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Lewis was honored by the approval of the Miltonists, but he had to admit that he wasn't really one of them. He was not one for whom scholarship was an end in itself. At the heart of his impulse to write—even to write scholarly works of literary criticism—was his warm and passionate response to literature as an "imaginative man."

Lewis could make Narnia because the essential traits of Narnia were in his mind long before he wrote the first words of the Chronicles. He was a Narnian long before he knew what name to give the country. It was his true homeland, the native ground to which he hoped, one day, to return.

At the darkest moment in the first Narnia tale, when Aslan's tortured and humiliated body lies dead on the Stone Table, Lewis writes: "I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night, but if you have been—if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you—you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again."

Only one whose misery had taken him to such devastated "quietness" could write these sentences. Lewis had known misery as a child; he knew it again as a middle-aged man. Yet it was out of this misery that a story for children came—at first a bumbling story, flat and uninspired, but one that Lewis couldn't ignore.

As he wrote after all the Narnia stories were done, it was only when the great lion Aslan "came bounding into it" that he stopped bumbling and the story began to move in its proper course: "He pulled the whole story together, and soon he pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him."

Into Narnia he also pulled Lewis, and then us.

Alan Jacobs is a professor of English at Wheaton College and author of The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), from which this article is condensed.

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CT's full coverage of C.S. Lewis is collected on our site. CTMovies has a collection of articles about the film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

Reviews of Alan Jacob's books include:

Unfashionably Good | A savory collections of essays by Alan Jacobs. (Dec. 1, 2004)

Reading, Writing, and Charity | A theology of reading. (July 1, 2002)

Articles by Alan Jacobs from Books & Culture include:

Whose Natural Theology? | With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology (November 1, 2003)

Wole Soyinka's Outrage | The divided soul of Nigeria's Nobel laureate. (November 1, 2001)

The Virtues of Resistance | Computer Control, part 3 (September 1, 2002)

Life Among the Cyber-Amish | Computer Control, Part 2 (July 1, 2002)

Computer Control | Who's in charge? (May 1, 2002)

Shame the Devil | In the wake of September 11, everyone was quoting W.H Auden's September 1, 1939. But Auden himself repudiated the poem's most famous lines. (March 1, 2002)

It Ain't Me, Babe | Bob Dylan, reluctant prophet. (May 1, 1998)

The Lord of Limit | Is Geoffrey Hill the greatest living English poet? (May 1, 2004)

The Editor and the Exile | How the New Yorker's William Shawn gave a home to the brilliant autobiographer Ved Mehta. (November 1, 1998)

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December 2005, Vol. 49, No. 12