Stealing Past the Watchful Dragons

By Sue Careless

IN 1954 when Cynthia Donnelly wrote a letter to C. S. Lewis asking what role faith should play in a Christian author’s work, he replied: 

“…we needn’t all write patently moral or theological work. Indeed, work whose Christianity is latent may do quite as much good and may reach some whom the more obvious religious work would scare away. The first business of a story is to be a good story.” 

Dr. Simon Horobin, an Oxford professor of English Language and Literature, explored this further in his talk “Stealing Past the Watchful Dragons” at the Mere Anglicanism Conference in Charleston, S.C. last January: 

“It should first be an engaging narrative, that will draw us in. Lewis warns Donnelly not to try to shoehorn in the Christian elements. Instead let them bubble up to the surface on their own accord. And if they don’t, you still have given a good story to your readers. The story is like a soup; it can still be nourishing but don’t just drop Christian tracts into it.”  

According to Horobin, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe began not as a fully worked out narrative but as a series of images or mental pictures: a faun in a snowy wood, a witch on a sledge, neither of which had any Christian imagery. He didn’t know how the story would unfold until the image of the lion Aslan came bounding in pulling the whole story together. The Christian element pushed itself in of its own accord. 

When Lewis wrote the Narnia stories, he wanted to strip away any “Sunday school, stained glass window” veneer and make the gospel message appear as fresh and powerful as if heard for the very first time.  

How do we help our friends understand sin and salvation when such ideas seem old-fashioned? 

Sin

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Edmund and Lucy Pevensie are stuck with their odious cousin Eustace Scrubb. The three children are sailing with King Caspian but Eustace, after offending everyone on board, goes off in a huff up a mountain alone. There he spies thin wisps of smoke coming out of a cave.  Lewis writes: 

“Eustace had read none of the right books. The thing that came out of the cave was something he had not even imagined…. But perhaps if he had known something about dragons he would have been a little surprised at this dragon’s behaviour. It did not sit up and flap its wings, nor did it shoot out a stream of flame from its mouth…. Even in his fear Eustace felt that it was an old, sad creature.” 

He thought of making a run for it but what was the point of trying to escape a creature that could fly? 

Then instead of leaping up and attacking Eustace, the dragon simply drops down dead. It starts to rain so Eustace takes shelter in the dragon’s cave. Now most of us know what to expect to find in a dragon’s cave but again, Eustace had read the wrong books  –  books about exports and imports but nothing about dragons hording treasure. 

Like Lewis, the young JRR Tolkien was fascinated by stories of dragons. But while both fantasy writers were influenced by the same sources  –  Beowulf and the Norse sagas – they treat them very differently and for different reasons. Tolkien was very dismissive of allegory and did not see Beowulf as a Christian allegory. He denied that The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings was allegorical.   

In his 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” Tolkien objected to how dragons were conventionally treated as allegories of malice and greed. In The Hobbit his dragon Smaug has a distinct personality as one who can be flattered and who loves riddles.  

Lewis’ dragon didn’t do what you’d expect a dragon to do  –  to attack Eustace. It just falls over and dies. But, said Horobin: 

“There is a battle here, just not a test of strength or bravery. It’s a battle in Eustace’s own heart, provoked by his greed for the treasure. Lewis is concerned with communicating a central idea in the Christian faith – sin. 

“Eustace does battle not with the dragon but with the greed in his own heart and he loses. The consequence is that he himself is turned into a dragon. Sleeping on the dragon’s hoard, dreaming greedy dragonish thoughts, he had become a dragon himself. ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also (Matt. 6:21).’”  

Lewis uses Eustace’s transformation to teach the reader something about the consequences of sin. Eustace gets exactly what he wants – the treasure trove – but he can’t enjoy it because he’s turned into a dragon. His first thoughts as a dragon are of taking revenge on Caspian, Lucy and Edmund, but at the same time he feels lonely and cut off from them. 

The dragon Eustace tries to ingratiate himself with his fellow travellers by lighting dragonish fires to keep them warm, letting Lucy and Edmund rest on his hot sides to keep them warm and taking them on excursions flying on his back. 

“Here we’ve left the remote northern landscapes of Beowulf and the Norse sagas,” said Horobin, “and find ourselves in the more comforting children’s stories like Kenneth Graham’s The Reluctant Dragon who doesn’t want to fight St George at all. Or Edith Nesbitt’s Last of the Dragons in which a dragon that flies people around on its back eventually morphs into the first airplane. I can’t imagine Tolkien enjoying that story!”  

“Eustace as a dragon is forced to confront his own sinfulness in a way that he wasn’t able to before,” said Horobin. Lewis writes that Eustace “began to see that the others had not really been mean at all. He began to wonder if he himself had been such a nice person as he had always supposed.”  

“Eustace’s transformation is a brilliant depiction of how sin fails to deliver on its promises,” said Horobin. “Neither the riches nor the power mean anything to Eustace now that he has them.”

Salvation

Lewis is also remarkable in how he deals with Salvation. Eustace was sinful but he came to repent of it. He recognizes that he behaved badly and he regretted it. The story of his un-dragoning is significantly recounted to Edmund who had undergone a similar process in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. 

Eustace tells Edmund how he tried three times to scratch off his dragon skin, but to no avail. Underneath was another scaly layer. Only the lion Aslan with his sharp claws made a tear so deep Eustace thought it had gone straight into his heart, but the skin peeled right off. Then Aslan threw Eustace into a well of bubbling spring water.   

In this episode Horobin said we’ve travelled into a very different literary world, that of Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queene, one of Lewis’ favourite works but one which Tolkien disliked. Spencer freely admitted that his epic poem was “cloudily wrapped in allegorical devices.”

In Book I the Redcrosse Knight, who stands for Holiness, does battle with a dragon in order to protect the lady, Una, who represents Truth. Just when all seems lost because he is so badly injured, the knight suddenly falls into a spring, the well of life. He leaps back out, completely healed and now, stronger than before, is able to slay the dragon.

“The well of life figures the Christian sacrament of Baptism,” said Horobin. “The baptism purges the Redcrosse Knight of his sins, making him stronger in his fight for truth against the enemy in the form of the dragon. 

“Eustace’s un-dragoning seems to draw explicitly upon this episode. Yet Lewis makes subtle changes. Unlike the Redcrosse Knight who is immediately healed, Eustace is not an entirely reformed character. The scales are gone but elements of his old self continue to surface. He began to be a different boy but he had relapses.” 

“This is a realistic response to our salvation and makes it very relatable,” said Horobin. “Our efforts to share the gospel are most effective when we are open and real about our own struggles. We, like Eustace, have been washed clean but there are days when we too can be rather tiresome.” 

Horobin believes that Lewis’ openness and honesty about his own failings and struggles in his writings gets to the heart of its continual relevance, why people keep coming back to his works. 

The book that launched Lewis’ career as a Christian apologist was The Screwtape Letters (1942), a study of human temptation given from the perspective of a senior demon instructing a junior tempter. The satire was “a novel way to shine the light on human temptation and sin.” Readers assumed that the author had spent many years studying moral theology. Instead, Lewis had learned the hard way how temptation works in real life. 

Sudden Grace

Lewis chose the fairy tale form for the Narnia stories not because it was particularly suitable for children but because of its severe brevity, the restrictions that it placed on description, digression and analysis. 

“This lack of internal analysis is related to another conventional feature of the fairy tale, the clear division between good and evil,” said Horobin. “There is no need for psychology because if someone is good in a fairy tale, they stay good and if they’re bad, they stay bad. But this is where Lewis is at his most innovative because he challenges the convention from within. While the White Witch stays resolutely evil to the end in true fairy tale fashion, in the case of Edmund we witness repentance, forgiveness and restoration. The repentant Eustace goes on to be the hero in The Silver Chair.” 

The main feature of a fairy tale, many would say, is a happy ending. The evil enchantment is broken, the wicked stepmother is defeated, the prince and princess get married and they all live happily ever after.  

In his famous essay on fairy tales, Tolkien coined the term “eucatastrophe,” literally a good catastrophe, to describe this fortunate turn of events. Last year BBC journalist Richard Fisher wrote:

“According to Tolkien, a eucatastrophe in a story often happens at the darkest moment. When all seems lost – when the enemy seems to have won – a sudden ‘joyous turn’ for the better can emerge. It delivers a deep emotional reaction in readers: ‘a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart.’

“As Tolkien wrote: ‘The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy tale, and its highest function. The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending – or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’…is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well… it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur.’

“For Tolkien himself, a Christian, the ultimate human example was the life of Jesus: his birth, and eventual resurrection: ‘There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true,’ he wrote.”

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe all seems to be lost when the White Witch demands her right to kill the traitor Edmund, leading to Aslan’s self-sacrifice in Edmund’s place. But that is not the ending. The eucatastrophe is still to come. Aslan rises from the dead, the witch’s reign is over, and the children are crowned kings and queens of Narnia. Here Lewis explores    Christ’s resurrection, which Horobin called, “the greatest of all eucatastrophes, the one in which story and history meet.   

“The Narnia stories offer powerful, striking ways of presenting Christian truths in ways that effectively sneak past the watchful dragons of secularism and our own sinful nature and give us access to real treasure, treasures in heaven where thieves cannot break in and steal.”  

Horobin concluded by quoting Lewis in “The Weight of Glory”:

“Remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us.”   TAP