Eight Children in Narnia
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Eight Children in Narnia is a detailed study of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, exploring the story’s influences, themes, symbols, ironies—and the reasons for its enormous popular success. Lobdell draws attention to insistent motifs in the work: the great house in the country, the past alive in the present, the life of the imagination, the mixture of the familiar and the adventurously new, the combination of pageant and satire, the child as judge, and the child as warrior. A prolific writer and literary scholar with an established reputation, Lewis decided quite late in life to write something completely new to him: a story for children, and he drew upon his own childhood memories as well as his literary and philosophical theories. Among the many important influences Lobdell identifies Bunyan, Swift, Kipling, and the popular children’s writer E. Nesbit, as well as the classic fairy-tale and medieval romance.
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Other Books by Jared Lobdell
Seeking the Lord (2015, printing limited to 100 numbered copies)
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My approach in this book, as I have suggested, is individual and personal, and reflective—some critics may even say it is idiosyncratic. For example, to anticipate some of what I write in Chapter 3, the name Narnia, in combination with Lucy, suggested to me at my first reading, the name of the Blessed Lucia da Narni—presumably because I had seen that name very recently in a book assigned as summer reading for my class at the Episcopal boarding school I was then attending. It was. I think, Samuel Shellabarger’s Prince of Foxes [1947]).
I do not suppose many others first reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe around 1952–53 would have had that reaction, though of course I cannot be sure—but there was certainly a reference to “Saint” Lucia of Narni abroad in a popular book of that time, and it may have had an influence on Lewis, already writing a book “for” his godchild Lucy Barfield. (The whole matter of the ancient Umbrian Narnia and the present Narni is now well-known, of course, and I believe that the town of Narni has a website with references to C.S. Lewis, but I am speaking of what happened with me more than sixty years ago.)
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