Omar Holayel
4/09/2015
English 223 Other-world Fantasy
Dr. Shortsleeve

Call of the Wild: C.S. Lewis’s Use of Anthropomorphism In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

In C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) Lewis introduces us to a magical new world called Narnia found on the other side of a mystical wardrobe in which time stands still. Peter, Edmund, Lucy, and Susan Pevensie, the main protagonist of the story, are children who have become caught in a unnamed war in London (presumed to be WWII), are moved far away from harms way and are forced to live with a old professor (Lewis, 7). In the old professors house they discover a magical wardrobe that leads to Narnia. The wardrobe’s supernatural characteristics were discovered early on by the youngest Pevensie Lucy (Lewis, 10). This initiation of surreal events by Lucy plays into the creative fantasy that is the world of Narnia. This sudden acceptance of fantastic events by Lucy can be compared to C.S. Lewis’s Of other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1975) in which he suggests this phenomenon to be “a special type of longing” (Of other Worlds, 30). The world of Narnia is described as a snow-covered land surrounded by immense pine forests and fragmented by streams. The geographical layout of Narnia plays an important role in the creation of the …show more content…
Faërie containes many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, ginats, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted… [T]he definition of a fairy-story…does not, depend on any definition or historical account of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that