today's topic is the lion the witch and the wardrobe and how thanks to c.s lewis i know i
understand book burning a little bit better. not that i approve of it anymore but i do understand
it. i love the chronicles of narnia a lot and a lot of that is nostalgia because i really liked
them when i was small and because they feel like home to me because narnia is very much
like northern ireland because cs lewis was from northern ireland this was his grandfather's church
this is a lion this was his house though now that i'm older i side eye the stereotypes a lot more.
the plot of the lion the witch and the wardrobe goeth thusly: once upon a time there were four
siblings who were evacuated from london during the blitz they are sent to a country house where
an old professor lives and one day the youngest lucy discovers that there is a world which can
be got to through a wardrobe has tea with a fawn and discovers that the world is magical but also
dangerous because the queen who rules it is at least 14 kinds of awful her older brothers and
sister don't believe her about the magic world particularly because it's not there all the time
then edmund the third child finds his way in and takes up with the white witch illegitimate queen
of narnia and then pretends he didn't because he's a little twerp all the kids end up in narnia they
learn that there's a prophecy and also that the mysterious aslan is apparently on the move edmund
betrays his siblings turns out this was a bad idea aslan is giant lion slash jesus allegory he dies
in edmund's place resurrection thankfully doesn't take three days because there's a battle to be
fought the good guys win the pevensies are crowned kings and queens of narnia they reign for quite a
few years by the looks of things and then suddenly one day they're out hunting for a stag that grants
wishes and bam they're back in their child bodies in england and no time has passed the end or is
it? spoiler there are six other books so no the lion the witch in the wardrobe was published in
1950 and it's the best known of the entirety of the narnia series it's also as i used to tell
people when i was a tiny narnia hipster the second book chronologically because the magician's nephew
is about the creation of narnia still i'm of the opinion that if you're going to start reading the
narnia books from scratch the lion the witch in the wardrobe is a good place to start because
it's the most satisfying introduction to the world and to aslan but if i'm honest the lion the witch
in the wardrobe is probably my least favourite in the narnia series simply due to overexposure
because once upon a time in the 1980s the bbc made an adaptation of the lion the witch and wardrobe
and i have watched it endlessly there have been a lot of adaptations for stage and screen and
radio and audio book and there have been a lot of adaptations but i watched the bbc one so many
times during my childhood that the words have lost all meaning and so i like the relatively
recent disney version because it felt like i was coming back to narnia with fresh eyes while they
kept most of the major plot elements in they also changed things around a bit and it freshened it
up for me in a way that i hadn't quite anticipated but see you're wondering what this has to do with
book burning so i should probably explain c.s lewis you may or may not know was one of the
foremost english-speaking christian apologists of the 20th century he grew up in northern ireland
like i said there's a reason narnia feels like home to me moved to oxford became a don became
a christian largely due to the friendship of one j.r.r tolkien you might have heard of him maybe
and wrote a lot of stuff and that stuff included the lion the witch and the wardrobe which is
sort of a christian allegory lewis didn't think of it as an allegory he described it as being about
how the story of god and jesus might play out in a world not our own but you know the christian
parallels are most definitely deliberate and that will get you critics who will tell you that not
only do your books suck but you are a propagandist not like me philip pullman to be scrupulously fair
to philip pullman though at least he criticizes things about the books which are actually there i
read a lot of articles both positive and negative about cs lewis before i wrote this episode
and it amazed me how many of those articles contained facts about c.s lewis which were just
incorrect in the screwtape letters there's a bit about a milk cow and blah blah sexual overtones
and blah blah cs lewis hated women there is there is nothing about cows in the scrutiny of letters
this weird psychosexual overtone which the author has ascribed to lewis's writing in the screwtape
letters just doesn't exist at all i mean it's not like there aren't legitimate things to criticize
about c.s lewis or the narnia books or lewis's writings in general sorry right book burning i
know that it's terribly popular to laugh at people who burn children's books because my goodness
what are they teaching the children these days and harry potter is witchcraft and satanism and orgies
and i don't know mass hysteria dogs and cats living together or whatever but i think that's
a mistake because they have a grasp on a truth and that's how much stories can shape us lewis once
said i saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed
much of my own religion in childhood and he's not wrong books infect our minds books contaminate
us books take us to different places and make us see things from a different point of view stories
cut straight past our defensive rational minds and right to the heart of who we think we are and
they aren't the only things that do that but my goodness they're effective at it when i was about
seven or eight maybe i had a hardback copy of matilda by roald dahl and i carried it everywhere
and i read it over and over and over again because something in matilda struck right to the core of
me if you think that atheism is dangerous then you better ban the northern lights trilogy forthwith
if you think that little girls should be seen and not heard then you best not let your daughters
read matilda and if vague depictions of sex are going to warp teenagers minds then i have some
bad news for you about a significant proportion of why a literature children's books especially
ones which seem to advance a worldview which they all do to a certain extent are always going to be
controversial because stories cut to the heart of who we think we are and who we want to be c.s
lewis was one of the people who taught me that so thanks jack that was a lesson worth learning
thanks for watching this 150th episode of stuff you like i hope you enjoyed it if you've been with
me since at or near the beginning thank you for sticking with me for six years and more than 200
videos on random topics happy 150th everyone and thank you again so much for everything