Post #4041075
2026-07-23 16:43 UTC
@mxchara@seattle.pink
Oh, I forgot to mention (though I'm sure you've heard this subject done to death on those mailing lists about Lewis) that putting "The Magician's Nephew" before "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe" COMPLETELY ruined some lovely surprises for readers. I can't understand how anyone with a functioning brain could fail to realize that.
I read the Narnia books when I was quite young, because my third- or fourth-grade home room teacher read a chapter to us each day. I read the whole series immediately after. I enjoyed it, but even though I was nominally Christian at the time I found the Christian elements extremely overdone. They detracted from the work.
Random note: My father disliked the books, or at least noted disapprovingly that "Aslan" means "lion" in Turkish. His parents were child survivors of the Armenian Genocide, so I guess that felt a little personal to him. Although I doubt that Lewis knew or cared what that particular word would mean to Armenian readers.
Replies (1)
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@mxchara@seattle.pink 2026-07-23 17:02
@Quasit@beige.party Oh I think it's a disastrous choice, but then I think The Magician's Nephew is itself somewhat disastrous, a retcon so clumsy and awkward that it makes a hash of the already dodgy worldbuilding. It's like Lewis realized how little of #Narnia actually made sense up to that point--like, why would a realm of sapient beasts need human rulers? So he tried to fix it up and only made it worse. But that suggests something perhaps about the true reason for scrambling the publication order of the books: if you read them in proper order, the faulty worldbuilding becomes far more obvious.