{"id":7,"date":"2006-01-04T01:22:59","date_gmt":"2006-01-03T18:22:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/?p=7"},"modified":"2020-01-05T14:19:36","modified_gmt":"2020-01-05T19:19:36","slug":"narnia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/narnia\/","title":{"rendered":"Narnia"},"content":{"rendered":"

I picked up a copy of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe <\/em>to read to my daughter a couple of years back. It blew me away. I immediately bought the rest of the set.<\/p>\n

I knew little about CS Lewis at the time, although I was aware that he’d written books about his Christian faith.<\/p>\n

I didn’t need to know anything about him. The Chronicles of Narnia are ideal children’s literature. Partly because they are so well-written. But mostly because the children are the heroes, yet not one-dimensionally: these aren’t saccharine characters. They become heroes by wrestling with conflicting impulses (some noble, some base) and by experiencing first-hand that one’s choices have consequences in the greater world.<\/p>\n

Somewhere (I thought it was here<\/a> but offhand can’t find the exact reference right now) I read that Lewis conceived of Narnia by asking a question something like this: what if the Christ myth had embodied itself in a different land, a fantasy land?<\/p>\n

I know some people dismiss the Chronicles for that very reason; they fancy the books are “only” Christian allegory.<\/p>\n

But they aren’t. They are myth, in the highest sense of the word.<\/p>\n

What any writer wants is to create (or would that be “tap into?”) myth; what any decent writer understands is that true myth is felt<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Narnia books give us a felt myth.<\/p>\n

Movie version works, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I picked up a copy of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe to read to my daughter a couple of years back. It blew me away. I immediately bought the rest of the set. I knew little about CS … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4899,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions\/4899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kirstenmortensen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}