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An attractive feature of Ward's theory is that it provides a good answer to one of the main arguments that have been raised against the "Narniad." It is notorious that Lewis' friend Tolkien was neither impressed nor amused by the books, because he thought them linguistically and mythologically inconsistent. Narnia has never known Christ, or at least not under that name. So how in the world can one justify the appearance of "Father Christmas" in the first of the books, where he signals the end of the everlasting winter created by the White Witch? Ward says, that is because The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the book of Jove, whose attributes have been sadly all but forgotten in the modern world. His metal, tin, has become identified with cheapness and inadequacy, "tin-can," "tinpot," "tinny." It may have seemed different when tin was the rare metal added to soft copper to make hard bronze, the rustless metal of eternity. We still do retain the word "joviality," and joviality includes or should include not just merriment but generosity, magnanimity, justice combined with mercy: a lordly quality, as befits the most senior of the Classical gods, though lordliness like tin has gone out of fashion. Father Christmas, with his loud voice, good cheer, red face and red robe, is Jove's nearest modern embodiment, the bright color in the depths of winter when, especially in England, color seems to have been leeched from the world, leaving only grey skies and earth turned "fallow," the non-color of dead leaves and frosted ploughland. In The Lion he is, then, not an inconsistency but an imaginative necessity, part of the dominant mood of the book. In "The Planets" Lewis links Jove with "winter passed and guilt forgiven," as good a five-word summary of the book he was much later to write as one could get.
The Silver Chair, meanwhile, declares its allegiance in its title. It is the book of the Moon, and in "the discarded image" the Moon is above all the boundary between Earth and heaven, one side turned eternally inward, the other out. Its attributes are to be "insubstantial and inconstant," its element is water. A damp drizzliness accordingly hangs over the book, well expressed by the marsh-dweller Puddleglum. The witch who controls the silver chair tries to make her captives believe there is no sun, for the Moonwitch wishes above all to deny that she derives her light from elsewhere, claiming to be entirely self-sustaining. The Moon is associated with madness or "lunacy," though she too has a fortunate and virtuous side as patroness of virginity. Mercury is even harder to sum up, "Lord of language" in "The Planets," but also the god of thieves, identified in the Germanic pantheon with Woden or Odin, the god who (for his own reasons) always betrays his worshippers. Lewis found powerful symbolism in his metal, quicksilver, though he was unable to define it except by saying that one should put some of the stuff in a saucer and play with it for a while. Mercury is about "joining and dividing," and that is what happens again and again in The Horse and his Boy, as companions are found and lost, twins lost and found, paths fork and rejoin. Christologically, Aslan in this book appears almost as the Trinity: in one scene, when Shasta asks "Who are you?", Aslan replies three times, with different tone and accent, "Myself … Myself … Myself."
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