IN THE Christmas season, we naturally return to favourite Christmas books, TV shows, and films: The Box of Delights, with its arcane magic and scrobbling in snowdrifts, centring on the attempt to hold the 1000th Christmas service at Tatchester Cathedral; The Wind in the Willows, with its mice singing carols outside a snug burrow; Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, in which the wintry charm of Hogwarts shows that Harry has finally found a place where he belongs. At first glance, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the most Christmassy classic of all.
It takes place in the kind of snowy landscape which the British imagination persists in associating with Christmas, despite the evidence of the weather. The villain of the book is a White Witch who has put the land of Narnia under a spell so that it is “always winter and never Christmas”. At least, never until she is opposed.
The children even meet Father Christmas, who gives them the kind of presents that fit them for heroic adventuring: a sword and shield, a bow, a hunting horn, a vial of healing potion. I would like to suggest, however, that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is not a Christmas book in quite the same way as the others.
The arrival of Father Christmas is an early sign in the novel that the power of the White Witch is weakening, and that the great lion Aslan is returning to Narnia. His presence releases the land from snowy desolation just as his breath returns to life those creatures whom the witch has turned to stone. The characters even happen upon a small festive banquet held by some squirrels and a fox, with food provided by Father Christmas.
This is not the heart of the book, however. The plot and the characters quickly move on, towards the larger story in the novel. Aslan’s arrival is followed by the bargain that he strikes with the witch, to save one of the children by substituting himself and dying in their place. He dies, killed by the witch on the Stone Table. The next morning the table cracks, and Aslan returns to life, then releases prisoners from the witch’s castle and joins the war against her army. As spring appears in the countryside, a royal saviour rises from death, and the people are set free, it becomes clear that we are not tracing the story of Christmas.
EASTER is the season that shapes most of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The triumphant final meal that takes place at the castle of Cair Paravel, as the children are crowned by Aslan, is not a cosy Christmas feast. For one thing, the doors of the great hall are deliberately left open, to allow the guests to hear the music of the merpeople beyond the shore. (It is not recorded that the coronation feast of the Narnian monarchs was continually interrupted by talking beasts yelling “Will somebody shut that door!”)
Throughout the novel, the sympathies of the characters (and the reader) have been moving away from snowy caves and towards warmer weather and sprouting flowers. The arrival of Aslan banishes the ice and snow: this is not a tale that encourages us to luxuriate in wintry landscapes.
The cosy eating in this novel, which we might associate with Christmas, is over fairly quickly. Lucy has an idealised sort of nursery tea with Mr Tumnus in his cave, involving toast and sardines and sugared cakes. Then she and her siblings have a homely meal of fish with Mr and Mrs Beaver as the snow lies thickly above the dam. These are some of the most memorable moments in the novel, but they are over before the book reaches its midpoint.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe moves us seamlessly through the Christian year by the way the plot develops. This echoes the style of a much older kind of Christian literature: the medieval carols and religious songs. C. S. Lewis was a prodigiously well-read scholar. and had a particular affection for medieval literature. The songs of the period repeatedly bind together images of the incarnation and the atonement in ways that seem to echo through Narnia.
One carol, for example, sets out to list the 12 days of Christmas and the subjects to remember on them, and begins thus:
The first day of Yule have we in mind,
How God was man born of our kind;
For he the bonds would unbind
Of all our sins and wickedness.
Another fairly rollicking carol celebrates the arrival of a figure it addresses as “Sire Christëmas”:
Goday, Sire Christëmas, our king,
For every man, both old and young,
Is glad and blithe of your coming.
The identity of the knight to be celebrated becomes clearer as the stanzas progress:
God’s son of so much might,
From heaven to earth down has alight,
And born is of a maid so bright.
Heaven and earth and also hell,
And all that ever in them dwell,
Of your coming they be full snell [eager];
Of your coming these clerks find:
You come to save all mankind,
And of their bonds them unbind,
The familiar imagery of “Adam lay ybounden”, with its depiction of mankind trapped in eternal winter until the arrival of the Saviour, is only one example of this medieval habit of mind. Lewis’s imagination apparently reacted to this symbolism when he came to invent his own fantastical world and plot his novel. His characters discover a Narnia which is literally locked in eternal winter, and in which the snowy landscape naturally turns towards the atonement.
The way that the Narnian seasons turn in response to Aslan’s arrival is also redolent of the medieval imagination. Another carol depicts the incarnation in these terms:
Out of the blossom sprang a thorn,
When God himself would be born;
He let us never be forlorn,
That born was of Mary.
The combination of “blossom” and “thorn” brings together Christ as the new flowering of life and the suffering of the Passion in one poignant image of spring. There is a single-stanza poem that begins “At a spring well under a thorn”, and which describes a maiden standing there, who provides a relief from pain, and within whom the source of true love can be found. It never mentions Jesus or Mary by name, but the imagery suggests a mysterious gesture to the incarnation and its effects.
This is the world of the medieval lyric, and it is one that C. S. Lewis knew very well. (Indeed, one of the volumes on my shelf, in which I first read several of these poems, includes Lewis’s name in its dedication.)
So, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is not quite a Christmas classic in the same way as we might think of The Box of Delights or A Christmas Carol. The feasting and the joy found in the depths of winter are certainly present in the first Narnia book. The story does not stop there, though. It carries the reader on without pausing, towards the Stone Table and the dawn rising above the sea. Or perhaps I should say that it binds those ideas into its image of Christmas. Its instinctive vision of Christmas is not Victorian and Dickensian, not the shining of candles on a tree in the corner of the room, or the frost on a brightly decorated shop window. It is an older and stranger sense of the season, which encompasses a knight called Sir Christmas, a thorn growing among the spring blossoms, and centuries of winter loosed by the mystery of love.
Lewis wrote a fantasy story that most of us automatically think of as a typical Christmas book, but it subtly reshapes what we might mean by that term. As so often in the Narnia stories, we are invited into a world in which we can enjoy the adventure, while our imagination is being enriched from deep and unexpected sources.
Jem Bloomfield is Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Nottingham, and a Reader in the Church of England. He is the author of Gold on the Horizon: A literary journey through” Prince Caspian” and “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, and Paths in the Snow: A literary journey through “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”, both published by DLT. He will be speaking at the 2025 Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature in Winchester. faithandliterature.hymnsam.co.uk