Although C.S. Lewis penned the Narnia Chronicles more than 50 years ago, today they are more popular than ever. Using dramatizations of Lewis' early life and career, this intriguing documentary travels the world, meeting experts, testing evidence, and uncovering surprising questions behind the best-selling series.
I do not understand.
... I still don't understand.
"Forget it Jake. It's Narnia."
ReplyDeleteI think the Narnia books are popular today not because they are great books, but because they are fantasy written by a Christian, as opposed to Harry Potter, which is fantasy written by a secular humanist, or "Satanist," as a majority of fundamentalist Christians see it.
ReplyDeleteBased on the previous assumptions of other "code" books, I'm going to guess that they have taken some numerology and mapped the Narnia books to the Bible, instead of accepting the simple literary connection between the Bible and Narnia that Lewis used to write the series.
I have a book called "The Force of Star Wars" that makes the claim that Star Wars was successful as a movie because it was the story of the Bible in allegorical form, and the author mapped every character in the movie to some Biblical character and declared Star Wars was popular only because it resembled the Word of God.
It's all very silly.
This looks like that documentary that was on the Beeb a few years ago. T'was quite interesting, although I think the "Code" in the title is a bit of a nerd-troll-baiting; I doubt many people would buy a documentary solely on literary criticism and analysis unless it had a punchy Tom Hanks inspired title.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I would buy one, if it included Audrey Tautou, but that's another story.
DO we really need this?
ReplyDeleteDr. Ward's basic thesis is that the Chronicles of Narnia can be better understood when viewed through the lens of Lewis's knowledge & professional study of medieval cosmology. More specifically, he argues that each Chronicle has a sort of "patron planet" that colors the setting, theme, and narrative - for example, he says that "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" is the book most concerned with the sun. After all, it is in this book that the characters make an eastward journey and come perilously close to the sun, encountering along the way an island that can turn you to gold (the sun's metal, according to medieval astrology). Dr. Ward points out that the Greek god most closely associated with the sun, Apollo, was a renowned dragon-slayer, and that there are more dragons defeated in Dawn Treader than in all the other books combined. And that's just one or two of the most easily explained ways in which he shows Lewis weaving together classical and medieval thought into the Chronicles.
ReplyDeleteAs I understand it, "The Narnia Code" is a more popularly oriented version of Dr. Ward's previous book on this theory, "Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis". As the subtitle implies, in that work he doesn't just focus on the Chronicles, but draws from the Space Trilogy, Lewis' poetry and scholarly works, and pretty much everything known about Lewis and his writings. I've had the privilege of listening to Dr. Ward lecture and greatly enjoyed reading "Planet Narnia", and am quite convinced that he's on to something. We won't know for sure until we get to the afterlife and can ask Lewis directly, but I think there's a lot to be gained from Dr. Ward's work even if he's not completely correct.
Guh? Lewis explicitly made imaginative use of medieval conceptions of the world (including, explicitly, the seven medieval planets) all over the place. It seems a little silly to go looking for places where he did that secretly.
ReplyDeleteWhat Lewis has said openly about the process of writing the books seems to contradict the notion that there was some grand septenary, planetary secret architecture behind the whole series.
I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate that the scholarly work this is all based on is probably more careful and reasonable and humble than the TV special based on his work and the book based on the TV special.
Just a guess.
T'was quite interesting, although I think the "Code" in the title is a bit of a nerd-troll-baiting; I doubt many people would buy a documentary solely on literary criticism and analysis unless it had a punchy Tom Hanks inspired title.
ReplyDeleteAh, well that makes sense.
Hmm, I wonder if we can look forward to "The Conan Code" in the future?