"Narnia:" Inside C. S. Lewis's Mythological Mashup

Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News

December 9, 2005

The new movie Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe opens today in theaters across North America. But well
before its release, the film had sparked a lively debate about author C.
S. Lewis's religious influences in writing the beloved children's books
on which the movie is based.

That may not be surprising to many C. S. Lewis fans. The story about four children who walk through a wardrobe to enter the magical world of Narnia plays out as a Christian allegory. In addition, another main character is a messianic lion.

However, Lewis himself said he didn't set out to write a Christian story, but simply a great children's tale. His creative influences, at least at the outset, were not Christian, but various mythologies from early cultures.

The world of Narnia is populated mainly by talking animals. But it also includes mythological creatures and figures, such as fauns, nymphs, dryads, Bacchus, and Silenus from the Greek and Roman traditions, and dwarfs and giants from Norse mythology.

To bring Narnia's characters to life, Richard Taylor, the movie's creature design supervisor, had to draw on a vast array of mythological societies and doctrines spanning more than 2,000 years.

"C. S. Lewis developed a world that is drawing on a rich culture of mythology, which has very strong pictorial representation through art, sculpture, and design," Taylor said in a phone interview from New Zealand, where his WETA workshop is based.

"Things as diverse as porcelain from the Grecian era, mosaics, bronze castings, marble carvings, sculptures, illustrative paintings—all of these influences we used to source and find the most appropriate mythological representation of a particular character or culture in Narnia."

Breaking the Spell

Born in Belfast, Ireland, C. S. Lewis later fought in World War I. A scholar on Christianity and medieval literature, he taught at Oxford University in England for three decades.

In 1950 Lewis wrote The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the first of seven children's fantasy books collectively entitled The Chronicles of Narnia. The series became hugely popular and has to date sold an estimated 85 million copies.

One person who did not like the Narnia books was one of Lewis's colleagues and closest friends, J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of the The Lord of the Rings books.

Tolkien, who relied heavily on Norse mythology for Rings, thought a fantasy world worked best when its mythology was self-enclosed. Encountering figures from different traditions in the same story would break the spell of the fairy tale, Tolkien argued.

"So when Lewis brought in fauns and centaurs … and even Father Christmas, it just set Tolkien's teeth on edge," said Alan Jacobs, an English professor at Wheaton College in Illinois and author of The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis.

Lewis defended his use of different mythologies.

"He called [them] 'good dreams' that God sent humankind to prepare them for the 'true myth,' which, for Lewis, was the incarnation," said Bruce Edwards, an English professor and Lewis expert at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. "He believed myths were not legends but alternate histories that echoed our mysterious past."

Lewis especially loved Norse and Icelandic myths, which he fell in love with as a child through the Longfellow adaptations of Norse tales and through Richard Wagner's operas.

He also had a very deep knowledge of ancient Greek literature. As a teenager he translated whole Greek tragedies, and that mythology shaped him more and more as he got older.

Inspired Designs

For Taylor, the creature designer, who also worked on the Lord of the Rings movies, Tolkien's and Lewis's divergent uses of mythology shaped his design work.

"Tolkien documented with a fantastical spin a very, very strict historical reality on the world of a medieval past, primarily from Nordic influences," Taylor said. "What that created was a sort of bible for us. We could literally turn to the written word of Tolkien when we got stuck."

Lewis, in contrast, didn't use such historical references. His world was created to resemble a childhood dream state.

"Therefore, many of the rules that would dictate that world were in some way let go, because a childhood dream state is one of immense flexibility and creativity," said Taylor. For the movie, his team designed 68 mythological creatures compared to the 10 cultures they developed for Lord of the Rings.

At first, Taylor's team broke away from the historical representation of Narnia's mythological creatures to try to come up with their own designs. After six months, they realized that approach wasn't working.

"What Lewis had done [was to draw] … on a very strict back history of art that he had seen in his own past," Taylor said. "So … we tried to find the same source material that had inspired him, and draw directly from that."

The design of the movie's centaurs—creatures with the head, arms, and trunk of a man and the body and legs of a horse—became an amalgam of all the different centaurs that had been sculpted or illustrated through primarily the Grecian period.

The team's favorite centaur representation turned out to be a bronze statue belonging to stop animator Ray Harryhausen, who keeps a large collection of Grecian bronzes in his London home.

Taylor, who grew up on a beef cattle farm in New Zealand, says his favorite creatures are the minotaurs, bulls that stand upright like a man. In Narnia, Otmin is the minotaur general of the evil witch's army and a formidable warrior, much like his counterpart in Greek mythology.

"They actually have the most beautiful armor of any culture in the whole of Narnia," Taylor said.

To create the textural motifs seen in the armor, his team used an Italian Renaissance technique known as repuso in which chisels and bars are used to beat the steel armor out from behind to create elaborate sculptural shapes.

Classic Fairy Tales

In an essay called It All Started with a Picture, C. S. Lewis said his vision of Narnia began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella in a snowy wood, an image that had been in his head since he was 17 years old.

The faun, a goat-man hybrid, is celebrated in almost every mythology stretching back more than 2,000 years. In the beginning of Narnia, a faun named Mr. Tumnus befriends the young girl who first steps into the magical world.

The character presented Taylor with a dilemma.

"We visualized him as the keeper of innocence and the giver of friendship. But a faun by its very nature also has strong satyr overtones," Taylor said, referring to a Greek mythological demon figure with pointy ears and devilish eyes.

"He can't be seen as the naked-chested male leading the little girl down the forest path to his home," he said. "His character must transform any form of overtone toward male predatory feel and become so childlike that you accept him as a savior in the world of Narnia."

Some of the creatures are drawn from classic fairy tales of witches, goblins, and ghouls. Nymphs and dryads (nature and tree spirits) are found in Shakespeare's writings.

"For fantasy purists like Tolkien, the eclecticism of the Narnian world is a serious hindrance," said Peter Schakel, an English professor at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, who has studied the life and works of C. S. Lewis. "But for general readers, Lewis's eclecticism and inclusiveness become one of the primary attractions of the series."

"The sense of strangeness and wonder such readers experience as they read the Chronicles derives precisely from the magical reality they experience as they find in that world figures they know to be only mythical in our world" Schakel added. "That magical effect is heightened, not diminished, by the mixing of figures from different traditions."

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