How C.S. Lewis used myth to supercharge storytelling

Great stories allow ideas to be experienced rather than merely thought about.

Simon Horobin

Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language & Literature, Magdalen College, Oxford University.

Aslan sculpture in Belfast, Lewis' birthplace.

K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash.

‘I’m tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading’. That is how C.S. Lewis described himself to a class of Fifth Grade pupils in Maryland who wrote to him in May 1954. An exhibition this summer at Magdalen College, Oxford, entitled C.S. Lewis: Words and Worlds, includes this letter along with a variety of personal objects, letters, books, manuscripts and audio materials relating to one of its most famous fellows.

As well as answering questions about plot details and forthcoming books in the series, Lewis corrects their view that everything in the Narnia books represents something in our own world. As he notes, that is indeed how Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress works – a reference which may have been lost on his ten-year-old correspondents – but that’s not what Lewis intended in the Narnia stories. Instead, Lewis explains that he set out to write a ‘supposal’ rather than an allegory. He began by asking himself the question: ‘Suppose there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, what would happen?’

For Lewis, the great value of stories is the way they allow their readers to experience ideas rather than simply think about them. In an essay called ‘Myth Became Fact’ he notes the impossibility of feeling an emotion such as pleasure and simultaneously studying it. But if you aren’t roaring with laughter, how can you genuinely understand humour? If you are suffering from toothache, you will be unable to write. But once the toothache has subsided, how could you write a book about pain? Lewis explains this paradox using the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus was permitted to lead his beloved wife out of the underworld, but the moment he looks back at her, she disappears. We can draw an abstract truth from this story about the impossibility of simultaneously seeing and experiencing, but it is not the only truth that this myth can communicate. If it were, it would be an allegory.

Instead of presenting the reader with a single message needing to be unlocked, myths instil a sense of longing for something much less tangible

As such, an allegory is like a puzzle that must be solved by the reader to reveal its hidden meaning. Its one-dimensional characters straightforwardly signal the qualities they represent, as in Bunyan’s Mr Despondency, held captive in Doubting Castle by a giant called Despair. Unlike allegory, myths are stories from which numerous truths may be abstracted. Instead of presenting the reader with a single message needing to be unlocked, myths instil a sense of longing for something much less tangible – ‘like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can’t quite place’. Lewis considered allegory to be a limited medium, since authors can only insert ideas that they already know, whereas a myth is of a higher order, since authors can fill it with ideas of which they are not yet conscious.

Lewis was fascinated by myths from his first encounter with the stories of Asgard and the Norse deities as a young man. As an atheist, one of his key objections to the Christian faith was that it was just another version of the myth of a dying god who is resurrected, similar to those he found in the stories of the Norse god Baldr, whose death was brought about by Loki, the trickster god. Following entreaties by Baldr’s mother, the goddess Frigg, Hel agrees to release him from the underworld, on the condition that everything on earth weeps for him. But Baldr’s return is ultimately blocked by one creature, a giantess, presumed to be Loki in disguise, who refuses to mourn him.

Why was Christianity different to this myth, or others, like the Egyptian account of Osiris or the Classical story of Adonis? It was a lengthy night-time conversation with his friends Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien in the grounds of Magdalen College in September 1931 that helped him overcome this objection and embrace Christianity. What Lewis came to recognise is that, when he encountered a god dying and being revived in pagan myths, he found it profoundly moving, suggestive of meanings beyond his grasp. But, when he met a similar concept in the Christian gospels, he was unmoved. What he took from his talk with Tolkien and Dyson was an openness to accepting the Christian story as a myth, with all its mystery and suggestive implications, but with one key difference from the Norse, Egyptian and Classical myths: it really happened. But, by becoming fact, he argued, Christianity did not cease to be a myth: ‘that is the miracle’.

Lewis wrote the Narnia stories to help children like Eustace become open to the possibility of a reality beyond the strictly material world.

In writing the Narnia stories Lewis was engaged in what he and Tolkien called ‘mythopoeia’ – the act of myth-making – communicating Christian truths in ways that would inspire children to grasp something of its mystical and mythical qualities. As he noted in his essay ‘On Stories’, reading about enchanted woods does not make children despise real woods, but instead makes all real woods a little bit enchanted. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the children meet Ramandu, a retired star who is being restored to his former youth so that he can rejoin the great dance in the sky. ‘In our world’, says Eustace Scrubb, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas’. ‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of’, Ramandu retorts. Eustace, we are told at the beginning of the story, had wasted his time at school reading only books of information about exports and imports, so it is no surprise that he can only comprehend a purely materialist definition. If he’d only read more fairy stories, he might have been able to grasp this reality, as well as being better prepared for his adventure on Dragon Island.

Lewis wrote the Narnia stories to help children like Eustace become open to the possibility of a reality beyond the strictly material world. Since God himself is mythopoeic – after all, isn’t the sky itself a myth? – shouldn’t we therefore be mythopathic, that is, receptive to myths? For Lewis, Christianity offered the marriage of Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact, which should be met not solely by love and obedience, but also by wonder and delight.

Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language & Literature, Magdalen College, Oxford University. He is the author of C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (Bodleian Publishing, 2024) and co-curator of C.S. Lewis: Words and Worlds. The exhibition runs until 11 September 20024, in the Old Library of Magdalen College, Oxford. Check opening times.

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To boldly hope: how Star Trek dares us to be better

Amid dystopian dramas, Paula Duncan analyses the attraction of the Star Trek franchise.

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Paula Duncan is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, researching OCD and faith.

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It’s something of a running joke that the popular animated series The Simpsons can predict the future – so much so that this was addressed by Time magazine. It is far from the only show that has a take on our pending fate. There is no shortage of dystopian futures available to us – nuclear war, rising sea levels, zombie apocalypse, super-contagious virus… Some of these no longer feel quite as fictional or remote a possibility as we might like. Such storytelling allows us to consider what it might mean for us to live through such scenarios and, perhaps, think more carefully about how we might prevent them.

I’m sure there are movies, games, books, or TV shows that spring to mind for each of us when we think about this. For me, it is the Hunger Games and the Divergent book series by Suzanne Collins and Veronica Roth, respectively. Even when these stories offer us a hopeful possibility of redemption, they do so in the wake of disasters that humanity has failed to prevent. We are invited to dwell in the worst parts of humanity and human nature. In some stories we destroy ourselves. In others, we find ourselves simply destroyed. I find it all too easy to become preoccupied by the potential horrors in our near or distant future.

This is why I’m so drawn to the vision of the future that the Star Trek franchise offers. There’s a hopeful message at the heart of the series that makes our continued existence seem plausible but doesn’t discount the changes we need to collectively make to achieve this. I am slowly making my way through Star Trek: Deep Space 9, having now completed The Original Series (TOS) and The Next Generation, and I’m always struck by this ultimately hopeful view for our future. It’s a not-quite utopian view of the future. We don’t achieve perfection in any way but we do learn to survive and thrive despite the challenges presented to us.

What do we pass on to our literal next generation? What morals, what values? What hope for a future in which we both survive and thrive? This, I think, is the crucial point.

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It's certainly not perfect. There are definitely things that are uncomfortable on the show – the portrayal of women, for one thing, often misses the mark in TOS. But I do think it represents a beginning, a promise that things can get better. I’m reluctant to write any line that begins “for its time”, but I think there is something in that here. I also defer to the judgement of someone who was actually there, contributing to the formation of the Star Trek universe: Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura. She wrote compellingly about the importance of diverse representation in the cast and what it meant to viewers in her autobiography Beyond Uhura. She reflected there:

Like all of Gene’s characters, Uhura embodied humankind’s highest values and lived according to principles that he was certain would one day guide all human endeavor. In Star Trek Gene created a work of fiction through which he communicated a timely, yet timeless message about humankind’s power to shape its future. But most important, he gave that vision to the world: to writers, to enlarge upon; to directors, to dramatize; to actors, to personify and make real; and to audiences, to enjoy, cherish, and incorporate into their own hopes for the future and for humanity.

For all its flaws, TOS set up a universe where we could see a better and fairer future for ourselves. In this early series, there are certainly problematic elements that would be written differently today. But there is, at least, hope.

What speaks most clearly to me is the idea of stewardship. For those unfamiliar with the franchise, it began when TOS originally aired in 1966 and follows the crew of the star ship Enterprise on a five-year exploratory mission through space. On the bridge, Captain James T. Kirk is accompanied by some of the best crew Starfleet has to offer. We follow them through the stars, visiting new people(s) and places and getting into an uncanny number of scrapes.

Airing in 1987, The Next Generation shows us the new and improved Enterprise is now captained by Jean-Luc Picard and a whole new crew with new skills and talents but the principles are the same – a crew that looks out for one another and their ship, caring for their home away from home. The Enterprise changes and different people take the helm, but the common goals remain.

Perhaps if we contemplate our world to be something like this: if we consider that we might each be given a collective opportunity to hold the fate of our planet, how should we act to make sure that we hand over the best possible future to those that come next? What do we pass on to our literal next generation? What morals, what values? What hope for a future in which we both survive and thrive? This, I think, is the crucial point

There are some key messages that we can draw from Star Trek’s view of our future. Captain Kirk frequently talks fondly of an Earth that has eradicated poverty and many unjust power structures. What might need to change for us to get to a position where we hold the same values? Where might we need to sacrifice personal gain in order to create a more sustainable world? I cannot help but think that we are not acting on this as quickly as we should be. The BBC recently published an article focusing on the episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in which 2024 is shown to be a year of riots and unrest on Earth. Even in our sci-fi not-quite-utopian future, our progress is slow.

I’d like to conclude with a reference to the 2009 movie reboot of Star Trek. Captain Pike says to a young Jim Kirk:

“your father was Captain of a star ship for twelve minutes. He saved eight hundred lives, including your mother's. And yours. I dare you to do better.”

What if we looked at our stewardship of our planet in the same way? We briefly, collectively, have a chance to make a difference. We have a chance to do better. We need, therefore, to boldly go.