Introduction The Lion's World

Introduction

The Lion’s World

Not every reader has been charmed by C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, and the recent release of high-earning film versions of several of the books has renewed the controversy. Critics of Christian faith have been predictably vocal – though their comments often suggest at best a superficial reading of the books. But even among Christian readers, the reaction has not always been friendly. Notoriously, Lewis’s friend, J. R. R. Tolkien, found them intolerable. He hated the random mixture of mythologies (classical Fauns and Dryads, Northern European giants and dwarfs, and, to add insult to injury, Father Christmas) and the failure, as he saw it, to create the kind of fully coherent imaginative world that he had spent his energies on for so long...