The meaning of Mr. Tumnus: classical epic and the making of modern fantasy

Abstract

Abstract The faun Mr. Tumnus in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe evokes a layering of pasts that both Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien identify in their scholarly work as a key characteristic of Virgil’s Aeneid and of classical epic more generally. Tolkien discusses the epic layering of pasts as a shared feature of both Beowulf and the Aeneid, and he describes in letters his adoption of the literary technique of those poems in his fiction. Lewis treats the temporality of the Aeneid as a revolution in epic poetry in his Preface to Paradise Lost, and he less explicitly uses it in his Chronicles of Narnia. Fauns in Latin poetry are not simply Roman versions of Greek satyrs, but they represent a version of the same layering of pasts in epic that Lewis and Tolkien identify. By introducing both Lucy Pevensie and readers to Narnia with a faun, Lewis characterizes Narnia not only as a magical realm but also as an epic one.