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Writing

Lewis described the origin of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in an essay entitled “It All Began with a Picture”:

“…the Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy woodland. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it.’” ^[2]

During World War II, many children were evacuated from London to the English countryside to escape attacks on London by Nazi Germany. In autumn of 1939 four school girls were billeted at Lewis’s home, The Kilns, three miles outside Oxford.^[3] Lewis later suggested that the experience gave him a new appreciation of children, and at this time he commenced a children’s story, but only managed to complete a single paragraph:

“This book is about four children whose names were Ann, Martin, Rose and Peter. But it is most about Peter who was the youngest. They all had to go away from London suddenly because of the Air Raids, and because Father, who was in the Army, had gone off to War and Mother was doing some kind of war work. They were sent away with a kind of relation of Mother’s who was a very old professor who lived all by himself in the country.” ^[4]

In the summer of 1948 he told Chad Walsh, a friend, that he had started writing a children’s book in the tradition of E. Nesbit. It was a continuation of the story he had begun in 1939, when child evacuees had come to live at The Kilns. On March 10, 1949 a former student of Lewis, Roger Lancelyn Green dined with him at Magdalen college. After the meal, Lewis read two chapters from his new children's story to Green. He had previously read it to J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolkien had been unimpressed. Lewis asked Green’s opinion of the tale, and Green thought it was good. By the end of the month the complete story was ready.^[5]

Initially the character of Aslan was not present in the story. Lewis had already conceived of the land of Narnia as a frozen kingdom under the terror of the totalitarian rule of the White Witch, mostly probably reflecting the events of the Second World War and the situation of countries under Nazi occupation.^[6] He had suffered from nightmares for most of this life. Around the time he was writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe he had a number of dreams with lions in them and soon the figure of Aslan made a dramatic entrance into his imagination, effecting a complete transformation upon the story and to draw the novel and the entire series of Narnia stories together.^[7]