The Magician's Nephew

The Lefay Fragment

The original opening of the novel differs greatly from the published version, and was abandoned by Lewis. It is now known as 'The Lefay Fragment', and is named after Mrs Lefay, Digory's fairy godmother, who is mentioned in the final version as Uncle Andrew's godmother, a less benevolent user of magic, who bequeathed him the box of dust used to create the magic rings.

In the Lefay Fragment, Digory is born with the ability to speak to (and understand) trees and animals; the distinction between Talking and non-Talking Beasts which was to become such a characteristic feature of the Narnian world is absent. Digory lives with an Aunt Gertrude, a former school mistress with an officious, bullying nature, who has ended up as a Government minister after a lifetime of belligerent brow-beating of others. Whenever his aunt is absent, Digory finds solace with the animals and trees, including a squirrel named Pattertwig. Polly enters the story as a girl next door who is unable to understand the speech of non-human creatures. She wants to build a raft to explore a stream which leads to an underground world. Digory helps construct the raft, but saws a branch from a tree necessary to complete it, in order not to lose face with Polly. This causes him to lose his supernatural powers of understanding the speech of trees and animals. The following day he is visited by his godmother Mrs Lefay who knows that Digory has lost his abilities and gives him a card with the address of a furniture shop which she instructs him to visit. At this point the fragment ends.

Pattertwig and Aunt Gertrude do not appear in the final version of the novel. Pattertwig does, however, appear as a Narnian creature in Prince Caspian, and Aunt Gertrude's career path is retraced by the Head of Experiment House in The Silver Chair.

Autobiographical elements

A number of aspects of The Magician's Nephew are parallels with Lewis's own life. Both Digory and Lewis were children in the early 1900s, both wanted a pony, and both faced the death of their mothers in childhood. Digory is separated from his father, who is in India, and misses him. Lewis was educated in England after his mother's death, while his father remained in Ireland. He also had a brother in India. Both Lewis and Digory were voracious readers as children, and both are better with books than with numbers. Digory (and Polly) struggle with sums when trying to work out how far they must travel along the attic space to explore an abandoned house, Lewis failed the mathematics entrance exam for Oxford University. Lewis remembered rainy summer days from his youth and Digory is faced with the same woe in the novel. Additionally Digory becomes a professor when he grows up, who takes in evacuated children during World War II.

The character of Andrew Ketterley also closely resembles Robert Capron, a schoolmaster at Wynyard School, which Lewis attended with his brother, whom Lewis suggested during his teens would make a good model for a villain in a future story. Ketterley resembles Capron in his age, appearance, and behaviour.

History

According to Jadis, Charn was once the greatest city of her unnamed world, "the wonder of the world, perhaps of all worlds." It was a magnificent civilization ruled by a line of magically adept emperors and empresses, of whom Jadis was the last. However, by the time the protagonists enter, the world has become a cold, lifeless wasteland, and the city is on the brink of collapse.

Magic may have been widely used in Charn; Jadis referred to the common use of magic carpets for transportation. Their use was apparently limited to the nobility, who inherited inborn magical powers. Jadis disdained Andrew Ketterley, Digory's magician uncle, as a petty conjurer without a drop of real magic blood in his veins, saying, "Your kind was made an end of in my world a thousand years ago."

Apparently dragons were also once abundant in Charn and in the service of the royal and noble families.

The Hall of Images displays the regal history of Charn, showcasing lifelike portraits of past rulers who are depicted as tall, beautiful, and powerful figures seated upon their thrones. The sequence of these images, through the expressions on their faces, tells a story of a civilization that was once benevolent but degenerated into a cruel, tyrannical empire. The early Emperors and Empresses of Charn were kind and wise, but over centuries, for unexplained reasons, their lineage devolved into one of malevolence, corruption, evil, and despair, seeing their subjects only as a means to an end. Evidently, their hunger for power was insatiable and they conquered several other realms, as Jadis gloats that "many great kings" attempted to stand against Charn, but were defeated and their names lost to history. Slavery was once common in Charn, as was human sacrifice. The last queen of Charn was Jadis, although the numerous empty thrones after hers suggest a premature end to the dynasty.

As Jadis leads the children through the crumbling palace, she describes the cruelty of Charn and its leaders. She points out dungeons and torture chambers to them and recounts that her great-grandfather once invited seven hundred nobles to a banquet and slaughtered them all, "before they had drunk their fill," for "they had rebellious thoughts."

When the children finally see the full extent of the city from the balcony of the royal palace, it extends as far as the eye can see in any direction, as if covering the entire world. It is described as being full of pyramids, bridges, palaces, and towers, with a great river that had long since turned to dust. Jadis recalls viewing the city while it was full of life: "It is silent now. But I have stood here when the whole air was full of the noises of Charn; the trampling of feet, the creaking of wheels, the cracking of the whips and the groaning of slaves, the thunder of chariots, and the sacrificial drums beating in the temples. I have stood here (but that was near the end) when the roar of battle went up from every street and the river of Charn ran red."

Destruction of Charn

Jadis was responsible for the eradication of all life on Charn but blamed the destruction on her sister. Jadis and her sister fought a civil war for the throne, which Jadis eventually lost. She claimed she had offered to spare her sister's life if she surrendered, so the resulting destruction was the unnamed sister's fault. Jadis obliterated her kingdom and all its people rather than relinquishing her power over them.

According to Jadis's own account, her sister had started a long and murderous civil war. There was a solemn oath between her and the unnamed sister that neither side would use magic, a pact broken by the sister, who gained the advantage as a result. Jadis recounts that during the civil war, she "poured out the blood of her armies like water," but was eventually defeated. In the final battle, which was fought in the city itself over three days, the sister defeated the last of Jadis' forces.

Within the ruling family of Charn, there was knowledge of an evil spell, the Deplorable Word, which would destroy all life except the one who spoke it, though the word itself was a mystery. Although her ancestors had bound themselves and their descendants with oaths never to seek knowledge of this spell, Jadis had sought it out and learned the word "in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it." Her sister knew Jadis had discovered the Deplorable Word but did not think Jadis would use it. Facing defeat, Jadis spoke the Deplorable Word, which annihilated all life under the sun apart from herself.

After this, she put herself into an enchanted sleep in the Hall of Images. During her suspended animation, all water in Charn dried up and the once-magnificent city crumbled into ruin.

Waking of Jadis

The spell that bound Jadis was broken by Digory Kirke. He and Polly Plummer had arrived on Charn via the Wood between the Worlds, and they had explored the deserted royal palace. In the room where Jadis slumbered with life-sized images of her royal ancestors, Kirke succumbed to temptation after having read a verse:

Make your choice, adventurous Stranger;
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had.

Charn's star is described as red, large, and cold. When Digory asks Jadis about the star's appearance, she asks him about his world's Sun. When informed that the Sun is yellow, brighter, smaller, and "gives off a good deal more heat," she remarks with sudden interest, "Ah, so yours is a younger world."

Charn and the realm in which it resided ceased to exist entirely after Jadis and the children left. Later, when Aslan and the children are in the Wood between the Worlds, Aslan shows them that the puddle leading to Charn is dried up, as the empty world has been destroyed. Jadis entered Narnia with the humans from Earth, and 900 years later appears as the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, ruling that land for 100 years until Aslan returned and defeated her with the aid of the four Pevensie children.

Commentary

The name "Charn" suggests "charnel house," a repository for human skeletal remains.^: 138 The hall of the figures of the rulers of Charn, inspired by the underground grotto of mummies in King Solomon's Mines,^: 139 shows a progression illustrating the decline and fall of the city and its world, reflecting a view of history described by G. K. Chesterton.^: 138 The "deplorable word" is most likely a metaphor for weapons of mass destruction, which many feared would bring about the destruction of the world at the time when the novel was written.^: 163

In the last chapter of the book, Polly asks Aslan if humanity has yet grown as corrupt as Charn, to which he replies:

"Not yet. But you are growing more like it. It is not certain that some wicked one of your race will not find out a secret as evil as the Deplorable Word and use it to destroy all living things. And soon, very soon, before you are an old man and an old woman, great nations in your world will be ruled by tyrants who care no more for joy and justice and mercy than the Empress Jadis. Let your world beware. That is the warning."

In this paragraph, Lewis may have been alluding to the tyranny, despotism, and corruption which had been spreading abroad. Aslan's statement that before the protagonists grow old, their world, which is our world, "will be ruled by tyrants who care no more for joy and justice and mercy than Empress Jadis", might be a reference to World War I and World War II.^{[citation needed]} This is further suggested by the fact that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which is set during World War II, portrays Digory as the elderly Professor Kirke.

Parallels with the Book of Genesis

Lewis suggested that he did not directly intend to write his Narnia stories as Christian tales, but that these aspects appeared subconsciously as he wrote, although the books did become Christian as they progressed. He thought that the tales were not direct representations or allegory, but that they might evoke or remind readers of Biblical stories. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan is a Christ-like figure who suffers a death of atonement and returns to life in a similar way to Christ's crucifixion and resurrection. The Magician's Nephew has similar biblical allusions, reflecting aspects of the Book of Genesis such as the creation, original sin and temptation.

Parallels with events in the Book of Genesis include the forbidden fruit represented by an Apple of Life. Jadis tempts Digory to eat one of the forbidden apples in the garden, as the serpent tempts Eve into eating a forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden; unlike Eve however, Digory rejects the offer. (Lewis's Perelandra also features a re-enactment of the same Biblical story, which in that book also ends with the tempter foiled and the fall avoided.)

While the creation of Narnia closely echoes the creation of the Earth in the Book of Genesis, there are a number of important differences. Human beings are not created in Narnia by Aslan, they are brought into Narnia from our own world. Unlike Genesis, where souls are given only to human beings, animals and half-human half-animal creatures such as Fauns and Satyrs and even trees and watercourses are given souls and the power of rational thought and speech. This appears to suggest Lewis combined his Christian outlook with his fondness for nature, myths and fairy tales.

Parallels may also be found in Lewis's other writings. Jadis's references to "reasons of State", and her claim to own the people of Charn and to be beyond morality, represent the eclipse of the medieval Christian belief in natural law by the political concept of sovereignty, as embodied first in royal absolutism and then in modern dictatorships. Uncle Andrew represents the Faustian element in the origins of modern science.

The Holy Spirit and the breath of life

On a number of occasions in the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan uses his breath to give strength to characters, demonstrating his benevolent power of bringing life. He specifically does so in The Magician's Nephew when a "long warm breath" gives life to Narnia. Lewis used the symbol of breath to represent the Holy Spirit, also known as the Holy Ghost. Both spirit and ghost are translations of the word for breath in Hebrew and Greek. The flash from the stars when the Narnian animals are given the ability to talk also most probably represents the Holy Spirit or "breath of life" of Genesis chapter 2, as well as (possibly) the scholastic concept of the divine active intellect that inspires human beings with rationality.

Nature and a natural order

The Magician's Nephew suggests two opposing approaches to nature, a good approach associated with Aslan as creator and an evil approach associated with human deviation from divine intentions and the harmony of a natural order. On the one hand there is the beauty of Aslan's creation of Narnia, which is suggested as having a natural order by the use of musical harmony to bring landscapes and living things into being. There is also a distinct order to the process of creation, from earth to plants to animal, which evokes the concept of The Great Chain of Being. Lewis himself was a strong believer in the intrinsic value of nature for itself, rather than as a resource to be exploited. This is perhaps reflected in how Aslan also gives speech to spiritual aspects of nature, such as naiads in the water and dryads in the trees. Andrew Ketterley and Jadis represent an opposite, evil approach of bending the forces of nature to human will for their own gain. They see nature solely as a resource to use for their plans and thus disturb and destroy the natural order.

Weapons of mass destruction: the Deplorable Word

The Deplorable Word is a fictional magical curse which ends all life on a world except that of the one who speaks it.

In The Magician's Nephew, the children who are the central characters, Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer, come to a lifeless world called Charn. In an ancient, ruined building they awaken a queen called Jadis. She tells them of a worldwide civil war she fought against her sister. All of Jadis's armies were defeated, having been made to fight to the death of the last soldier, and her sister claimed victory. Then Jadis spoke the horrible curse which her sister knew she had discovered but did not think she would use. In speaking the Deplorable Word, Jadis killed every living thing in her world, except herself, to avoid losing the war to her sister.

The children are shocked by this account, but Jadis has no regrets or remorse. The past rulers of her race, who evidently had not always been evil, knew of the Deplorable Word's existence but not the word itself, and had vowed that none of them, nor their descendants, would seek to discover it. Jadis said she had “learned it in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it".

Lewis did not say what the word was, or the price paid to learn it.

The book was written in 1955 during the Cold War, ten years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and three years after the first thermonuclear weapon was detonated. Lewis does not explicitly link the Deplorable Word to any specific weapon of mass destruction, but he alludes to the power of humanity to destroy life. Near the end of the story Lewis has the lion Aslan say to the central characters from the Victorian era:

It is not certain that some wicked one of your race will not find out a secret as evil as the Deplorable Word and use it to destroy all living things. And soon, very soon, before you are an old man and an old woman, great nations of your world will be ruled by tyrants who care no more for joy and justice and mercy than the Empress Jadis. Let your world beware. That is the warning.

Several writers have interpreted this warning as an allusion to nuclear weapons. Katherine Langrish wrote, "the Deplorable Word is an unmistakable metaphor for the atom bomb."

John Milton's Paradise Lost

The sacred Garden in the west of the Narnian world is surrounded by a "high wall of green turf" with branches of trees overhanging it, and "high gates of gold, fast shut, facing due east", which must be the only entrance because the travellers "walked nearly all the way round it" before they found them. In all these points Lewis echoes John Milton's description of Eden in Paradise Lost:

The verdurous wall of Paradise up sprung...

And higher than that Wall a circling row

Of goodliest trees loaden with fairest fruit,

Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue,

Appeerd, with gay enameld colours mixt...

One gate there only was, and that look'd east

On th' other side...

Jadis takes on echoes of Satan from the same work: she climbs over the wall of the Garden in contempt of the command to enter only by the gate, and proceeds to tempt Digory as Satan tempted Eve, with lies and half-truths.

Some details of the creation of Narnia, such as the emergence of animals from the ground, and the way they shake earth from their bodies are also similar to passages in Paradise Lost, and may also have been inspired by descriptions of the processes of nature in the seventh book of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.

The Garden of the Hesperides

Four years before the publication of the first Narnia book, Lewis had written as follows on the experience of reading really good poetry for the first time:

...I did not in the least feel that I was getting in more quantity or better quality a pleasure I had already known. It was more as if a cupboard which one had hitherto valued as a place for hanging coats proved one day, when you opened the door, to lead to the garden of the Hesperides...

The element of the cupboard leading to a new world Lewis proceeded to use in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but the snowy Narnia of that book is quite unlike the balmy Garden of the Hesperides, most of whose major mythological features appear as attributes of the sacred Garden in The Magician's Nephew where it differs from the Biblical or Miltonian Eden. It is set in the far West of the world; it has a watchful guardian; a hero (Digory) is sent, like Hercules, to fetch an apple from it; a female villain (Jadis) steals another of the apples, like Eris. Since the eponymous Hesperides were daughters of Hesperus, the god of the planet Venus in the evening, advocates of the planetary theory adduce this as evidence for a special association between The Magician's Nephew and Venus.

Edith Nesbit

Lewis read Edith Nesbit's children's books as a child and was extremely fond of them. The Magician's Nephew refers to these books in the opening of the novel as though their events were true, mentioning the setting of the piece as being when "Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road". The Bastables were children who appeared in a number of Edith Nesbit's stories. In addition to being set in the same period and location as several of Nesbit's stories, The Magician's Nephew also has some similarities with Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet (1906). This novel focuses on four children living in London who discover a magic amulet. Their father is away and their mother is ill, as is the case with Digory. They also manage to transport the queen of ancient Babylon to London and she is the cause of a riot; a very similar event takes place in The Magician's Nephew when Polly and Digory transport Queen Jadis to London and she also causes a similar disturbance.

J. R. R. Tolkien

The creation of Narnia may also have been influenced by his close friend J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion, which also contains a creation scene driven by the effect of music.

Morgan Le Fay and Pandora's Box

Lewis greatly enjoyed stories of Arthurian legend and wrote poetry about this world. Mrs Lefay visits Digory in The Lefay Fragment, and becomes Andrew Ketterley's nefarious godmother in the finished novel. She gives Ketterley a box from Atlantis containing the dust from which he constructs the rings Digory and Polly use to travel between worlds. Both Lefays are allusions to Morgan Le Fay, a powerful sorceress in a number of versions of King Arthur's tales, who is often portrayed as evil. The box itself is also evocative of Pandora's box from Greek myth, which also contained dangerous secrets.

The Atlantis legend

The box of dust enabling travel between worlds originated in Atlantis. Both Lewis and Tolkien were fascinated by the Atlantis legend. The degeneration of Charn's rulers, Jadis's ancestors, from the early kind and wise to the later cruel and arrogant is reminiscent of the similar degeneration in Tolkien's Númenor, the fabled island kingdom that finally sank under the waves due to the sinfulness of its latter inhabitants. The world of Charn was destroyed when Jadis spoke The Deplorable Word, a form of knowledge ancient Charnian scholars feared for its destructive potential. A number of commentators believed Lewis was referring to the use of the atomic bomb, used less than a decade earlier. It is perhaps more likely that Lewis was echoing the mythical destruction of Atlantis by the forces of evil and arrogance. As noted by Alice Ward, the comparison with nuclear arms is made explicit in Aslan's last warning: "You [Earth] are growing more like it [Charn]. It is not certain that some wicked one of your race will not find out a secret as evil as The Deplorable Word and use it to destroy all living things".

Theatrical

Aurand Harris was a well-known American playwright for children, whose works are among the most performed in that medium. He wrote 36 plays for children including an adaption of The Magician's Nephew. The play was first performed on 26 May 1984 by the Department of Drama, University of Texas, Austin and staged at the B. Iden Payne Theatre. A musical score by William Penn was written for use with productions of the play.

Erina Caradus wrote a playscript for The Magician's Nephew that was performed in Dunedin, New Zealand in 2005.

Film

An agreement among representatives of 20th Century Fox, Walden, and the C. S. Lewis Company determined that The Magician's Nephew would be the basis for the next film following the release of the 2010 film The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. However, in October 2011, Douglas Gresham confirmed that Walden Media's contract with the C. S. Lewis estate had expired.

On 1 October 2013, the C.S. Lewis Company announced that they had entered into an agreement with The Mark Gordon Company to jointly develop and produce The Silver Chair, ultimately deciding to continue releasing the films to mirror the novel series' publication order.

In October 2018, Netflix announced an agreement with the C. S. Lewis Company. Netflix would develop and produce a new series adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia. Mark Gordon, Douglas Gresham, and Vincent Sieber are attached as producers for the series. The film, directed by Greta Gerwig, is scheduled for release in theaters on 12 February 2027, before streaming on Netflix from 2 April 2027.

Television

In 2003, the BBC produced a 10-part version read by Jane Lapotaire and signed by Jean St Clair wearing different Narnia-like clothes in British Sign Language, for the TV series Hands Up! which was first broadcast on the 16 January 2003. Jean signed in front of various high quality illustrations representing parts of the novel. It was later repeated on CBBC on the 3 December 2007, and BBC Two on the 16 September 2008.

Radio

A BBC Radio 4 adaptation exists. Focus on the Family also made an adaptation of this book with a full cast, sound editing, and music. Both productions adapted all seven books.

Manga

A HarperCollins Japan manga adaptation, Chronicles Of Narnia: The Magician's Nephew: I Opened the Wrong Door! (Japanese: ナルニア国物語: 魔術師のおい: 間違ったドアを開けた!, Hepburn: Narnia Koku Monogatari: Majutsushi no Oi: Machigatta Doa o Aketa!), began publication in 2018, before concluding in 2020 after two volumes.