The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe Christian Themes

Christian Symbolism in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe C. S. Lewis was a brilliant author known for his fictional novels as well as his Christian apologetics works. Religion was a large part of his life, and he utilized such themes throughout his fiction books. The first book in The Chronicles of Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, exemplifies such overlap. Lewis inserted fundamental Christian themes into this novel, allowing his religion to influence his work. C. S. Lewis creates Christian entities within his book due to his own coming into religion. He was not originally a religious sort of boy. He grew up in a scholarly household with his older brother, Warren, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His parents raised him to be more in tune to the past than the present and future. They named him at birth as Clive Staples Lewis, but he picked up the nickname of “Jack”. It was long, though, until his mother’s influence was no longer felt in his life. She passed when he was ten years old, and from then on his life was turned upside-down (Edwards 1). C. S. Lewis lost himself at this time, becoming vagrant during his high school years. He gave up, until he converted to Christianity as he reached adulthood. He considered this his “greatest joy”. From there, he continued into life with an open mind, altering vocations drastically between different times in his life. There were very distinct ones, however, that his good friend and executor of his will, Owen Barfield, recalls. He considers Lewis a “distinguished Oxford literary scholar”, moat likely prevalent from his early upbringing. Barfield also says that Lewis was a “highly acclaimed author of science fiction and children’s literature, as seen through his Chronicles of Narnia series. His final and most prideful profession was a “broadcaster of Christian apologetics”, about which most of his adult novels are written (1). The author’s life story is crucial to understanding the

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