A Kangaroo in Narnia
There is a curious moment towards the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when Lucy and Susan are rushing around the witch’s castle, looking for prisoners to free. Aslan has already breathed on centaurs, unicorns, foxes, dogs, satyrs, dwarfs, birds, birch-girls, beech-girls, larch-girls, a lion, and a giant, but now he tells the children and the rescued prisoners to search inside:
And into the interior they all rushed and for several minutes the whole of that dark, horrible, fusty old castle echoed with the opening of windows and with everyone’s voices crying out at once, “Don’t forget the dungeons – Give us a hand with this door! – Here’s another little winding stair – Oh! I say. Here’s a poor kangaroo. Call Aslan”
The kangaroo is never mentioned again. Nor is any other creature from the Antipodes. The stone marsupial is a complete anomaly in the chronicles. So what is it doing there?
If we’d asked Tolkien that question, he may well have answered that it was evidence of Lewis’ total disregard for imaginative and geographical coherence. Narnia is clearly in the north. The refrain that runs through The Horse and His Boy is “To Narnia and the North.” But here we find a kangaroo from the far south in the witch’s castle.
It is certainly true that Lewis did not share Tolkien’s attention to detail (or obsessiveness) but he was not completely slapdash either. He may have spelt the Professor’s surname as Kirk on one occasion and Kirke on another, but there are reasons for thinking that he knew what he was about when he placed the kangaroo in the castle.
As I mentioned in my last post, the freeing of the prisoners from the witch’s castle is the Narnian equivalent of the Harrowing of Hell. So an obvious question to ask is whom did Jesus free? Adam and Eve certainly, and the Old Testament patriarchs, but what about virtuous pagans? Lewis was not a universalist like his hero, George Macdonald, but he certainly had a broadly positive sense of the wideness of God’s mercy as we can see from his presentation of Emeth in The Last Battle. If Aslan was capable of freeing centaurs and fauns, dwarfs and giants, why not kangaroos as well? Surely his mercy knew no bounds?
It may, then, not be entirely insignificant that the first creature Aslan frees is a lion. We tend not to question the presence of the lion in Narnia in the same way we might with the kangaroo, but the lion is no more native to Britain than is the kangaroo. And yet the lion is also quintessentially British. The lion flies rampant on the royal standard. When we jingle the coins in our pockets, it may be the lion’s roar that rings out. Asia and Africa stalked the Britain of the mind long before Lewis introduced Aslan to his willing readers.
And here’s the irony: Tolkien did something very similar himself. As Tom Shippey points out in The Road to Middle-Earth, there are rabbits and tobacco and potatoes in The Lord of the Rings, none of which would have been found in the early English world on which the Shire was based:
the scene in which Sam discusses ‘taters’ with Gollum is a little cluster of anachronisms: hobbits eating rabbits (Sam calls them ‘coneys’), wishing for potatoes (‘taters’) but out of tobacco (‘pipeweed’). One day, offers Sam to Gollum, he might cook him something better - ‘fried fish and chips’. Nothing could now be more distinctively English! Not much would be less distinctively Old English. The hobbits, though are on our side of many cultural boundaries.
And so are Lucy and Susan. The kangaroo is now a wholly familiar creature to any British child, as familiar as Lewis wanted centaurs and unicorns and dwarfs and giants to become. Like the Pevensies, this familiar (and yet unfamiliar) animal helps ease us through the wardrobe door to a world which is strangely unfamiliar (and yet, somehow, reassuringly familiar).
So maybe we shouldn’t be asking ourselves why there is a kangaroo in Narnia. Maybe we should be asking why not?