Tales Before Narnia

Rating All Ages Genre classic Author C.S. Lewis / Douglas A. Anderson Publisher Del Rey

J.R.R. Tolkien criticized C.S. Lewis's Narnia series for being careless with its mythology. Of course, most works would have a hard time competing with Tolkien's thoroughness, but Lewis's influences are certainly broader and shallower than Tolkien's. However, Lewis's broader taste allows for a more accurate anthology of influential work than Douglas A. Anderson's 2003 Tales Before Tolkien. which stretched to include many works that could not properly be considered influences on Tolkien's work. Anderson's new anthology, Tales Before Narnia, does a far better job in this regard. But this is not to say it gets it right all the time.

As a collection of Lewis's influences, quite a few of the inclusions in Tales Before Narnia are stretches. While Lewis was an avid reader of G.K. Chesterton's philosophical work, he claimed to have never read his fiction (though the editor's Chesterton selection, "The Coloured Lands," opens very similarly to Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader). It is equally doubtful that Lewis was influenced by his contemporary and classmate Owen Barfield's fiction. This anthology also includes two selections from "Letters from Hell," a work Lewis seems never to have read, and a chapter from Dickens' Pickwick Papers, apparently only because Lewis often used similarly humorous names for his characters. Charles F. Hall's "The Man Who Lived Backwards" is included simply because Lewis made a passing reference to it in the preface to The Great Divorce.

In many ways, this collection best illuminates the literary tastes of George MacDonald, a man whose work was extremely influential upon Lewis. The prefaces for many of the stories mention MacDonald more often than they mention Lewis, which would likely suit Lewis perfectly, as he regarded him as his literary master. "Tegner's Drapa" and "Undine" both highlight what Lewis considered the important quality of "Northernness" -- a sense of coldness, spaciousness, and remoteness. This influence is clearly felt in Lewis's Narnia novels, especially in the form of Jadis, the White Witch, an influence further seen in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen." As for Lewis's writing style, the clearest inspiration can be seen in E. Nesbit's "The Aunt and Amabel," a story of a young girl who is punished by a cruel aunt and forced to spend the day in the spare room, but finds a portal to a magical land (stop me if you've heard this one) inside a wardrobe. Lewis' and Nesbit's treatment of the premise differ, but the idea and the literary style make this selection the clearest influence on Lewis's work in the collection.

While it may fail as a record of Lewis's inspiration (and even there, it does not fail entirely), Tales Before Narnia is a wonderful collection of stories that recommend themselves in their own right. All of the poems and myths embody Lewis's notion of "Northernness," an idea that is key to his fiction and one that simply cannot be understood any way other than reading works that contain it. If you've never read "Undine" or "Tegner's Drapa," this collection is worth your time just to do so. Tales Before Narnia is a valuable book for fans of Lewis's work, if only as a handy source of similar stories that share his broad, sweeping sense of wonder.