Narnia Club and Paths in the Snow

Happy New Year, everyone, and welcome back to Into the Wardrobe and Beyond!

This term, I’m looking forward to starting my Narnia Club for 8-14 year olds. There’s just about time to sign up here if you’re able to join us on Zoom at 3pm (UK time) on Mondays. Here’s the promotional trailer, reminding us of when the weather was less White-Witch-like:

I’m particularly looking forward to being joined for one session by Jem Bloomfield, Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Nottingham. Dr Bloomfield is the author of the recently published Paths in the Snow: A literary journey through The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It’s a book I heartily recommend.

Paths in the Snow has two major strengths, I think. The first is the light it sheds on links between The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and a wide range of other books. A really wide range. Bloomfield moves effortlessly between books as varied as The Divine Comedy and Peter Rabbit, Sir Orfeo and The Stones of Green Knowe.

In the introduction, for example, Bloomfield follows a Narnian robin with the Pevensies and leads us to The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It’s not the destination we might have expected but Bloomfield makes a convincing case for the journey. And once we arrive we learn more about both books.

The best works of criticism open up new vistas within books we have already grown to know and love - I’m thinking of works like Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth, for example - rather then dissecting them as if they were cadavers. Bloomfield takes the former approach. Hearing an echo of The Silent Garden in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, we discover another level to Lewis’s book which we may never have found on our own.

The second major strength of Paths in the Snow is its awareness of the contexts in which the book was originally written. Bloomfield is very good on the lived experience of the 1940s and 1950s. There is an excellent chapter on Turkish Delight, for instance, in which he writes about sweet rationing. Just imagine it! Lewis’s readers knew what it was like to be sweet-deprived, which meant that they understood so much better than 21st century readers what a temptation Turkish Delight could be! (Having said that, I have written about my own brush with Turkish Delight in Popes, Emperors and Elephants while discussing Aristotle and Greek philosophy.)

This interest in the immediate contexts of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe bears fruit elsewhere. In considering why the Pevensies shake hands so often, for example, Bloomfield draws on J. B. Phillips’ 1947 book, Letters to Young Churches, a translation of the Epistles of the New Testament. I won’t go into the argument here as you can read it for yourselves in Paths in the Snow but I’ll simply point out that Bloomfield’s approach is very much in the spirit of Lewis himself, who was as comfortable referring to detective novels as he was to Elizabethan poetry.

So there we go: two adverts for the price of one. Please do sign up your children to Narnia Club if you think they’d enjoy it and check out Paths in the Snow or read more at Jem Bloomfield’s blog on books and faith here.