It all started, we’re told, with a picture of a faun, walking through a snowy wood and carrying some parcels and an umbrella. The image had come to C.S. Lewis when he was 16 years old, and many years later it became the seed of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—which, incidentally, celebrates its anniversary today, having been published on October 16, 1950.
It’s a strange scene, symbolic of the wonderful mythological hodgepodge that passes for Narnia’s worldbuilding. In most myths up until that point, fauns weren’t particularly child-friendly, known mostly as symbols of fertility or followers of the wise drunkard Silenus. We definitely wouldn’t expect them to be trotting along with an umbrella and parcels (we’re never told what’s in those parcels or where they came from). Mr. Tumnus (that’s the polite little faun’s name) also has a long tail which he drapes over his arm…an odd detail for someone who is half goat.
Lewis’s disregard for cohesive worldbuilding was cause for critique among a number of his friends. J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t appreciate the mythological jumble. Poet Ruth Pitter complained that if it’s always winter in Narnia, the Beaver family shouldn’t be able to grow potatoes or serve fresh marmalade rolls. In fact, Lewis burned an earlier draft of something similar to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe because, “It was, by the unanimous verdict of my friends, so bad that I destroyed it.”
But he kept coming back to that civilized little faun. After the critical savaging of the original draft, Lewis didn’t show The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to many people, and he didn’t read it to his band of literary friends, the Inklings. He read it to Tolkien, who categorically disliked it specifically (again) because of the jumble. Lewis objected that all these characters interacted perfectly well in our minds, and Tolkien said, “Not in mine, or at least not at the same time.” If he hadn’t received some encouragement from an old pupil he trusted, Roger Green, Lewis said he might not have finished the book at all.
It’s not at all astonishing that people might object to Lewis’s crazy mix of mythological traditions. There are Greek and Roman gods (in a later book the Pevensie children even attend a Bacchanalia, which seems, well, ill-advised in a children’s book), Norse giants and dwarves, a lion named Aslan who suggests he just might be Jesus Christ, and of course our good friend Father Christmas. When we start pushing out beyond the mythological we pull in other influences, as well: Tolkien’s Middle-earth, which Lewis heard bits of long before anyone else, certainly flavors things here and there. Charles Williams’s neo-Platonic 1931 fantasy novel In the Place of the Lion almost certainly influenced the arrival of Aslan. And of course E. Nesbit—whose fantastic children’s stories Lewis enjoyed—wrote a short story called “The Aunt and Amabel” in which Amabel discovers a magical wardrobe that transports people to another world (and this wardrobe is, like Lewis’s, situated in the spare room).
Further details are taken straight from his life, of course, whether it’s the children being sent to stay with the old professor during the war (Lewis hosted several at that time), or even everyone’s favorite Pevensie child being named Lucy (after his godchild Lucy Barfield, daughter of poet and Inkling Owen Barfield).
I didn’t notice any of this as a kid. It didn’t bother me that everyone keeps calling the humans “Sons of Adam” and “Daughters of Eve” or that most of the animals could talk, or that Santa showed up in the same story as a white stag who can grant wishes and an ice queen and a dwarf who seem straight out of some sort of Norse mythology. And why would I? I was a kid. Which is to say that the mixed up worldbuilding of Lewis, which is seen as a great failure by some adults, is largely invisible to many children.
As a kid I’d mix my Star Wars and G.I. Joe and Transformer action figures into grand, sweeping adventures (and one Tron action figure, plus a knock-off Planet of the Apes ape astronaut). Depending on which friends were around, we might throw in some He-Man or little green plastic army guys, or Barbie dolls (at my godsister’s house, Barbie had been dating Spider-Man for quite a while). I wasn’t worried about their IP getting mixed up or whether Cobra Commander and Darth Vader could really get along long enough to plan something truly evil. I just wanted the story to be fun.
It seems to me that the confused mythology of Narnia is a feature, not a bug. Lewis is pulling in anything and everything that has meaning to him and patching it all together into some new myth. He and Tolkien were both interested in creating a new mythic story—it’s just that Tolkien was weaving his mythology from whole cloth, and Lewis was putting together a quilt, taking snatches of this or that mythology to make something that resonated with him as both new and true.
So, yes, he cuts out the sex from the fauns and the Bacchanalia, because that’s not the element of their mythology that he finds of interest. He tweaks Father Christmas so that he becomes a figure on par with the minor gods of Narnia. He ignores inconvenient plot points like the fact that food might be pretty hard to get in a country where it has been winter for years and years. He’s doing all this to move us toward the parts of the story that he finds most compelling: there is a broken world full of winter and traitors and evil creatures, but spring is coming…and we can be part of that heroic progression.
The underlying cohesion of Lewis’s world-building isn’t, like many of us might prefer, a watertight world with a central logic to it. That kind of world is for adults. Lewis’s world is a child’s world, where myths mix and overlap, where what is true and what is magical might be the same thing, where there is uncertainty when your sister says, “I found a fantasy world hidden in the furniture.”
In his essay “Myth Made Fact” Lewis explains the underlying rationale for why he would mash together any myth or symbol that rang true to him. He wrote, “… myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with the vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular.” Myth transcends thought, and Lewis believed that what resonated in, as he would say, “Pagan myth” was reality itself. Truth could be found in it, but to read a myth searching for truth would cause you to miss the point because you would lean into abstractions. One must experience the myth as story to have a concrete experience of the reality it represents.
Lewis’s criteria of mythical inclusion boiled down to whether this or that myth gave him an insight, an experience of the deep truths which are the foundation of the world. He expected that if a myth was true, one would expect to see echoes and parallels of it in other myths as well. In fact, he was skeptical of theological constructs which didn’t have mythical parallels.
I love the strange world of Narnia, with its mishmash of gods and myths. I loved the moment of walking into the wardrobe to discover another world, the friendly faun, the snow queen and her dwarf servant, and yes, the talking animals like the Beaver family. But then, I first read it as a child, without much thought and certainly not with a critical eye. I was enveloped in the story, not looking for underlying meaning. And I think that’s the way Lewis wanted us to read it: as story first. It’s a specific kind of reading that must come when one is young, or when one has been able to move past the need for critical engagement with the text. As Lewis says in the dedication to Lucy Barfield, “One day you would be old enough to start reading fairytales again.”
In our next installment we’ll take a look at the great lion Aslan (who, by the way, isn’t even mentioned in this novel until a full third of the way through), who the author assures us is Definitely Not an Allegory. Until then keep an eye out because, as the Beaver family tells us, Aslan is on the move!
Matt Mikalatos is the author of the YA fantasy The Crescent Stone. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on Facebook.
Lewis may have played fast and loose with his myths, but he had a very strict, literary definition of allegory. To him, an allegory was something like the Faerie Queene with layers and layers of a strict one-on-one mapping all through. By that definition, Narnia is not an allegory. I’m not sure he ever understood why so many people insisted it was
I first encountered Jack’s works during a family reading at age 6 in 1982. I thought it fit beautifully with my other loves; Bullfinch’s Myths, Sunday School and Doctor Who. I later attended Wheaton College, one of two U.S. colleges to have received a wardrobe from the Lewis estate upon his death. I don’t think it occurred to me to read it critically until I took a Modern Mythology course at the above-mentioned school.
Interesting idea between a set-in-stone, taught mythology, like ancient Greek or Roman, or what Tolkien was building in his fantasy world, and a dynamic, ever-changing patchwork of living “mythology,” which we can recognize in our modern belief structures. Lewis appears to have been reacting to how people actually treat mythology. It could explain why Lewis included Father Christmas because of how the idea of Santa has already been interwoven into a Christian religious holiday, but the two traditions are not considered discordant.
Have you read Michael Ward’s “Planet Narnia”? He’s got this interesting hypothesis that each book (and its mythological references/characters) corresponds to a planet in medieval cosmology. It’s a little bit bonkers how well some of the elements line up (particularly the case for Horse and His Boy as Mercury). http://www.planetnarnia.com/ Ward seems to think the mishmash of mythologies can kind of be explained by the philosophical underpinning of that system.
Another example of this is the children growing into adulthood in Narnia, then reverting back to childhood when they return to Earth. Er, spoiler alert. Kids have no problem with this, but an adult could be horrified at the idea.
So, basically, Narnia is just crossover fanfiction?
@1 Yes, exactly. It seemed self-evident to Lewis and I think it exasperated him to explain it all the time.
@2 Thanks for sharing that! That’s really interesting.
@3 I’m hoping to do a full article about Father Christmas in December, exploring a little bit how we get the more adventure oriented saint who brings gifts of war. It’s actually not a far cry from some of the Christian “northern myths” of Father Christmas, so I think you’re right.
@@.-@ Yes! I think his work is compelling and almost certainly correct… and will help us in some of the later books when we get to some weird moments (Aslan encouraging teachers to be chased with whips?!).
@5 Oh wow, yes. Great example. Didn’t bother me at all as a kid.
@6 Bahahahahahaha I love that.
“He and Tolkien were both interested in creating a new mythic story—it’s just that Tolkien was weaving his mythology from whole cloth, and Lewis was putting together a quilt, taking snatches of this or that mythology to make something that resonated with him as both new and true.”
Oh, I liked that description! Really enjoyed reading your piece, so full of insights. Thank you.
I loved reading this. I have read Narnia books to all my nephews who would sit still to listen. I often make up stories for them, using lots of sources for characters and plots. I’ve always been a little ashamed I couldn’t come up with my own original ideas, but now I know I was just following the example of one of my favorite authors.
So, maybe, I will now actually write down those stories about Sir Knight in Shining Armor, White Horse George, and the Talking Sword of Blue Light as they fight for right by convincing dragons to act as the village bakery oven, help Hercules tame Cerberus by pulling a bad tooth, changing the evil Transformer into a good Transformer by switching out his corroded battery for a green rechargeable one, or teaming up with Moana and Lilo to rescue Stitch from the curse of the Goddess of the Red Poison Flower Tree after Stitch left a stinky gift on her roots. (Little boys- whatcha gonna do?!)
@8 Thank you!
@9 Ha! My dad did that when we were kids. He used to let me and my sisters each pick one character and then he’d make a story. So it would be, like, Han Solo, Strawberry Shortcake, and Rainbow Sparkle.
Great article. I loved the Narnia books as a child. My library was missing Dawn Treader and Magician’s Nephew, so the librarian lent me her children’s copies, who had since grown up and moved out. A special memory from my childhood.
I didn’t know about Tolkien’s critique of LWW. It really seems like Lewis was way more supportive than Tolkien. When Tolkien gave Lewis his incomplete Lay of Leithian (The Beren and Luthien story in verse), he gushed over it, and said he loved reading it, and not just because he was reading a friend’s work, but would have loved it as much if he had picked it up off a shelf in a bookstore. Even his critique of certain parts was done in a very non confrontational way; he wrote a very ingenious and funny critique, as if the Lay was an old myth made up of translations by various scribes. In this way he could criticize certain areas without offending his friend. Tolkien took most of these points to heart and changed the Lay accordingly, much to it’s improvement. When Tolkien was writing LotR, Lewis supported him every step of the way and kept encouraging him to finish it. I think without Lewis’ support, LotR would have been one more of Tolkien’s endless unfinished works.
But, when Lewis reads LWW to his friend, Tolkien dislikes it…twice, and calls it a mythological jumble!!! Man, what a downer. I’m glad he got someone else to review it and proceeded to publish it anyway.
Mixing Christianity with multiple miscellaneous mythologies is an English-language tradition going back (at least!) to Shakespeare; as a kid who grew up on a lot of 19thC British childrens’ lit, including Nesbitt, it seemed completely normal to me. And although I wasn’t raised religous, I never had the sense of betrayal that other (maybe mostly American?) kids had when the Aslan Is Jesus stuff came in. I was just like ah, here’s Jesus I guess– books are like that sometimes.
I didn’t read any of the Narnia books until a junior in college, where we were doing LWW as children’s theater one spring. (I played Tumnus, everyone insisting I was type cast…) Our director bought a version of it as a play, and after the first scene, found it was so bad, that he just wrote an adaptation himself. We would get a new scene (from a chapter) each day in rehearsal. Loved doing it, esp. with a negative budget. We created everything from leftovers and recycled trash. Even took it on the road, and performed parts of it at a couple of elementary schools!
Even at college age, I didn’t have any problem with the mashed up mythology. I had read LotR once a year since my freshman year in high school, and just found this entertaining. Before the play was over, I had read the entire Narnia series and have reread it several times since. It never fails to delight…
Matt, thanks for kicking off this road trip. Question: where do you see the flavors of Tolkien in Narnia? Maybe in the parts with such gravity (like references to Old Magic) that seem to refer to deep mysteries with untold backstories? Or did you have something else in mind?
The aspect of this that I always appreciated from Lewis was that it served as gateway for curiosity about the patches of his quilt. No one wants to be like Eustace Scrubb who has read all the wrong sorts of books. Much of my interest in myths of all kinds is due to running across something in Narnia.
Lewis’ mixing of mythologies didn’t bother me, and really doesn’t strike me as that uncommon in children’s fantasy. I do sort of see a difference between incorporating types of mythical beings, like fauns and dwarves, and specific individuals like Bacchus or Father Christmas. And when we see Narnia’s origins, the latter aren’t accounted for at all. But then, I guess gods don’t always have to obey the rules.
Tolkien’s criticism of Narnia seems a little weird when you consider that he wrote about Catholic-friendly versions of pagan deities. A more significant difference between them seems to be that Tolkien was constantly revising to make things fit (even after publication, as with the Gollum incident), while Lewis was very loose with such matters.
I loved this. I could never articulate why I was never bothered either by the mish-mash of myths and the inconsistencies, but this does it.
On “he leaves out the sex”, I find it particularly interesting to note how in the Creation (in The Magician’s Nephew) I think he comes the closest to mentioning it of anywhere in the books, and it is very biological (“It made you want to rush at people and either hug them or fight them.“)
“But now the song had once more changed. It was more like what we should call a tune, but it was also far wilder. It made you want to run and jump and climb. It made you want to shout. It made you want to rush at people and either hug them or fight them. It made Digory hot and red in the face. It had some effect on Uncle Andrew, for Digory could hear him saying, ‘A spirited gel, sir. It’s a pity about her temper, but a dem fine woman all the same, a dem fine woman.’”
@11 Tolkien didn’t love much of Lewis’s work. He felt pretty uncomfortable with “Screwtape Letters” — which is dedicated to him! — because he felt that (a) Lewis should spend a little more time getting to know his faith before writing all about how things worked and (b) because he thought the spiritual world was a serious matter that should be approached with more care. In general, though, Tolkien wasn’t easy to please in modern literature!
@12 Hm. That’s an interesting question about the American kids being the ones upset about Jesus-Aslan. I’ll have to look into that.
@13. Ha! Love it!
@14. Hey Dave! Great question. It gets complicated quickly since Tolkien spent so long working on his books, and we can’t just glance at the publication date and see when Lewis had access… and they both loved some of the same sources, so there are places where it could look like one is influencing the other, but it’s just that they love the same books. But I have to say Puddleglum certainly has some similarity with Tolkien’s dwarves (although Lewis said he was based on his gardener). Tolkien is said to have occasionally mentioned that he felt Lewis was lifting things from his work, but the only documented evidence I can find of him saying that first hand is in reference to the names in Perelandra.
@15 I suspect that would make Lewis very, very pleased.
@16 Good point. Lewis definitely messed with thing post publication on occasion (someone mentioned last week about the relatively significant differences of the American and British versions of the first Narnia book) but honestly I think the fact that he had another book coming up in a few months may have kept him from doing that more.
@17 Oh wow. I never saw that paragraph quite like that but now that you point it out and now that I’m an adult, well. I see that much more clearly.
Tolkien also objected to having big G God directly in Lewis’s stories. Tolkien thought you should show the hand of God.
@1: “I’m not sure he ever understood why so many people insisted it was”
Oh, I’m pretty sure he grasped that most people don’t understand terminology outside their specialties. It’s a problem he suffered from himself.
I didn’t read the series till I was an adult. As an adult I had some issues with it I probably would not have had as a child, but I do reread it now and then. I’ve often thought how weird it would be to be zapped back into childhood after being an adult – and then return to the world where you had been an adult, with memories of your adult years! Probably a good thing Susan didn’t get married in that world.
Joy Chant’s children’s book and portal fantasy Red Moon, Black Mountain had a character who arrived as a young boy, became a great warrior, sacrificed himself and returned to our world – as a child again. There were elements of Narnia in it, though it had more of a Tolkien flavour.
@19 – yes, I too feel that Tolkien doesn’t hit you over the head with the religion the way Lewis does. I admit kids would be less likely to notice it, but then I was an adult when I read LOTR too and it wasn’t till my second reading that I noticed!
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is one of the books I read first so long ago, so young, I cannot remember exactly when I did. The mixed-up mythologies didn’t bother me initially, until – I think – I was about ten, and was reading more and more mythologies – I’d had a nodding acquaintance with Greek myths via Roger Lancelyn Green for almost as long as Narnia, but the more widely I read the less happy I was with Nania’s mixed bag – and Father Christmas (and “always winter, never Christmas”) still affronts me.
But as you promise a post specifically for discussion of Father Christmas in Narnia, I’ll save my thoughts for that.
One thing I will note:
I was brought up a Christian: I knew the BIble possibly more thoroughly than other mythologies, and my parents took me to church on Sundays. (I became an atheist as a teenager, but as a child when I was reading Narnia, I believed in God and Christianity as comfortably as one does any unchallenged belief.)
I knew Narnia, and I knew Christian mythology. But: I had to have the Christian allegory of Narnia explained to me. I didn’t get it until I read an essay outlining it, when I was in my late teens I think, and then I went back and re-read the books (I had read all seven of them before I was eleven: I recall being told about Lewis’s science-fiction and being all agog “There’s MORE?” though I didn’t’ find them for two or three years) and when I re-read them, I could quite see how Lewis had carefully worked in references to Christian mythology, quite carefully and clearly when you knew what to look for.
But until someone told me, I never had.
When I was fifteen, I read Plato’s Republic for the first time, in a Penguin translation. In Book X, when Socrates is describing his vision of the worlds, I recognised Lewis writing about the worlds in The Last Battle – “Further up and further in!” and I did so spontaneously – I had entirely forgotten (til I re-read TLtWW again) that the Professor himself clues us in “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato…” No one had to tell me what Lewis was trying to do: I saw what he had done as soon as I read Socrates describing what Lewis had borrowed as the structure of the Narnian universe.
Lewis was (IMO) a lot more of a Platonist than he was a Christian, at least when he was writing.
@19 True! He and Lewis both had plenty of strong opinions!
@21 Ooo I haven’t read that one. I’ll put it on my to-read list.
@22 Thanks for sharing that, and that’s a great insight that he was deeply influenced by Platonism. Charles Williams was a neo-Platonist and Lewis was deeply taken with him as a friend and as a writer, though uncomfortable with some of his practice (which he felt was akin to “white magic” and not something safe or wise).
The mythological mishmash didn’t bother me as a child, and doesn’t bother me as an adult. It seems to me that Lewis put the quilt together with an overall design/color scheme (pick your metaphor) which makes the disparate pieces equally real and believably coexistent in context. I think that in this instance Tolkien mistook the deep predilections of his personality for objective aesthetic judgment. Which we’re all prone to do, of course! Lewis writing for children has a light touch, which stands him in good stead when he’s mixing Norse and Greek and Christian mythical elements. He usually doesn’t describe or explain more than he needs to, and enables the world to take shape in the child-reader’s imagination. It certainly never occurred to me in childhood that the Beavers could not have raised potatoes in always-winter…any more than it occurred to me to worry about where Mr. Tumnus’s books had been printed and bound. Tolkien is a master of consistent and amazingly detailed world-building–and no one ever accused him of having a light touch!
Will you write at some point about the Baynes illustrations? I think they were and are a great asset to the Chronicles, providing just enough visualization and Not Too Much. Even the colorized Baynes illustrations from later editions are inferior, in my opinion. The original Baynes illustrations give you a vaguely medieval Narnia which is not archaic or stilted and the black-and-white drawings help make all the disparate characters, including the mid-20th-century British children, equally real. Lewis wrote and Baynes drew a fantasy world that does not feel impossibly far away.
I’m still trying to figure out how to subscribe to this series (not the thread for comments, but the series for new posts). Sent an email through the contact address but never heard back. Can anyone help?
Amazon Prime is showing Walking with C.S. Lewis. It’s a multi-part discussion, with sections on Mere Christianity, Screwtape, Narnia, and the Space Trilogy. That coincides nicely with this projected discussion.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B077QM1MW7/ref=atv_hm_hom_3_c_Tco32S_8_38
@26, ooh, I hadn’t seen that, thank you! I was also just at the “Most Reluctant Convert” one-man play about the life of C.S. Lewis put on by the Fellowship for Performing Arts. Lots of Lewis around at the moment, it seems!
I have probably read the entire series more than 3 dozen times, and TLTLWaTW even more than that as an older hardbound copy of that was given to me as a gift by a priest when I was around 10 years old.
Probably my favorite stories ever and my only regret is giving away the 7 book set I had before the publisher messed with their order, making them strictly chronological. What an awful decision.
Have you ever read _Past Watchful Dragons_ ? It’s a very interesting book about the creation of the Narnian stories.
When I die I hope the next plane of existence IS Narnia.
Tolkien’s worldbuilding is far from perfect itself. What did elves, orcs, and dwarves eat before the Sun?
As an atheist American kid some of the religious stuff in Narnia was pretty obvious to me and I’ve always been baffled by those who say they missed it. Aslan/Jesus, all the faith stuff in Prince Caspian, the Last Battle.
OTOH I needed more time for to appreciate the details. The White Witch isn’t just an enemy villain, but claims Edmund under the Deep Magic law, that is inscribed on the Stone Table. Aslan agrees. Dying and coming back is so associated with Jesus that people try to stick it on Gandalf, but Aslan’s death or return breaks the Stone Table, and he talks about the Deeper Magic. This isn’t just “Aslan is Jesus”, it’s supercessionism, the replacement of the Old Testament law (given out on stone tablets) with the Gospel.
…now take a second look at the Black Dwarfs, a dark-haired and bearded people who followed the Old Testament served the White Witch and refuse to acknowledge Aslan even in the afterlife.
@16: The revision really matters. Manwe is an archangel/god of air who is king/regent of his people and the world, in a sense, but he’s otherwise nothing like Zeus, not in origin, history, personality, or behavior.
@29: Plants and animals, which lived and grew before the Sun arose. (On a Flat Earth, no less.)
After reading THE SILVER CHAIR, I always thought there needed to be an essay called “From Plato to Puddleglum” given the analogy of the cave, the fire and the outside.
@12: I’m British and not raised religious, and while I didn’t feel betrayed by the Aslan-is-Jesus stuff I was… rather revolted, I suppose? Disturbed? In a “you shouldn’t put that kind of thing in childrens’ books” way.
@19: Ha! I wonder if that’s the adult version of my kid feeling?
@29, Why do people keep equating Dwarves with Jews? Our men may be bearded, if Orthodox, but we’re no shorter than anybody else and we are NOT known for our smithcraft!
The Inklings met at an Oxford pub called the Bird and Baby. More formally known as the Eagle and Child. Have you looked at their street sign? It shows an eagle carrying a supine baby by its diaper.
I wonder if that sign influenced how Sam and Frodo hitched a ride out of Mordor.
On a related subject—I met someone in a bookstore. He told of touring England with a friend. They were wandering around Oxford University, and stumbled across the Great Man’s mailbox. There they are, wonder-struck hippies, saying, “Oh wow! That’s J. R. R. Tolkien’s mailbox!” From behind they heard a cheerful voice, “And this is J. R. R. Tolkien!” The Great Man invited them to tea, for an hour he would never forget.
@32 I’m afraid I don’t understand; why should religion not be in a children’s book?
@35, Me either.
@35, @36: I would assume the objection is not so much to religion as the attempt to indoctrinate into a particular set of religious views.
@@@@@#32 xenobaithe Wasn’t raised in a religious tradition either, but didn’t find “Aslan as Jesus” at all disturbing or revolting. Not that I was tricked into converting by reading Narnia. I just never became one of those nonbelievers with an ax to grind against religion in general, or Christianity in particular. Religion appears to me to be rooted in human biology, and at any rate I find it, in all of its multitudinous manifestations, endlessly fascinating and eminently worthy of study. Fantasy seems like an ideal vehicle for investigating the phenomena of religion, and I see no reason why children’s fantasy, or believers, should be excluded from the undertaking.
@@@@@33 princessroxanna, I seem to recall Tolkien equated his Dwarves with Jews. As his version became the generic fantasy template (i.e. the cliche) it wouldn’t surprise me if others followed suit.
Tolkien based the Dwarvish language on semitic models and compared the Dwarves wandering from Moria to the Jewish diaspora. That’s not the same as Dwarves = Jews
@39 You remember the details better than I do. Fair enough, perhaps Tolkien’s Dwarves aren’t supposed to represent or to be an exact analog of Jews. But the association between them in his legendarium seems sufficiently clear to explain why they might tend to be conflated in the modern popular conception of “Dwarves.”
a very good start to this series. Thank you. I’m afraid I disliked the “Sons of Adam” and “Daughters of Eve” usage from the start, and more as I aged and became more aware of the handling of gender in the stories.
As to the Christian elements, I, like several other commenters, objected to being increasingly openly bashed over the head with them. As a child, I would have said it was unfair to lure me in with “let me tell you a wonder story” only to find that the tale teller had an agenda. Today, I recognize that every artist has an agenda, or a belief system reflected in their stories, but I object to what Ursula LeGuin called the too audible grinding of axes.
@41 Lewis’ handling of gender is an issue for me in a lot of his writing! I don’t think it’s particularly rare for someone of his milieu, but it’s very difficult for me as a product of mine.
@41, I noticed Ursula’s very audible grinding of axes in Tehanu. It really turned me off.
43: No axes were ground in Tehanu. That was kind of the point: Le Guin (I envy you being on first-name terms with her!) was writing a fable in which the hero never lifts a sword, let alone a axe. If you mean that Tehanu is a distinctly feminist novel, unlike the previous three Earthsea novels, I will never feel that a novel is the worse for writing as if women are human beings: YMMV.
But moving back to Narnia:
35: In the three science-fiction novels, which can certainly be read by children (I read them first in my late teens, but I could have enjoyed them had I read them earlier) Lewis uses Christianity to a significant extent – presenting Mars as a world that Fell and survived, Earth as a world conquered by Satan and fighting back, and Venus as a world as yet unfallen.
There is no sleight-of-hand involved: Lewis is clear and unambiguous about working the Christian elements into the plot.
When he wrote the Narnia books, he was – or so he said in more than one essay about it – working Christianity into his plotting because this justified him in writing stories based on what he regarded as false mythology (“Breathing a lie through silver”) – he wanted to trick children into loving Jesus risen by writing Jesus as a huge purring roaring Lion.
In doing so, Lewis was, I think, doing an injustice both to the Christian religion, which has some tremendous mythology of its own, and to child readers. The Narnia books are a kind of propaganda: Lewis justified himself writing stories about Greek mythology and philosophy, which he genuinely loved but thought unChristian, by artificially flavouing what he wanted to write about with Christianity-for-children which he felt he ought to write about.
I think Lewis was caught between two conflicting demands: he knew how to write a novel about the Greek mythology and philosphy he loved that children would love reading, but he didn’t feel he should. And IMO, though I certainly loved Narnia as a child, I think this is a flaw in the novels and Lewis’s worldbuilding. And that’s what I don’t think belongs in a book for children: the confidence-trickery.
As Dorothy L. Sayers would say – did say, in The Mind of a Maker – a Christian writes as a Christian when the Christian writer does the best work possible. Lewis didn’t.
@44 I never got the idea that Mars had fallen; where does that come from? (I’ve read the books, just didn’t get that sense)
45: The uplands of Malacandra used to have breathable air, so the hross tell Ransom – they don’t now. I understood this to be in consequence of the planet’s Fall.
@46 It has been a long time since I read the space trilogy, but I thought the alteration in Mars was in part because of Earth’s fall knocking things out of whack.
@44 Lewis thought that all myths contained an imperfect reflection of the truth. He thought of Christianity as a myth that is also true
@44, We must have read different books. But of course a writer may write whatever he or she pleases.
Have to say I was bothered as a child by the mixture of elements, and also by the children growing up in the first book but not in any of the others. It definitely felt as if he didn’t expect at first to do other books, and IIRC he said he didn’t. Then after the second it had to be either three or seven.
#46: Malacandra did not “fall.” What happened was that the evil Oyarsa of Terra — Satan — “smote” the planet and the Martian Oyarsa defended his people by asking God to create the deep canyons so that all the air and warmth and water would not escape and the Malacandrians could survive. The canyons seen from Earth looked like “canali,” channels. That all works if you understand that Lewis was writing from an early 20th-century idea of Mars, which, alas, turns out not to be accurate. But anyway, the Malacandrians were unfallen, but not ignorant of what the Fall of the Terran Oyarsa meant.
To me, the existence of the Wood Between the Worlds (Magician’s Nephew) justifies the patchwork elements of Narnia and its environs. Even before Aslan sings Narnia into existence, there appear to exist parallel worlds with parallel elements, such as humans (Earth) and humanoids (like those from Charn). Earth alone has its Greek mythology, flavors of which then appear in Narnia. It creates a sort of in-universe precedent for worlds borrowing from other worlds. It could even be that Greek myths were themselves inspired from contact with other worlds where fauns and minotaurs and centaurs existed.
@49 – The children never stayed in Narnia long enough to grow up in any of the other books.
52: All the children except Susan were killed by Aslan before they *could* grow up.
50: Thanks for the correction – it has been years since I read Out Of The Silent Planet, and I was remembering it wrong.
@53 They died in a train crash; Aslan didn’t kill them any more than God kills anyone else who dies in an accident.
The real issue is, if the time differences are only due to time moving at different rates, there’s no reason that they should have reverted back to being children when the came back to our world. Since even physicists had barely begun to understand temporal mechanics in 1950, I guess we can let him off the hook.
Ah, thanks so much for this!
I had a thought while reading this, and about the way children play, and the way we just stitch together things that have meaning for us (I really like his thoughts on myth and the way they parallel each other. Of course, I’ve never been one to shy away from the fact that the Chrisitan tradition is full of rituals that have other origins and I feel Lewis probably wasn’t either).
But basically, this is everything I loved about the LEGO Batman movie and the big climax at the end (or really any of the LEGO movies to an extent) – it’s like the greatest crossover ever and it was just truly delightful. Perhaps Lewis would approve, lol. But I for one get a huge kick out of seeing Batman battling Voldemort and Sauron.
Not directly connected to The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (which I love), but one of my favorite Lewis books is English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama. Any thoughts on it?
@43&48
as you may know, the example of excessive ax-grinding that LeGuin cited from her own work was The Word for World Is Forest, which I admired a lot. Like another commenter, I love Tehanu (and The Other Wind), but readers’ mileage does vary, just as one would expect.
To return to the subject of the post, I like Lewis best at his least polemical. LWW has some of my favorite parts of his work. What do you like best?
XKCD had a Narnia related cartoon earlier this week.
@58, that’s one of my favorites as well.
55: I hope we get to discuss this when the read-along gets to The Last Battle!
59: I think Le Guin admits TWfWiF is axe-grinding in the intro – what she wanted to be doing was protesting the Vietnam war, but she was in London at the time. But I think Tehanu and The Other Wind are beautiful extensions of the Earthsea series – and while (as Le Guin would say) they may drive non-feminists mad, that’s only fair.
I would find it hard to say what my favourite Narnia book is. Once I would have said definitely The Horse And His Boy, because ARAVIS, but I have issues with that now which – I still love it in oh so many ways – I hope we explore in the read-along. (Matt! Before you get to THAHB, if you’ve not read it already, can I recommend to you Judith Tarr’s column about Hwin, found in her Horses of SFF series?)
I think at the moment my favourite’s probably The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, because I do love Reepicheep, and so many of the islands they visit are awesome, and I’m fascinated by Eustace Clarence Scrubb.
@22: I was raised Episcopalian, but our church didn’t discuss the Sacrifice with 3rd-graders, which I was when I read LWW; I remember being utterly blown away by the story (I’d certainly read a bit of Nesbit by then, but nothing else with such scope) without seeing any connection to Christianity. I also hadn’t read any mythology other than bits of the Greek version, and the serious Father Christmas in-the-open was so different from the covert, jolly Santa Claus that I didn’t see an issue with him and a faun in the same story.
@51: the problem with using the Wood as justification is that (a) it seems to work only by will — people can bring things with them but IIRC there’s no hint that the worlds can bleed into each other; and (b) it was written several years later.
@49/52/53: LWW is the only book in which the children are enthroned, rather than helping some other crowned head. (I can see I’m going to have to read the later books carefully to see if there are any clues about the succession, or why a single monarch became acceptable when 2 pairs were necessary in LWW.) It’s plausible to tell a little of how they ruled, where other stories are more “Our work here is done.”
@55: Aslan didn’t kill them any more than God kills anyone else who dies in an accident. What was Lewis’s position on an activist God? Also: if Aslan were resolved to wrap up Original Narnia, would he think it inappropriate to collect his adherents for the paradise of New Narnia?
stairstep thought: it’s possible I had less trouble with the mashup because of having already read the Freddy-the-pig book in which he writes a play fitting in the characters the animals wish to play (Queen Elizabeth, Captain Kidd, Sherlock Holmes, …).
@64 But the children’s parents also die in that same crash and later the children and parents see each other from a distance. I got the impression that the place they went to after the battle wasn’t just New Narnia but New Everything and that they would also be reunited with their parents at some point.
Getting ahead of myself, but my wife and I agreed to give our kids middle names from our favorite stories.
Our 23 year old’s middle name is Elessar.
Our 20 year old’s is Raistlin
And our 5 year old’s is Corin, so @63 I’m a pretty big fan of The Horse and His Boy too. :)
The most jarring element of any of the Narnia stories, for me, is the schoolroom in Prince Caspian. Sure, it makes sense that kids would be getting re-educated to fall in line with their conqueror’s beliefs – happens all the time – but Narnia in all other respects does not strike me as being the place for such modern and formal institutions.
The Narnia in the years before Prince Caspian’s victory is different from the Narnia of any other period; there are other displays of Order that are disassembled in the wake of the battle. OTOH, 20th-century schoolrooms do seem out of whack given that even under the Telmarines Narnia was a cod-medieval society (rather than, say, the early-industrial society that Saruman imposed on the Shire).
Regarding Narnian food and it being always winter, I came up with a theory for this on a different reread.
The Narnian economy, during the rule of the White Witch, was centered around an ice trade with Calormine. (We know from The Horse and His Boy that the upper Calormine classes enjoyed chilled and iced food and drink in a Middle Eastern type climate.)
The ice trade was a real thing in the 19th century. In the northeast US and eastern Canada, people would cut large blocks of natural ice from ponds and lakes through the winter. This was packed in straw or sawdust, and shipped all around the world.
If the White Witch made it constant winter, it would provide a constant ice source. It would also allow her to effectively control the population. She would trade the ice for food and other necessities that normally come with the warm season. You would only have access to such things if you cooperated with her in some way.
For example, the beavers would have a lot of work making and maintaining ponds where ice would form. Dwarfs, as metal-smiths, would make the tools used to cut and move the ice. Other animals might have other such tasks. Those who weren’t directly in the ice trade would have to collaborate in some other way to get food, such as Mr. Tumnis being a spy, or the wolves being her enforcers.
Hah! Ice export is an interesting idea.
I think the long and good fanfic “Carpetbaggers” touched on Winter economics/ecology a bit, but I recall nothing useful.
I’d forgotten the schoolroom. Well, it’s obviously ‘modern’ (the girls have collars and tickly stockings), but schoolrooms aren’t *inherently* modern; pretty sure you’d find classes in the urban Greeks, Romans, Edo Japan, and Aztecs (said to have compulsory education for boys and girls alike.)
Though if you want Fridge Logic and horror, there’s the next school, where boys who looked like pigs are implied to be turned into pigs by Bacchus. “And it was said afterward (whether truly or not) that those particular little boys were never seen again, but that there were a lot of very fine little pigs in that part of the country which had never been there before.”
So a bunch of parents lost their children, and someone later had some bacon that used to be human. Thanks, Lewis! No nightmare fuel here!
Speaking of Bacchus, can anyone offer any insight into why Lewis dropped a Bacchanalia into a kids Christian allegory? I can’t circle that square at all.
First off, I loved that episode as a kid. Who wouldn’t have wanted Aslan and some guy called Bacchus to free you from the drudgery of school by destroying it with nature and seeing the bullies get their comeuppance?
Now? I don’t get it. The whole thing seems confused and messy.
On the one hand, there seems to be something about the righteousness and authority of Christianity over paganism. Bacchus and friends are clearly happy to see Aslan/Jesus and defer to him. They also seem to be sniffing out who, out of the Telmarine population, is by nature and spirit a true Narnian (Christian?) then proceed to liberate them. Those who aren’t are punished. Maybe even eaten, as noted above.
On the other hand, Bacchus and company are described as having a wildness about them and Lewis notes that Susan and Lucy would’ve felt quite intimidated without Aslan’s presence. IIRC, some of the liberated Telmarines start taking off their clothes. Only the uncomfortable ones. It is a kids book but still, a sense of being uninhibited and free mixed in with a hint of danger.
Maybe it’s Lewis taking a swipe at puritanism and restrictive authority but a Bacchanalia? A ritual that was deemed way too dangerous and outrageous even in pagan times!
Aslan/Jesus grooving with the God of wine and madness and Silenus the permanently hammered?
Can anyone make sense of this?
@72 Dogsbody Tentacles, Maybe this sheds light:
Dionysus: Born of a Virgin on December 25th, Killed and Resurrected after Three Days
by D.M. Murdock/Acharya S
Dionysus shares the following attributes in common with the Christ character as found in the New Testament and Christian tradition.
Dionysus was born of a virgin on “December 25th” or the winter solstice.
He is the son of the heavenly Father.
As the Holy Child, Bacchus was placed in a cradle/crib/manger “among beasts.”
Dionysus was a traveling teacher who performed miracles.
He was the God of the Vine, and turned water into wine.
Dionysus rode in a “triumphal procession” on an ass.
He was a sacred king killed and eaten in an eucharistic ritual for fecundity and purification.
The god traveled into the underworld to rescue his loved one, arising from the land of the dead after three days.
Dionysus rose from the dead on March 25th and ascended into heaven.
Bacchus was deemed “Father,” “Liberator” and “Savior.”
Dionysus was considered the “Only Begotten Son,” “King of Kings,” “God of Gods,” “Sin Bearer,” “Redeemer,” “Anointed One” and the “Alpha and Omega.”
He was identified with the Ram or Lamb.
His sacrificial title of “Dendrites” or “Young Man of the Tree” indicates he was hung on a tree or crucified.
“Early Christian art is rich with Dionysiac associations, whether in boisterous representations of agape feasting, in the miracle of water-into-wine at Cana, in wine and vine motifs alluding to the Eucharaist, and most markedly…in the use of Dionysiac facial traits for representations of Christ.”
—Dr. Thomas F. Mathews, The Clash of the Gods, 45
Even Tolkien pointed out that what fauns do with little girls is rape them.
@70: that’s bloody brilliant, is what that is. Of course the Calormen would want sherbets, being Arabs-as-seen-by-a-tWBaC* Englishman — and Narnia would have been the closest reliable source; Archenland (as described in A Horse and His Boy) appears to have a continuous royal family (modulo the occasional kidnapping) without an interregnum caused by the White Queen.
This is especially fun because I frequently drive by a former rail line (now a bike path) which I recently read was the first railroad in the area — built specifically to move ice expeditiously from its harvesting on the adjacent Fresh Pond to the nearest harbor.
*”the wogs begin at Calais” — old expression of British prejudice
@74: perhaps you and Tolkien are/were thinking of satyrs? Although (as per the theme of this thread) Lewis’s assemblage is so mixed-up that we shouldn’t be surprised at a faun/satyr who is Felix rather than Oscar, and sometimes argued to be gay.
I kind of feel like why should I care what fauns or anything else does in the mythologies as opposed to in Lewis’ or other author’s stories? No one owns them, so they can be different in different stories.
@various
I get the impression that satyrs/fauns like elves and other fantastical beings from European mythologies were rather neutered and sanitized by the Victorian era, to the degree they continued to exist in the popular imagination. Perhaps someone could write an effective dark satire of Narnia in which satyrs, say, are portrayed as, well, satyromaniacs. Perhaps someone already has.
@76 – no reason to mind at all. Unless you’re a classicist, or a historian or anthropologist who focuses on the era and region, in which case it would be like nails on a chalkboard.
Or like what happens to musicians if you tap out “shave and a haircut, two bits” but leave off the final knock for “bits.”
@78 – I thought that was just Toons :)
@79 – Musicians are worse. There are a bunch of things you can do, such as singing a scale or solfege exercise, and stopping on the penultimate note. (E.g. “do mi sol mi, do fa la fa, fa re ti sol, ti re…”)
@78, ah, okay, so this is like me whenever any story describes a spider as an insect!
@63
Many thanks for the suggestion! Just finished Judith Tarr’s post on The Horse and His Boy, and the follow-up on talking horses. Excellent suggestion, to tie them in with discussion of the novel.
@28: Regarding the change in order of the books: making them strictly chronological. What an awful decision
Agreed. I tried doing a reread this way and was horrified at the spoilers and lack of context. While I suppose it would have been the publisher’s decision ultimately, it was around the time that his literary executor Walter Hooper took over that the change was made. There were *questions* about his legitimacy, which he’s apparently been able to weather. Nevertheless, unreasonably perhaps, I’ve always held him responsible for this change I dislike extremely.
Hello to Matt, and everyone else following along with this discussion. I am so indescribably pumped to finally be in the right place at the right time to be able to follow along with a Tor re-read in real time – I was years too late for Kate Nepveu’s Lord of the Rings re-read, and only a tantalising couple of months too late for Emmet Asher-Perrin’s Harry Potter re-read, so I’m incredibly excited to interact and share ideas with the Tor community at long last. I love hearing which parts stood out to different people, and as somebody who knows next to nothing about the mythological context of Lewis’ universe, I’m looking forward to learning lots of new things.
I first came to Lewis and Narnia listening to an abridged (gasp) audiobook read beautifully by Sir Michael Hordern which was interspersed by the occasional musical accompaniment. If memory serves correctly, these accompaniments were exclusively comprised of a single instrument: the harp. This concept sounds hilariously kitschy and naff written down in front of me, but as a little kid, it produced entirely the opposite effect. Something about the combination of Lewis’ prose, Hordern’s supreme delivery, and that ethereal, enchanting, hypnotic harp motif had the effect of lassoing me and yanking me abruptly by the waist into a world I never wanted to leave. I was utterly transported. One of my favourite childhood memories is curling up at the foot of my Dad’s fireside armchair, listening to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (feat. Harp) as a rare winter snow came down outside.
I haven’t been back to Narnia in probably 10 to 15 years, having done a proverbial Lucy Barfield, ‘outgrowing’ fantasy and embarking on a Literature degree. However, as a fresh grad who’s just moved away from all my friends and family to teach in a country where they don’t speak English, I’ve got to say that Matt’s timing for this is nigh-on impeccable. I’ve got heaps of time, a Kindle, and a semi-reliable internet connection. I suspect that this re-read shall become a cosy little pocket of normalcy for me while balancing learning a new language and dealing with a permanent Lost in Translation -style sense of being a fish out of water: flopping about haphazardly, but resiliently optimistic of eventually evolving a leg or two.
PS. If anybody knows where to get hold of those old Michael Hordern audiobooks, I’m now feeling all nostalgic and fuzzy, so please get in touch!
@14:
”Matt, thanks for kicking off this road trip. Question: where do you see the flavors of Tolkien in Narnia? Maybe in the parts with such gravity (like references to Old Magic) that seem to refer to deep mysteries with untold backstories? Or did you have something else in mind?”
If I may barge in:
1. Creation by song in Magician’s Nephew = cf. the creative Song of the Ainur in the Silmarillion
2. Mention of Atlantis by Uncle Andrew’s dying Aunt = Tolkien’s Atlantis-myth
3. Rings made by Uncle Andrew = cf. Rings made by Elves and Sauron
4. Placename Cair Paravel = cf. Placename Cair Andros in LOTR
5. Peter Pevensie as High King over his 3 siblings = cf. Elendil as High King over his 2 sons
6. Gradual degeneration of the Rulers of Charn in MN = gradual degeneration of the Rulers of Numenor
7. Calormenes in Lewis = cf. Easterlings and Southrons in Tolkien
8. Joint kingship of Isildur and Anarion in Gondor = Joint rule of Pevensies in Cair Paravel
9. Prophecy of rule by Sons of Adam & Daughters of Eve in LWW = cf. prophecy of restoration of Kingdom of Gondor and Arnor by Heir of Isildur in LOTR
10. Talking Beasts in Narnia and Archenland = talking or intelligent animals in Hobbit & LOTR
11. Underland journey in Silver Chair = cf. Aragorn’s journey through Paths of the Dead.
12. Extinction of wicked Kingdom of Charn in MN = destruction of wicked Kingdom of Numenor
13. Voyage of Dawn Treader by Caspian X of Narnia to the Uttermost East = cf. voyages of Numenoreans to the Gates of Dawn in East of Middle-earth.
14. Marriage between Elf and Maia, and between Elven princesses and Mortal Men = cf. marriage between Caspian X and daughter of a star
15. Shift the Ape deceives the Narnians in Last Battle = cf. Sauron deceives the Men of Numenor
16. Shift sets up worship of Tashlan = Sauron sets up worship of Morgoth in Numenor
17. Treasure-guarding dragons in Voyage of Dawn Treader & Hobbit
18. Miraz the Usurper in Narnia = Castamir the Usurper in Gondor
19. Miraz plots to murder nephew Caspian = Castamir murders Ornendil, son of Eldacar king of Gondor
20. Miraz defeated and killed after several years, Caspian becomes king = Eldacar returns after 10 years, defeats and kills Castamir, reigns again.
21. Aslan’s Howe (the site of the Stone Table) is a hallowed place = cf. both the Meneltarma in Numenor and the Halifirienwood in Gondor when Elendil was buried.
22. Dwarves appear in both myths
23. Desert between Calormen & Narnia = cf. the Gasping Dust between Thangorodrim and the Elven kingdoms in Silmarillion
24. The Deplorable Word is an evil ultimate weapon discovered through sorcery = as is the Ring of Sauron
There are sure to be other similarities, some of them closer than some in this list. I love both myths, and wouldn’t want to choose either over the other. A lot of the similarities can be ascribed to the similar subject-matter; and to shared knowledge of literature in which those tropes occur.
“That Hideous Strength”, published in 1945, 5 years before LWW, contains a reference to Numenor (misspelt “Numinor”), which is a clue to the impression Tolkien’s myth of Numenor left upon Lewis. So it is not surprising if Lewis’ own myth contains many echoes of the other myth.
Double-posted in error
@75 – See, I was thinking of the ice trade as a tool of colonialism. The ice came from the northeastern US and Canada, harvested by immigrants from Europe and there descendants, and went to places like India, where it was consumed by British imperialists, helping make the tropical climate tolerable for the British elites.
Which is interesting if you consider the White Witch as a colonizing power, exploiting the resources of Narnia and suppressing its traditional laws and way of life.
In contrast to the other blatant expression of colonialism, with British children presented as the natural rulers of a land of mythological creatures, including adults of lesser species.
My dear wife pointed out to me yesterday that Pevensey is a placename – specifically, the place where William the Conqueror first arrived in England. I wonder how consciously Lewis chose “Pevensie” for the children’s name?
@@@@@ 88, AndyLove:
My dear wife pointed out to me yesterday that Pevensey is a placename – specifically, the place where William the Conqueror first arrived in England. I wonder how consciously Lewis chose “Pevensie” for the children’s name?
The chances that Lewis didn’t read Kipling are low indeed. He would have been eight when Puck of Pook’s Hill came out. Wherein the name and castle of Pevensey are strongly featured.
Wow. Fantastic series you have going on here. I’ve recently begun re-reading the series after 20 years, and these commentaries are fantastic!
Well, I found the “Father Christmas” episode and the whole “always winter but never Christmas” thing embarrassingly out of place when my mother first read LWW aloud to me when I was 7; I mean, I was genuinely embarrassed for the author for making such a blunder. I remember asking my mother “But if Narnia is a completely different world, how would they know about Christmas?” It also bothered me that everyone spoke English. I really appreciated that E. Nesbit tackles that problem head-on in her books and just says “I can’t really explain how it is that the children could understand all the other languages they heard, and be understood, but they could.”
Tolkien might have complained about Lewis’ “jumbled mythology”, but he wasn’t any better at feeding his imaginary people. The elves that Frodo & Co met wandering through the Shire — where did they get their food? What did the elves of Lothlorien eat? How did they obtain it? What did they make lembas from? What did whatisname eat in The Silmarillion, the elf who was chained on a mountainside for years?
I love The Lord of the Rings (the books, not the movies), but some things you just gotta accept and get on with it.