East of the Wardrobe

Abstract

This book teases out hitherto unrecognised Eastern aspects in and influences on C. S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles. These include storylines, plots, themes, imagery, and even cities and landscapes in the East, as well as the ‘Persian’ style of illustrations by Pauline Baynes. Although never having ventured east himself, Lewis wrote that ‘I am the product of endless books,’ and in recognising Eastern references—many only subconsciously intended by Lewis—it is possible to enter the rich world of books that Lewis lived and breathed all his life and, perhaps less obviously, overhear the conversations he had with his fellow Inklings or that he might have overheard himself in an Oxford pub. Religious messages other than the obvious Christian ones find their way into Narnia, but so, too, do the Arabian Nights and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, as well as the other great Persian poets. Great travellers from Herodotus and Marco Polo to T. E. Lawrence and Robert Byron are there, but so, too, are the great fictional travellers Baron Munchausen, Gulliver, and Sindbad. Themes borrowed from the great epics, from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Kalevala and the Knight in the Panther’s Skin, can also be found. Delve deeper, and Christianity is there along with paganism, but so, too, are Zoroastrian, Manichaean, and even Islamic messages. Ultimately, they are a reflection of the complex intellectual world that Lewis inhabited and of the wider social and intellectual climate of Oxford in the first half of the twentieth century.