The Magician's Nephew

The original opening of the novel differs greatly from the published version, and was abandoned by Lewis. It is now known as 'The Lefay Fragment', and is named after Mrs Lefay, Digory's fairy godmother, who is mentioned in the final version as Uncle Andrew's godmother, a less benevolent user of magic, who bequeathed him the box of dust used to create the magic rings.[9]

In the Lefay Fragment, Digory is born with the ability to speak to (and understand) trees and animals; the distinction between Talking and non-talking Beasts which was to become such a characteristic feature of the Narnian world is absent. Digory lives with an Aunt Gertrude, a former school mistress with an officious, bullying nature, who has ended up as a Government minister after a lifetime of belligerent brow-beating of others. Whenever his aunt is absent, Digory finds solace with the animals and trees, including a squirrel named Pattertwig. Polly enters the story as a girl next door who is unable to understand the speech of non-human creatures. She wants to build a raft to explore a stream which leads to an underground world. Digory helps construct the raft, but saws a branch from a tree necessary to complete it, in order not to lose face with Polly. This causes him to lose his supernatural powers of understanding the speech of trees and animals. The following day he is visited by his godmother Mrs Lefay who knows that Digory has lost his abilities and gives him a card with the address of a furniture shop which she instructs him to visit. At this point the fragment ends.[10]

Pattertwig and Aunt Gertrude do not appear in the final version of the novel. Pattertwig does, however, appear as a Narnian creature in Prince Caspian, and Aunt Gertrude's career path is retraced by the Head of Experiment House in The Silver Chair.[11]

Some doubt has been cast on the authenticity of the Lefay Fragment, as the handwriting in the manuscript differs in some ways from Lewis's usual style, and the writing is not of a similar calibre to his other work. Also in August 1963 Lewis had given instructions to Douglas Gresham to destroy all his unfinished or incomplete fragments of manuscript when his rooms at Magdalene College, Cambridge were being cleaned out, following his resignation from the college early in the month.[12]

A number of aspects of The Magician's Nephew parallel Lewis's own life. Both Digory and Lewis were children in the early 1900s, both wanted a pony, and both were faced with the death of their mothers in childhood. Digory is separated from his father, who is in India, and misses him. Lewis was schooled in England after his mother's death, while his father remained in Ireland. He also had a brother in India. Lewis was a voracious reader when a child, Digory is also, and both are better with books than with numbers. Digory (and Polly) struggle with sums when trying to work out how far they must travel along the attic space to explore an abandoned house, Lewis failed the maths entrance exam for Oxford University. Lewis remembered rainy summer days from his youth and Digory is faced with the same woe in the novel. Additionally Digory becomes a professor when he grows up, who takes in evacuated children during World War II.[13]

The character of Andrew Ketterley also closely resembles Robert Capron, a schoolmaster at Wynyard School, which Lewis attended with his brother, whom Lewis suggested during his teens would make a good model for a villain in a future story. Ketterley resembles Capron in his age, appearance, and behaviour.[14]

Lewis suggested that he did not directly intend to write his Narnia stories as Christian tales, but that these aspects appeared subconsciously as he wrote, although the books did become Christian as they progressed. He thought that the tales were not direct representations or allegory, but that they might evoke or remind readers of Biblical stories.[22] In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan is a Christ-like figure who suffers a death of atonement and returns to life in a similar way to Christ's crucifixion and resurrection.[23] The Magician's Nephew has similar biblical allusions, reflecting aspects of the Book of Genesis such as the creation, original sin and temptation.[24]

Parallels with events in the Book of Genesis include the forbidden fruit represented by an Apple of Life. Jadis tempts Digory to eat one of the forbidden apples in the garden, as the serpent tempts Eve into eating a forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden; unlike Eve however, Digory rejects the offer. (Lewis's Perelandra also features a re-enactment of the same Biblical story, which in that book also ends with the tempter foiled and the fall avoided.)

While the creation of Narnia closely echoes the creation of the Earth in the Book of Genesis, there are a number of important differences. Human beings are not created in Narnia by Aslan, they are brought into Narnia from our own world. Unlike Genesis, where souls are given only to human beings, animals and half-human half-animal creatures such as Fauns and Satyrs and even trees and watercourses are given souls and the power of rational thought and speech. This appears to suggest Lewis combined his Christian worldview with his fondness for nature, myth and fairy tales.[25]

Parallels may also be found in Lewis's other writings. Jadis's references to "reasons of State", and her claim to own the people of Charn and to be beyond morality, represent the eclipse of the medieval Christian belief in natural law by the political concept of sovereignty, as embodied first in royal absolutism and then in modern dictatorships.[26] Uncle Andrew represents the Faustian element in the origins of modern science.[27]

On a number of occasions in the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan uses his breath to give strength to characters, demonstrating his benevolent power of bringing life. He specifically does so in The Magician's Nephew when a "long warm breath" gives life to Narnia. Lewis used the symbol of the breath to represent the Holy Spirit, also known as the Holy Ghost. Both spirit and ghost are translations of the word for breath in Hebrew and Greek. The flash from the stars when the Narnian animals are given the ability to talk also most probably represents the Holy Spirit[28] or "breath of life" of Genesis chapter 2, as well as (possibly) the scholastic concept of the divine active intellect that inspires human beings with rationality.[lower-alpha 2]

The Magician's Nephew suggests two opposing approaches to nature, a good approach associated with Aslan as creator and an evil approach associated with human deviation from divine intentions and the harmony of a natural order. On the one hand there is the beauty of Aslan's creation of Narnia, which is suggested as having a natural order by the use of musical harmony to bring landscapes and living things into being. There is also a distinct order to the process of creation, from earth to plants to animal, which evokes the concept of The Great Chain of Being. Lewis himself was a strong believer in the intrinsic value of nature for itself, rather than as a resource to be exploited. This is perhaps reflected in how Aslan also gives speech to spiritual aspects of nature, such as naiads in the water and dryads in the trees. Andrew Ketterley and Jadis represent an opposite, evil approach of bending the forces of nature to human will for the purpose of self gain. They see nature solely as a resource to use for their plans and thus disturb and destroy the natural order.[29]

The sacred Garden in the west of the Narnian world is surrounded by a "high wall of green turf" with branches of trees overhanging it, and "high gates of gold, fast shut, facing due east", which must be the only entrance because the travellers "walked nearly all the way round it" before they found them. In all these points Lewis echoes John Milton's description of Eden in Paradise Lost:

The verdurous wall of Paradise up sprung...

And higher than that Wall a circling row

Of goodliest trees loaden with fairest fruit,

Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue,

Appeerd, with gay enameld colours mixt...[30]

One gate there only was, and that look'd east

On th' other side...[31]

Jadis takes on echoes of Satan from the same work: she climbs over the wall of the Garden in contempt of the command to enter only by the gate, and proceeds to tempt Digory as Satan tempted Eve, with lies and half-truths.[32]

Some details of the creation of Narnia, such as the emergence of animals from the ground, and the way they shake earth from their bodies are also similar to passages in Paradise Lost, and may also have been inspired by descriptions of the processes of nature in the seventh book of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.[33]

Four years before the publication of the first Narnia book, Lewis had written as follows on the experience of reading really good poetry for the first time:

...I did not in the least feel that I was getting in more quantity or better quality a pleasure I had already known. It was more as if a cupboard which one had hitherto valued as a place for hanging coats proved one day, when you opened the door, to lead to the garden of the Hesperides...[34]

The element of the cupboard leading to a new world Lewis proceeded to use in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but the snowy Narnia of that book is quite unlike the balmy Garden of the Hesperides, most of whose major mythological features appear as attributes of the sacred Garden in The Magician's Nephew where it differs from the Biblical or Miltonian Eden. It is set in the far West of the world; it has a watchful guardian; a hero (Digory) is sent, like Hercules, to fetch an apple from it; a female villain (Jadis) steals another of the apples, like Eris. Since the eponymous Hesperides were daughters of Hesperus, the god of the planet Venus in the evening, advocates of the planetary theory adduce this as evidence for a special association between The Magician's Nephew and Venus.[35]

Lewis read Edith Nesbit's children's books as a child and was greatly fond of them.[7] The Magician's Nephew refers to these books in the opening of the novel as though their events were true, mentioning the setting of the piece as being when "Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road". The Bastables were children who appeared in a number of Edith Nesbit's stories.[36] In addition to being set in the same period and location as several of Nesbit's stories, The Magician's Nephew also has some similarities with Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet (1906). This novel focuses on four children living in London who discover a magic amulet. Their father is away and their mother is ill, as is the case with Digory. They also manage to transport the queen of ancient Babylon to London and she is the cause of a riot; a very similar event takes place in The Magician's Nephew when Polly and Digory transport Queen Jadis to London and she also causes a similar disturbance.[7]

The creation of Narnia may also have been influenced by his close friend J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion, which also contains a creation scene driven by the effect of music.[37]

Lewis greatly enjoyed stories of Arthurian legend and wrote poetry about this world. Mrs Lefay visits Digory in The Lefay Fragment, and becomes Andrew Ketterley's nefarious godmother in the finished novel. She gives Ketterley a box from Atlantis containing the dust from which he constructs the rings Digory and Polly use to travel between worlds. Both Lefays are allusions to Morgan Le Fay, a powerful sorceress in a number of versions of King Arthur's tales, who is often portrayed as evil. The box itself is also evocative of Pandora's box from Greek myth, which also contained dangerous secrets.[38]

The box of dust enabling travel between worlds originated in Atlantis.[38] Both Lewis and Tolkien were fascinated by the Atlantis legend. The degeneration of Charn's rulers, Jadis's ancestors, from the early kind and wise to the later cruel and arrogant is reminiscent of the similar degeneration in Tolkien's Númenor, the fabled island kingdom that finally sank under the waves due to the sinfulness of its latter inhabitants. The world of Charn was destroyed when Jadis spoke The Deplorable Word, a form of knowledge ancient Charnian scholars feared for its destructive potential. A number of commentators believed Lewis was referring to the use of the atomic bomb, used less than a decade earlier. It is perhaps more likely that Lewis was echoing the mythical destruction of Atlantis by the forces of evil and arrogance.[39] As noted by Alice Ward, the comparison with nuclear arms is made explicit in Aslan's last warning: "You [Earth] are growing more like it [Charn]. It is not certain that some wicked one of your race will not find out a secret as evil as The Deplorable Word and use it to destroy all living things".[40]

Aurand Harris was a well-known American playwright for children, whose works are among the most performed in that medium. He wrote 36 plays for children including an adaption of The Magician's Nephew.[41] The play was first performed on 26 May 1984 by the Department of Drama, University of Texas, Austin and staged at the B. Iden Payne Theatre. A musical score by William Penn was written for use with productions of the play.[42]

Erina Caradus wrote a playscript for The Magician's Nephew that was performed in Dunedin, New Zealand in 2005.[43][lower-alpha 3]

An agreement among representatives of 20th Century Fox, Walden, and the C. S. Lewis estate determined that The Magician's Nephew would be the basis for the next movie following the release of the 2010 film The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.[44][45][46] However, in October 2011, Douglas Gresham confirmed that Walden Media's contract with the C. S. Lewis estate had expired.[47][48]

On 1 October 2013, the C.S. Lewis Company announced that they had entered into an agreement with producer Mark Gordon to jointly develop and produce The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair, ultimately deciding to continue releasing the films to mirror the novel series' publication order.[49]

In October 2018, Netflix announced an agreement with the C.S. Lewis Company. Netflix will develop and produce new series and movies based on The Chronicles of Narnia. Mark Gordon of Entertainment One, Douglas Gresham and Vincent Sieber will serve as producers for films and executive producers for series.[50]

In 2003, the BBC produced a 10-part version read by Jane Lapotaire and signed by Jean St Clair wearing different Narnia-like clothes in British Sign Language, for the TV series Hands Up! which was first broadcast on the 16 January 2003.[51] Jean signed in front of various high quality illustrations representing parts of the novel. It was later repeated on CBBC on the 3 December 2007, and BBC Two on the 16 September 2008.[52][53][54]

A BBC Radio 4 adaptation exists.[55] Focus on the Family also made an adaptation of this book with a full cast, sound editing, and music.[56] Both productions adapted all seven books.

A HarperCollins Japan manga adaptation, Chronicles Of Narnia: The Magician's Nephew: I Opened the Wrong Door! (Japanese: ナルニア国物語: 魔術師のおい: 間違ったドアを開けた!, Hepburn: Narnia Koku Monogatari: Majutsushi no Oi: Machigatta Doa o Aketa!), began publication in 2018, before concluding in 2020 after two volumes.[57]