetics and he is arguably the most important Christian writer of the 20th Century.
A prolific and popular author, Lewis's criticism, fiction, and religious essays stay in print, and are continually reprinted in various bindings and new collections. Lewis's life and work have been also the focus of countless books since his death in 1963. Ironically, though, Lewis may eventually suffer the same fate as other authors he himself "rehabilitated" during his scholarly career. Surfeited by volume after volume of analysis, paraphrase, and critique, Lewis's own canon may be dwarfed by secondary sources, an attitude he opposed all of his life in reading others. As it stands, both his fiction and theological writings have been endlessly and hyper-critically explored, creating a trail of footnotes and asides long enough to camouflage the essential viewpoints and facts about his life -- thus discouraging even the most diligent student of Lewis. It must be said that Lewis's own works remain the most reliable source and insightful interpreter of this original thinker and personality.
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