Dunluce Castle. Source: Geograph. Even places Lewis never saw personally inspired him. Inspired, Lewis used the old Latin form of its name, Narnia, and thus was the world born. Another place that may have been inspiration for Lewis was Legananny Dolmen, an old tomb in Northern Ireland.
Legananny Dolmen. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Containing a marsh-like lake, an air raid shelter, and many varieties of birds and aquatic creatures, it is no wonder that these woods were thought to inspire the Chronicles.
More information about the dedications. It All Began With a Picture , Letter to Mrs. Surprised by Joy , Mere Christianity , On Three Ways of Writing for Children , Narnia: 70th Anniversary Video. Lewis went on to write six more Narnia books but not necessarily in the order in which they were to be read. For instance, The Magician's Nephew, which tells of the creation of Narnia and sets the stage for the events that are to happen there, was written next to last and published in Although Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia with children in mind, he also wanted the stories to appeal to adults and to convey a larger message.
Thus the story of Narnia can be read and enjoyed on another level, as the story of Christianity as it is told in the Bible. Aslan the lion represents Jesus Christ, who died as a sacrifice to God for the sins of all people and then came back to life before ascending into heaven.
In Lewis explained it this way in a letter to some Maryland 5th graders: "I said, 'Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that [Jesus], as he became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen. Updated February 28, Infoplease Staff. Return to the Narnia Page!
A snow queen on a sledge became the White Witch. Lewis formed these pictures into stories as a way of "exorcizing" them from his mind. The picture of the faun had resided in his head ever since his teenage years.
Before he wrote Aslan into the story, Lewis was visited for a number of nights with dreams of lions. These haunting pictures came to him from an unknown source, but many of them all but demanded to be voiced in his stories.
An interesting parallel to this phenomenon occurs in the third book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Here, a picture of a ship at sea grows and expands until it actually becomes a ship at sea, and a doorway into Narnia. It is a fine illustration of Lewis's own intention to make his inner pictures come alive and act as windows opening in on his created world of imagination. Up to this point, little has been said about the spiritual, the religious, well why not say it: the Christian element of the Narnia books.
This is because that element was not present at the birth of the narrative. Lewis has emphatically denied that he sat down to write a series of stories that were encoded depictions of Christian truth, or moral lessons sugarcoated to appeal to children. Nevertheless, the Christian element of the Narnian mythos is unmistakable. So how did this element find its way into the stories? Well, in a sub-creative fashion, Lewis saw his handiwork — the Lion Aslan, and he saw that it was good. Immediately the author recognized the potential of his character.
A lion had come "bounding" into the story, and He was obviously one of great importance. Lewis quickly noted the numinous awe in which the other characters held him.
Also, it was not lost on him that the lion was a recurrent Biblical symbol for the Christ. Here the author asked "what if the Son of God entered into a world of talking animals in the form of a lion? And he could do so without the Law, without religious duty and hypocrisy entering into the equation. It had been Lewis's personal experience that what made it hard to feel the way one ought to feel about one's God was the sheer fact that there were feelings one ought to have.
With Aslan, Lewis had a tabula rasa. He could enjoin the reader to feel love and devotion without that suffocating sense of duty. He could convey his own great gratitude and love for his God without sermonizing. He could, as he once put it, "steal past those watchful dragons. In the first two books, Aslan is a clear-cut figure. He inspires fear in his enemies and love and devotion in his friends. He makes the four children from our world high kings and queens, and banishes all traces of evil from his kingdom.
Here Lewis is speaking of the first glorious days of one's spiritual experience. However, with the advent of the third book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lewis takes the reader into deeper theological waters. Here Aslan seems more distant; he appears in other forms, such as a lamb and an albatross.
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