The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a long, glittering chain of such citations and borrowings, beginning with a premise derived from Homer and Dante as well as Saint Brendan. The deathly pool that turns whatever touches it to gold is a variation on the Midas fable. There is Jesus’s expulsion of the moneylenders from the temple in the overturning of Governor Gumpas’s paperwork-laden table on Doorn. The albatross from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner appears in the bird that leads the Dawn Treader away from the Dark Island; Saint Brendan again in the encounter with the sea serpent; The Tempest in the magician who oversees the thick-witted Dufflepuds and regrets the need to rule them with “rough magic;” and, last but not least, the conversion of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus in Eustace’s ordeal as a dragon. That was the parallel, Neil Gaiman reports, that first alerted him to the Chronicles’ Christian subtext.
Lewis even wove bits of his own critical work into the story. The horrors of the Dark Island (where dreams, “not daydreams — dreams,” come true), for example, touch on something Lewis was writing at the same time, in a very different context, about the disturbing nature of nighttime dreams. In OHEL, he remarked that it is “at once so true and so misleading” for people to call Spenser’s poetry “dream-like.” Although The Faerie Queene has none of the quality of “waking reverie” we usually associate with the term, the poem’s vivid, often gory imagery has “a violent clarity and precision which we often find in actual dreams.” Ramandu, the convalescent star the companions meet near the end of their journey, even offers an epigrammatic version of medieval cosmology when Eustace informs him that “in our world … a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” “Even in your world,” Ramandu replies, “that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”
Do these appropriations, these borrowings and quotations, diminish The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in some way, make it less bewitching because we can track down the sources of its shining wonders? Do the fragments of Christian mysticism, classical cosmology, and Celtic legend rattle against one another gratingly, as Tolkien would probably have protested had he bothered to read the book? No writer can entirely avoid borrowing, of course — Tolkien himself put some of Tír na nÓg into Valinor, the paradise of the elves in the Uttermost West of Middle-earth. Tolkien, however, took more care to transfigure those origins, anodizing them in the solvent of his own mythos; only then would his work meet his own standard of true sub-creation.
If Lewis meant to do the same thing with Narnia, he obviously failed. But why assume that Tolkien was his model, or ought to have been? Perhaps he was no more interested in sub-creation than he was in the formal innovations of Woolf or Joyce. Why should he cast aside all the books he’d read and loved when he sat down to write — why not summon them instead? That’s what Chaucer and Malory and Spencer did. “I doubt if they would have understood our demand for originality or value those works in their own age which were original any the more on that account,” Lewis wrote of the medievals in The Discarded Image. “The originality which we regard as a sign of wealth might have seemed to them a confession of poverty. Why make things for oneself like the lonely Robinson Crusoe when there is riches all about you to be had for the taking?”
This choice was, in part, a matter of faith; if all myths were shadows of the one true myth, then, in a sense, they were all telling the same story. The really powerful myths had a fundamental unity that transcended the superficial dissonances that so irritated Tolkien. Still, it was not always possible to make everything fit properly with everything else, a dilemma medieval scholars regularly faced. The lumber room of Lewis’s imagination contained a vast collection of ideas, images, and stories constructed according to different systems, rather like a pile of building materials cut to both metric and Old English measurements. And in addition to all that, there remained some odds and ends that defied systemizing entirely. Some of these were items he’d stashed away before his conversion, things belonging to his old “secret, imaginative life,” treasures he wished to keep even though they couldn’t be reconciled to the new regime. Their recalcitrance was part of their charm, the really wonderful thing about them. They would find a place in Narnia, too.
Chapter Twenty-five
The Third Road
There is an old Scottish border ballad called “Thomas the Rhymer.” The eponymous Thomas is lying under a tree when a lady in a green gown approaches. Astonished by her beauty, he kneels, hailing her as the “Queen of Heaven,” whereupon she corrects him, explaining that she is instead the queen of “fair Elf-land.” She carries Thomas off to her splendid court, where he obeys her injunction not to speak to anyone. When he returns to his “ain countrie,” he discovers that seven years have passed, and in some iterations of the story Thomas acquires the gift of prophecy. One thing common to nearly every version is a moment in which the lady points to a narrow road “beset wi thorns and briers,” naming it as the path to righteousness, and then to a broad, lily-lined road that is the path to wickedness — shades of The Pilgrim’s Progress. But then the queen shows Thomas a third way, a “bonny road,” twisting through fern-covered hillsides. That is the road to “fair Elfland.”
By Lewis’s own admission, the medieval model of the universe, though resplendently harmonious, was “a shade too ordered.” Although there is something very human about the desire to inhabit such a comprehensible system, there’s also something very human in finding it suffocating from the inside. “For all its vast spaces,” Lewis wrote of the model in The Discarded Image, “it might in the end afflict us with a kind of claustrophobia. Is there nowhere any vagueness? No undiscovered byways? No twilight? Can we never really get out of doors?”
The first time I read those lines, a few years after I wrote my first piece about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I experienced a jolt of recognition. This had been exactly my own complaint about Narnia as a teenager, after Lin Carter’s Imaginary Worlds had clued me in to Lewis’s Christian agenda. The road that had once seemed to lead to free and open country had in reality doubled back to church. Now I was trying to explain why my damning adolescent assessment of the Chronicles wasn’t entirely sufficient, either. As an adult, I’d discovered that I could follow Lewis pretty far without feeling obliged to return to Christianity, and that the old sensation of freedom, of wildness in Narnia, remained. Where did it come from?