One perceptive critic, erican medievalist, suggests that Lewis based Narnia on the concepts of time and space and history that prevailed in the Middle Ages

4 In Narnia, she points out, just as in the Middle Ages, history was seen as finite. The world was created at a specific time and will be destroyed at another specific time. (According to the Lewis expert Walter Hooper, Narnia lasts exactly 2,555 years.) Outside of heaven, there is no idea of infinity or of progress. Like earth in medieval maps, Narnia is the center of its universe. Aslan’s homes are far to the east or west; Calormen, to the south, “corresponds to the Islamic Kingdoms of the Middle Ages, complete with deserts, Moors, and exotic walled cities” as well as pagan gods. Paradise is a walled garden with a fountain in the center. “Narnia” was also a word known to medieval scholars-it was the name given by the Romans to the ancient Umbrian city Nequinium.

Another possible interpretation of the stories occurred to me while I was watching the film of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The computer-generated Aslan there is halfway between the cartoon Lion King and an animal you might see in the zoo or a circus, but what he most resembles is the traditional British Lion, that ubiquitous nineteenth-century symbol of Empire, visible in hundreds of political cartoons and frozen in stone in front of hundreds of public buildings. Possibly The Chronicles of Narnia can be seen not only as a fairy tale or a religious allegory, but also as a history of the creation, success, and eventual decline and fall of the British Empire. In its prime Narnia, like Britain, controlled the sea and set up outposts on distant islands. But by the time of The Last Battle the country has been weakened and invaded by ugly aliens and godless foreigners. Most of its territory has been lost, and the land is ecologically devastated. Antichrist has appeared in the form of an ape named Shift. In the end the country is totally destroyed. Aslan, his human allies, and the talking animals and minor gods escape into a kind of super-Narnian heaven (“higher up and further in”) only by dying as an empire-and becoming history and literature.

Usually disaster can only be avoided by Aslan’s visible or invisible intervention

Perhaps the most important, though least obvious, way in which the Narnia books differ from most classics of juvenile literature is that they do not free children from the authority of adults. In the classic stories heroes and heroines usually have adventures and face dangers on their own; they solve problems and defeat their adversaries with only occasional help and advice from grownups. Often the good adults turn out to be unable to help the children, as in the Harry Potter books. And even when they seem to be on your side, adults may turn out to be weak or corrupt; at times it seems best not to trust anyone over fifteen. In some recent children’s fiction, such as Lemony Snicket’s popular Series of Unfortunate Events, the grownups are usually stupid, selfish, actively evil, or all of these things at once. The implicit lesson of such tales is subversive: they suggest that though some adults may wish you well, and may give you the knowledge or skills that will help you through life, essentially you are going to be on your own.

In the Narnia books, by contrast, children merely seem to be on their own. Behind everything that happens is the power and wisdom and intention of Aslan. With his aid battles are won, souls saved, and enemies defeated. Even when he does not seem to be there, he is: in The Horse and His Boy Shasta learns that Aslan has already preserved his life four times when he thought that chance, luck, or his own skill had done so. Without Aslan’s help, all seven books tell us, we would fail and evil would conquer. As Alan Jacobs writes, this is “a narrative world in which obedience to just Authority brings happiness and security, while neglect of that same Authority brings danger and misery.” The attitude of the good characters in the Narnia books toward Aslan is one of almost abject love and adoration mixed with literally holy terror. Or, as Russell W. Dalton puts it in Revisiting Narnia, “The ultimate virtue in Narnia, it seems, is to submit completely to the will of Aslan.” 5 “That is the greatest joy in life, even if it leads to trials and…death.” Other characters in the stories “are called upon to be good and faithful, but they should not presume that they can really accomplish any good.”