Tales Before Narnia!

It can be argued that C. S. Lewis’s influence has been even wider than his friend J.R.R. Tolkien’s. For in addition to the Narnia series, Lewis wrote groundbreaking works of science fiction, urban fantasy, and religious allegory, and he came to be regarded as among the most important Christian writers of the twentieth century. I look a look at The Space Trilogy early last year. In this collection titled Tales Before Narnia - Classic Stories that Inspired C. S. Lewis, much like another dedicated to Tolkien, we have stories which might have inspired the writer's children's classics.  

I am especially interested in “The Wood That Time Forgot: The Enchanted Wood,” a never-before-published fantasy by Lewis’s biographer and friend, Roger Lancelyn Green, that directly inspired The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. There is also E. Nesbit’s charming “The Aunt and Amabel,” in which a young girl enters another world by means of a wardrobe and of course “The Snow Queen,” by Hans Christian Andersen, featuring the abduction of a young boy by a woman as cruel as she is beautiful. Here's a list of the other stories in this fascinating collection. 

“Tegnér’s Drapa” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“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 Dream Dust Factory” by William Lindsay Gresham

Much more Narnia is on the way as I begin a two-month exploration of The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. I will begin next week with The Magician's Nephew. 

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