Tales Before Narnia Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Proem: “Tegnér’s Drapa” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  “The Aunt and Amabel” by E. Nesbit

  “The Snow Queen: A Tale in Seven Stories” by Hans Christian Andersen

  “The Magic Mirror” by George MacDonald

  “Undine” by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué

  “Letters from Hell: Letter III” by Valdemar Thisted

  “Fastosus and Avaro” by John Macgowan

  “The Tapestried Chamber; or, The Lady in the Sacque” by Sir Walter Scott

  “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” by Charles Dickens

  “The Child and the Giant” by Owen Barfield

  “A King’s Lesson” by William Morris

  “The Waif Woman: A Cue—From a Saga” by Robert Louis Stevenson

  “First Whisper of The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame

  “The Wish House” by Rudyard Kipling

  “Et in Sempiternum Pereant” by Charles Williams

  “The Dragon’s Visit” by J.R.R. Tolkien

  “The Coloured Lands” by G. K. Chesterton

  “The Man Who Lived Backwards” by Charles F. Hall

  “The Wood That Time Forgot: The Enchanted Wood” by Roger Lancelyn Green

  “The Dream Dust Factory” by William Lindsay Gresham

  Author Notes and Recommended Reading

  Copyright

  To the friends I’ve made in the Mythopoeic Society (www.mythsoc.org), and in memory of those no longer with us: Taum Santoski, William A. S. Sarjeant (“Antony Swithin”), Grace E. Funk, Norman Talbot, and Mary M. Stolzenbach

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A number of friends provided assistance and advice during my work on this compilation, and I’d like to thank Mike Ashley, Owen A. Barfield, Ruth Berman, David Bratman, Ned Brooks, Marjorie Burns, Janice Coulter, Alistair Durie, Dimitra Fimi, Mike Foster, Marjorie Lamp Mead, Christopher Mitchell, Robert M. Price, John D. Rateliff, Jim Rockhill, Deborah Rogers, and Richard C. West. A special thanks goes to Dale Nelson for many helpful comments. And I’m grateful to my sister Sue Smith for helping to type up some of the texts.

  INTRODUCTION

  My previous anthology, Tales Before Tolkien (2003), is a selection of early fantasy literature that influenced Tolkien, that he admired, or that presented similar themes to those that would later be found in his writings. The present volume is in many ways a companion to the earlier one, with the focus this time being on the writings of C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), Tolkien’s friend and colleague. Though this volume is titled Tales Before Narnia, it is not restricted solely to precursors of Lewis’s seven volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia; rather, it encompasses the much wider breadth of his fictional output.

  The critic William Empson is said to have described Lewis as “the best-read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read.” Lewis’s published writings range from book-length narrative poems to science fiction, children’s books to works of scholarship—particularly on medieval and renaissance literature, but also including volumes on the poet Milton and on the study of words and language. Lewis is renowned for his Christian apologetics, and additionally he was a prolific poet, essayist, letter writer, and book reviewer.

  In terms of fiction, Lewis published during his lifetime fourteen novels and a few short stories. The novels include the seven Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56), the three volumes of his so-called Space Trilogy—comprising Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1942), and That Hideous Strength (1945)—his allegorical first novel The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), his mythologically re-inventive final novel, Till We Have Faces (1957), and two short theological fantasies: the immensely popular Screwtape Letters (1942) and the afterlife fantasy The Great Divorce (1946). Some additional stories and fragments have appeared posthumously, including the collection The Dark Tower and Other Stories (1977) and the juvenilia Boxen (1985).

  Much of Lewis’s best fantasy is of the type that can be described as Mooreeffoc or Chestertonian fantasy, so named in recognition of the writer G. K. Chesterton, who once called notice to a passage in Dickens where the word Coffeeroom is seen backward through a glass door, giving it (in Chesterton’s words) “an elvish kind of realism.” Tolkien expanded on Chesterton’s remarks, using Mooreeffoc as a label to denote a particular type of fantasy, noting: “it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.” Lewis’s best fantasy does this superbly, whether viewing sin and the process of temptation from the Devil’s point of view (as in The Screwtape Letters); in revealing a new underlying theological framework for our solar system (in Out of the Silent Planet and its sequels); or in reinterpreting from a new vantage an old Greek legend (Till We Have Faces).

  Many of Lewis’s inspirations can be traced in his wide reading. In Surprised by Joy (1956), an autobiography of his early life, Lewis noted that one of the experiences forming his pleasure in literature occurred when as a youth he read the poem “Tegnér’s Drapa” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (The poem was first published as “Tegnér’s Death”—Esaias Tegnér, 1782–1846, was a Swedish poet, and the word drapa signifies a death song or dirge.) It gave him a glimpse of what he would later call “Northernness”—“instantly,” Lewis wrote, “I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote).” This Northernness was, for Lewis, a quality in literature he much valued—akin in some ways to the Romantic longing (Sehnsucht) that he also called “Joy.”

  Lewis’s own fiction is predominantly fantasy of one type or another, and various labels could be applied to any one of his works: children’s fantasy, fairy story, science fiction, theological fantasy, adult fantasy—these labels overlap and may in any case be subsumed under a more encompassing heading such as mythopoeic fantasy. This anthology is designed to center on the tradition of mythopoeic fantasy to which Lewis contributed. This is of course only one particular type of the many kinds of literature that he read, enjoyed, and studied, but it is self-evidently a particularly significant type with regard to his own writing of fiction.

  As with Tales Before Tolkien, I have kept my headnotes to the stories in this volume brief, intending them to serve more as guiding directions than as critical analyses. Background information on the various authors can be found at the end of the book, together with notes for further reading. And I have arranged my selections in a roughly chronological order as to when in Lewis’s life he might have encountered any particular item, though sometimes this involved educated guesswork.

  Finally, it is worth stating that the study of Lewis’s precursors, or of any particular sources that Lewis knew and used, in no way diminishes Lewis’s achievements in his own writings, wherein elements from the sources that inspired him may at times remain visible, transformed to a greater or lesser extent. The game of source-hunting is sometimes frowned upon by literary critics (though rarely by readers), yet the study of a writer’s sources and influences is often quite rewarding. Lewis himself knew this, commenting once: “I am a don, and ‘source-hunting’ (Quellenforschung) is perhaps in my marrow.” But elsewhere he saw a potential for danger, wondering “how much Quellenforschung in our studies of older literature seems solid only because those who knew the facts are dead and cannot contradict it?”

  Douglas A. Anderson

  July 2007

  PROEM: TEGNÉR’S DRAPA

  I heard a voice, that cried,

  “Balder the Beautif
ul

  Is dead, is dead!”

  And through the misty air

  Passed like the mournful cry

  Of sunward sailing cranes.

  I saw the pallid corpse

  Of the dead sun

  Borne through the Northern sky.

  Blasts from Niffelheim

  Lifted the sheeted mists

  Around him as he passed.

  And the voice forever cried,

  “Balder the Beautiful

  Is dead, is dead!”

  And died away

  Through the dreary night,

  In accents of despair.

  Balder the Beautiful,

  God of the summer sun,

  Fairest of all the Gods!

  Light from his forehead beamed,

  Runes were upon his tongue,

  As on the warrior’s sword.

  All things in earth and air

  Bound were by magic spell

  Never to do him harm;

  Even the plants and stones;

  All save the mistletoe,

  The sacred mistletoe!

  Hœder, the blind old God,

  Whose feet are shod with silence,

  Pierced through that gentle breast

  With his sharp spear, by fraud

  Made of the mistletoe,

  The accursed mistletoe!

  They laid him in his ship,

  With horse and harness,

  As on a funeral pyre.

  Odin placed

  A ring upon his finger,

  And whispered in his ear.

  They launched the burning ship!

  It floated far away

  Over the misty sea,

  Till like the sun it seemed,

  Sinking beneath the waves.

  Balder returned no more!

  So perish the old Gods!

  But out of the sea of Time

  Rises a new land of song,

  Fairer than the old.

  Over its meadows green

  Walk the young bards and sing.

  Build it again,

  O ye bards,

  Fairer than before!

  Ye fathers of the new race,

  Feed upon morning dew,

  Sing the new Song of Love!

  The law of force is dead!

  The law of love prevails!

  Thor, the thunderer,

  Shall rule the earth no more,

  No more, with threats,

  Challenge the meek Christ.

  Sing no more,

  O ye bards of the North,

  Of Vikings and of Jarls!

  Of the days of Eld

  Preserve the freedom only,

  Not the deeds of blood!

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82),

  from The Seaside and the Fireside (1849)

  THE AUNT AND AMABEL

  by E. Nesbit

  * * *

  LEWIS ENJOYED THE WRITINGS of E. Nesbit from the time he was a child. When he began writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he told a friend that he had begun a children’s book “in the tradition of E. Nesbit.”

  “The Aunt and Amabel” prefigures Lewis’s first Narnia adventure in that the young girl Amabel enters another world by means of a wardrobe, finding therein a magical train station called “Bigwardrobeinspareroom.” In chapter 2 of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the faun Mr. Tumnus similarly speaks of “the far land of Spare Oom” and of “the bright city of War Drobe.”

  “The Aunt and Amabel” was first published in Blackie’s Children’s Annual (1909), and collected in The Magic World (1912).

  * * *

  It is not pleasant to be a fish out of water. To be a cat in water is not what any one would desire. To be in a temper is uncomfortable. And no one can fully taste the joys of life if he is in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. But by far the most uncomfortable thing to be in is disgrace, sometimes amusingly called Coventry by the people who are not in it.

  We have all been there. It is a place where the heart sinks and aches, where familiar faces are clouded and changed, where any remark that one may tremblingly make is received with stony silence or with the assurance that nobody wants to talk to such a naughty child. If you are only in disgrace, and not in solitary confinement, you will creep about a house that is like the one you have had such jolly times in, and yet as unlike it as a bad dream is to a June morning. You will long to speak to people, and be afraid to speak. You will wonder whether there is anything you can do that will change things at all. You have said you are sorry, and that has changed nothing. You will wonder whether you are to stay for ever in this desolate place, outside all hope and love and fun and happiness. And though it has happened before, and has always, in the end, come to an end, you can never be quite sure that this time it is not going to last for ever.

  “It is going to last for ever,” said Amabel, who was eight. “What shall I do? Oh whatever shall I do?”

  What she had done ought to have formed the subject of her meditations. And she had done what had seemed to her all the time, and in fact still seemed, a self-sacrificing and noble act. She was staying with an aunt—measles or a new baby, or the painters in the house, I forget which, the cause of her banishment. And the aunt, who was really a great-aunt and quite old enough to know better, had been grumbling about her head gardener to a lady who called in blue spectacles and a beady bonnet with violet flowers in it.

  “He hardly lets me have a plant for the table,” said the aunt, “and that border in front of the breakfast-room window—it’s just bare earth—and I expressly ordered chrysanthemums to be planted there. He thinks of nothing but his greenhouse.”

  The beady-violet-blue-glassed lady snorted, and said she didn’t know what we were coming to, and she would have just half a cup, please, with not quite so much milk, thank you very much.

  Now what would you have done? Minded your own business most likely, and not got into trouble at all. Not so Amabel. Enthusiastically anxious to do something which should make the great-aunt see what a thoughtful, unselfish, little girl she really was (the aunt’s opinion of her being at present quite otherwise), she got up very early in the morning and took the cutting-out scissors from the work-room table drawer and stole, “like an errand of mercy,” she told herself, to the greenhouse where she busily snipped off every single flower she could find. MacFarlane was at his breakfast. Then with the points of the cutting-out scissors she made nice deep little holes in the flower-bed where the chrysanthemums ought to have been, and struck the flowers in—chrysanthemums, geraniums, primulas, orchids, and carnations. It would be a lovely surprise for Auntie.

  Then the aunt came down to breakfast and saw the lovely surprise. Amabel’s world turned upside down and inside out suddenly and surprisingly, and there she was, in Coventry, and not even the housemaid would speak to her. Her great-uncle, whom she passed in the hall on her way to her own room, did indeed, as he smoothed his hat, murmur, “Sent to Coventry, eh? Never mind, it’ll soon be over,” and went off to the City banging the front door behind him.

  He meant well, but he did not understand.

  Amabel understood, or she thought she did, and knew in her miserable heart that she was sent to Coventry for the last time, and that this time she would stay there.

  “I don’t care,” she said quite untruly. “I’ll never try to be kind to any one again.” And that wasn’t true either. She was to spend the whole day alone in the best bedroom, the one with the four-post bed and the red curtains and the large wardrobe with a looking-glass in it that you could see yourself in to the very ends of your strap-shoes.

  The first thing Amabel did was to look at herself in the glass. She was still sniffing and sobbing, and her eyes were swimming in tears, another one rolled down her nose as she looked—that was very interesting. Another rolled down, and that was the last, because as soon as you get interested in watching your tears they stop.

  Next she looked out of the window, and saw the de
corated flower-bed, just as she had left it, very bright and beautiful.

  “Well, it does look nice,” she said. “I don’t care what they say.”

  “Then she looked round the room for something to read; there was nothing. The old-fashioned best bedrooms never did have anything. Only on the large dressing-table, on the left-hand side of the oval swing-glass, was one book covered in red velvet, and on it, very twistily embroidered in yellow silk and mixed up with misleading leaves and squiggles were the letters, A. B. C.

  “Perhaps it’s a picture alphabet,” said Mabel, and was quite pleased, though of course she was much too old to care for alphabets. Only when one is very unhappy and very dull, anything is better than nothing. She opened the book.

  “Why, it’s only a time-table!” she said. “I suppose it’s for people when they want to go away, and Auntie puts it here in case they suddenly make up their minds to go, and feel that they can’t wait another minute. I feel like that, only it’s no good, and I expect other people do too.”

  She had learned how to use the dictionary, and this seemed to go the same way. She looked up the names of all the places she knew—Brighton where she had once spent a month, Rugby where her brother was at school, and Home, which was Amberley—and she saw the times when the trains left for these places, and wished she could go by those trains.

  And once more she looked round the best bedroom which was her prison, and thought of the Bastille, and wished she had a toad to tame, like the poor Viscount, or a flower to watch growing, like Picciola, and she was very sorry for herself, and very angry with her aunt, and very grieved at the conduct of her parents—she had expected better things from them—and now they had left her in this dreadful place where no one loved her, and no one understood her.

  There seemed to be no place for toads or flowers in the best room, it was carpeted all over even in its least noticeable corners. It had everything a best room ought to have—and everything was of dark shining mahogany. The toilet-table had a set of red and gold glass things—a tray, candlesticks, a ring-stand, many little pots with lids, and two bottles with stoppers. When the stoppers were taken out they smelt very strange, something like very old scent, and something like cold cream also very old, and something like going to the dentist’s.