Is this the first appearance of Aslan in literature? Written by Charles Williams and first
published in 1931 here we meet a tremendous lion. My question… was C.S. Lewis influenced by
this passage in his invention of Aslan two decades later? At the time it was written, Jack and Charles
had not met, nor did they know each others work. I’d be very interested in any comments from
Lewis/Williams scholars and readers.
“Forms and shadows twisted and mingled for two or three
seconds in the middle of the garden, a tearing human cry began and ceased as if
choked into silence, a snarl broke out and died swiftly into similar stillness,
and as if in answer to both sounds there came the roar of a lion - not very
loud, but as if subdued by distance rather than by mildness.
With that roar the shadows settled, the garden became
clear. Anthony and Quentin saw before
them the form of a man lying on the ground, and standing over him the shape of
a full-grown and tremendous lion, its head flung back, its mouth open, its body
quivering. It ceased to roar, and
gathered itself back into itself.
It was a lion such as the young men had never seen in any
zoo or menagerie; it was gigantic and seemed to their dazed senses to be
growing larger every moment. Of their
presence it appeared unconscious; awful and solitary it stood, and did not at
first so much as turn its head. Then,
majestically, it moved; it took up the slow forward pacing in the direction
which the man had been following; it passed onward, and while they still stared
it entered into the dark shadow of the trees and was hidden from sight.”
Charles Williams
The Place of the Lion
(Victor Gollancz,
1931)
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2 comments:
This is indeed the first appearance of "Aslan." Lewis and Williams did know one another's work years before they met. They first exchanged letters between 11 and 23 March 1936, in which Lewis wrote first to praise "The Place of the Lion," which he had just finished reading and LOVED, and then Williams wrote back to say that he was just reading "The Allegory of Love" in proof as it made its way through OUP.
I just want to tell you how much I love Narnia! You are a scholarly blog, mine is a mommy-blog, but I write about my children's learning, and what they are learning right now is an introduction into the mystic, magical, and beautiful world of Narnia!
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