Weak on dragons

“Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.” The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third book in the Narnia series, we see much the same progress from scepticism to belief as Caspian and Trumpkin experienced in Prince Caspian, though here the focus is on books as much as on oral storytelling. The tone is established very early in the book when the narrator finds fault with Eustace Clarence Scrubb for liking “books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.” Eustace himself later complains about “the sort of books those Pevensie kids read”, suggesting that the narrator’s earlier comment about Eustace’s reading habits is not quite as outrageous as it might initially sound.

Does any of this matter? Yes it does. It matters for very practical reasons. The narrator tells us that when Eustace wanders off alone on what comes to be known as Dragon Island, he fails to recognise the dragon because he “had read none of the right books.” And, just in case we’d missed it, the same point is made a few pages later:

Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons. That is why he was so puzzled at the surface on which he was lying.

There, in a nutshell, you have Lewis’s book advice: find books for your children which are not “weak on dragons.”

Again and again in the Chronicles, the children are saved by their love of good books, while, again and again, other characters go astray because they haven’t read the right books. A few pages later in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, for example, Eustace (who has now been turned into a dragon himself) fails to communicate effectively with the others because he “(never having read the right books) had no idea how to tell a story straight.” By contrast, reading good books gives the other children an immediate advantage. When Edmund finds the armour of one of the missing Narnian lords, he has an inkling that something is wrong because he was “the only one of the party who had read several detective stories”. Notice the absence of literary snobbery here. Edmund isn’t reading The Iliad in the original Greek: he’s the only one who’s read detective stories and that makes all the difference.

Lewis makes it clear later in the book that not having read the right sort of books doesn’t prevent you from becoming a virtuous person, though it might make it harder. When the Dawn Treader arrives at the island of the three sleepers, Reepicheep announces that he plans to stay by the sleepers’ table throughout the night even though the “whole place smells of magic – and danger.” One by one the others – Edmund, Caspian, and Lucy – agree to stay with him:

And then Eustace volunteered also. This was very brave of him because never having read of such things or even heard of them till he joined the Dawn Treader made it worse for him than for the others.

It is a sign of how far he has come that, despite the narrowness of his reading, he is able to find the courage to do the right thing. Books are important but not absolutely necessary for moral growth, the narrative suggests. But there’s more to literature than that, as we discover when Lucy agrees to read the Magician’s Book for the Monopods.

The Magician’s Book that Lucy finds is quite unlike any other book in the Chronicles of Narnia (though it is, of course, a familiar object in popular culture, recognisable to anyone who has seen Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Disney’s Fantasia.) It’s worth quoting the passage in full:

It was a large room with three big windows and it was lined from floor to ceiling with books; more books than Lucy had ever seen before, tiny little books, fat and dumpy books, and books bigger than any church Bible you have ever seen, all bound in leather and smelling old and learned and magical. But she knew from her instructions that she need not bother about any of these. For the Book, the Magic Book, was lying on a reading-desk in the very middle of the room. She saw she would have to read it standing…

The last time we saw so many books was in the Professor’s house in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, though this paragraph might also remind us of a passage in Surprised by Joy where Lewis describes the new house his family moved into when he was a child. In this passage he focuses on the “endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not.”

So, what is it about the Magician’s Book that makes it stand out from all these other books? It’s not the Bible, or Lewis would have told us (for there are books in the room “bigger than any church Bible you have ever seen”) but it certainly reminds us of one. It is set on a reading desk at which Lucy must stand, which is surely meant to remind us of the Bible on a lectern at which the priest stands to read the Gospel.

But this is a book of spells! I hear you cry. The Bible’s quite different. And so it is, in one sense, but not if we look at it with a philologist’s eye, as Lewis, the author of Studies in Words, would have done. Here, for example, is what the Oxford English Dictionary says about the etymology of Gospel:

Old English godspel, doubtless originally gód spel (see good adj. and spell n.1), good tidings (compare láð spel evil tidings), a rendering of the Latin bona adnuntiatio (Corpus Gloss. Int. 117) or bonus nuntius (‘Euuangelium, id est, bonum nuntium, godspel’, Voc. c1050 in Wright-Wülcker 314/8), which was current as an explanation of the etymological sense of Latin evangelium, Greek εὐαγγέλιον (see evangely n.). Compare Gothic þiuþspillôn ‘to preach the gospel’ (εὐαγγελίζεσθαι), < þiuþ-s good + spillôn to announce (cognate with spell n.1). When the phrase gód spel was adopted as the regular translation of evangelium, the ambiguity of its written form led to its being interpreted as a compound, gŏd-spel, < god n. & int. + spel in the sense ‘discourse’ or ‘story’.

What Lucy reads is, quite literally, a good spell, which merges into a good story: “On the next page she came to a spell ‘for the refreshment of the spirit’. The pictures were fewer here but very beautiful. And what Lucy found herself reading was more like a story than a spell.” In other words, there’s a great deal more going on in this part of the book than meets the eye. Lucy is reading good tidings that become a good story that become, we might suppose, the Gospel itself.

Why might we suppose that? Because Lucy sees a picture of Aslan in the Magician’s Book. A picture that is more than a picture, for it “seemed to be coming towards her out of the page”. To understand why Lewis thought stories were so important, we will eventually need to look at what he had to say about allegory and analogy, but that’s too complicated for a short post, so I’m going to limit myself here to suggesting that what Lucy sees is an analogy of the Word of God found in the word of God. The Magician’s Book is not the Bible; it’s not even the Bible as it might be in Narnia; but it is, by analogy, an expression of the word of God, for when Lucy reads “A Spell to make hidden things visible,” the hidden God truly becomes visible: “At that moment she heard soft, heavy footfalls coming along the corridor behind her … [and] what stood in the doorway was Aslan himself, The Lion, the highest of all High Kings. And he was solid and real and warm and he let her kiss him and bury herself in his shining mane.” Aslan appears in the book and then, through the reading of the spell/story in that book, he joins her in the room.

But let’s return for a moment to the spell that’s more like a story “for the refreshment of the spirit.” What is it, this story that she reads? It is “the loveliest story I’ve ever read or ever shall read in my whole life,” Lucy says. But lovely as it is, the story soon fades from her memory: “How can I have forgotten? It was about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill, I know that much. But I can’t remember and what shall I do?” A few pages later, she is still worrying about her inability to remember the story so she asks Aslan:

“Shall I ever be able to read that story again; the one I couldn’t remember? Will you tell it to me, Aslan? Oh do, do, do.”

“Indeed, yes, I will tell it to you for years and years.”

            All of this helps us see what the story about “a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill” is really about, if we hadn’t realised already. The cup reminds us of the Last Supper (Matthew 26: 27-29) and Jesus’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26: 39). The sword reminds us of Simeon’s words to Mary (Luke 2: 35), a prophecy that came true when Jesus was crucified. The tree is the cross itself. And the green hill is a reminder of a hymn by another Irish Anglican, Mrs C. F. Alexander:

There is a green hill far away,
Without a city wall,
Where the dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.

This is the story that Aslan will tell Lucy for years and years, just as he will tell her how to get into his country from Lucy’s world “all the time” (as we learn at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader).

There are more stories in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – Caspian mentions “fairy-tales in which there are round worlds”; Edmund compares Caspian with Ulysses; Reepicheep flings his sword into the water like King Arthur; and the cowardly Pittencream “deserted on the voyage home at the Lone Islands, and went and lived in Calormen, where he told wonderful stories about his adventures at the End of the World, until at last he came to believe them himself. So you may say, in a sense, that he lived happily ever after.” – but this post is long enough as it is, so perhaps I’d better stop here.