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“In the last days of Narnia.” With these words, the final book of the series begins. From the outset, we are not allowed to be ignorant of the fact that this world, a world that we have come to love so deeply and desire so fully that we think of ourselves as Narnians, is going to end.
Loss is our earliest memory as a race. There was a time before the Fall, a time before we gambled all our happiness in hopes to win a happiness beyond the lot of mortals and discovered that the boundaries set to mortal being are absolute; a time before the terror, astonishment, and above all shame of knowing that we suddenly had a secret from God, one we would give anything not to have to tell Him.
The Horse and His Boy begins with the boy of the title. Or rather, it doesn’t begin there, but with a short preamble telling us that this story happened during the days of the Pevensie reign. This is the golden age of Narnia, when myth had become fact and all was at last, according to the old rhyme, set to rights.
In The Silver Chair, Rilian, the son of Caspian the Explorer, was born to be king of Narnia. This was his birthright, and a joy both for him and for a Narnia that was still in its first generation of unification. His father was the man of two worlds, who could therefore lead them both, ruling by the gift of the High King, the election of Aslan, and law of the Telmarines.
Since ancient times, Christians have referred to the church as a ship: specifically, as Noah’s ark, in which God’s faithful are being saved from the destruction of the world. This is why the bulk of a church is called a nave, from Latin navis, meaning “ship.” And so it is fitting that the Narnian book devoted specifically to considering the progress of the Christian life should be about a sea voyage.
In Prince Caspian, we return to Narnia 1300 years after we last left it. And so, unsurprisingly, we find the world greatly changed: Cair Paravel, once on a peninsula, is now on an island. The River Rush has carved a deep gorge for itself. But the biggest change is that it is now the country of the Telmarines.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard people remark on a snowy landscape that it is like Narnia. I get it: when we first cross into Narnia, it is snowy, and the snow gets attached to that first enchantment of finding yourself in a new world and meeting a faun there. But we should be careful: wintry Narnia is cursed Narnia.
Famously, time doesn’t run true between our world and Narnia. A year in our world might be three years in Narnia, or it might be 1300. There is no discernible relationship, no way to tell how much time will have passed since your last visit, nor are there any factors that can be identified to determine why this amount rather than that amount of time has passed.
“Wise men from the east came to Jerusalem.” How we would love to know more! Where did they come from? Were they all from the same place? How long did they have to travel? What was the nature of the art by which they interpreted a star appearing in the heavens to mean that a new king was born to a tiny, insignificant Roman province? For that matter, what did they think he would be king of? They say he is to be king of the Jews, but why should they care? What prophecies of their people was this child the answer to?
I t is easy to think that Gabriel and the other angels knew what God was doing all along: that when the promise was made to Eve that her seed would crush the serpent’s head, they knew that it was a reference to Jesus, and that Jesus would be both God and man. All throughout […]
