Ovid at Cair Paravel: Periodization and the Ages of Man in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia

Abstract

Unlike many fantasy series, the Chronicles of Narnia have an explicit beginning, middle, and an end – a chronology. A mainstay of children’s literature since their publication in the 1950s, the Chronicles have received a great deal of scholarly attention, but most of it directed to Christian allegorical themes. The way that Lewis composed his novels out of order, or the strategies with which he shaped the reader’s expectations by doing interesting things with time, has gone largely unnoticed. Yet, in recent years scholarly approaches to the Chronicles have expanded to consider questions of mythology, cosmology, environmentalism, ideology, and even politics. This paper adds to that expansion by turning to the classical elements in the Chronicles. By examining the ways in which C. S. Lewis uses narrative techniques borrowed from Ovid’s periodization in the Metamorphoses, this paper argues that Ovid was Lewis’s main source of inspiration for devising a chronology for Narnia, and moreover, that we should not be surprised to find such a presence in Lewis’s work. Although mostly remembered as a medievalist, Lewis wrote with a dizzying array of inspiration and influences, and to underplay his classical training is to obfuscate the subtlety in his compositional technique.