Welcome to the second chapter of our
read-through of 'The Lion the Witch and
the Wardrobe'.
I'm Jem, the Reader at St John the
Baptist Parish Church in Beeston, and
this is the second chapter: 'What Lucy
found there.' If you haven't heard the
first chapter I'd advise going to the
first episode and listening to that, but
on the assumption that you are up to
date, here we begin the discussion of
what Lucy found when she went into the
magical land of Narnia, her tea with the
faun, and the way in which we might trace
literary and religious allusions and
echoes in Lewis's work. So if you haven't
yet read Chapter 2 go and read it. 
Read from '"Good evening," said Lucy, but the faun
was so busy picking up its parcels that
at first he did not reply' and read all
the way to 't was still raining and she
could hear the voices of the others in
the passage. "I'm here!" she shouted. "I'm
here, I've come back, I'm all right!"' So, as
I said in the first episode, what I'll be
doing here is discussing things that
particularly jumped out at me
or struck me as I read this chapter.  It's
not the first time I've read the book, 
but I'm always intrigued by
new things that come out of Lewis's work:
new details, new nuances or images that I
haven't noticed before and I
mentioned at the end of the last episode
that I was going to save discussing the
image of the faun to the beginning of
this one. So delving into the end of
Chapter One here we have a description
of him. 'He was only a little taller than
Lucy herself, but he carried over his
head an umbrella white with snow. From
the waist upwards he was like a man, but
his legs were shaped like a goat's, the
hair on them was glossy black, and
instead of feet he had goats' hooves. He also had a tail but Lucy did not
notice this at first because it was so
neatly caught up over the arm that held
the umbrella, so as to keep it from
trailing in the snow. He had a red wooden
muffler around his neck and his skin was
rather reddish too. He had a strange but
pleasant little face, with a short
pointed beard and curly hair, and out of
the hair there stuck two horns, one on
each side of his forehead. One of his
hands, as I have said, held the umbrella,
in the other arm he carried several
brown-paper parcels. What with the
parcels and the snow it looked just as if
he'd been doing his Christmas shopping. He was a fawn.' Now obviously this is a
very odd person for Lucy to meet in a
forest, even an apparently enchanted
forest, and though his critics and
scholars have advised advanced theories
as to what's going on here,
the figure that Tumnus reminds me most
of all - certainly when we first meet him -
is the figure of the god Pan, the
classical god of woods, forests and wild
places, and I think this is likely
because Pan haunts the imagination of
English creative writers in this period.
Rather strangely, as Ronald Hutton has
pointed out in his scholarly work, Pan's
not a hugely important classical god for
Greek and Roman writers, but he becomes
strangely significant as a symbol of
wildness and ancient power and in the
19th and 20th centuries. Simply
looking around at the the writers who
surrounded Lewis in in time and genre we
can see this. So the short story writer
and novelist Hector Hugh Munro, who wrote very mordant and witty short stories
under the name Saki at the end of the
19th century/ beginning of the 20th
century, he wrote at least one short
story I can think of that involves the
god Pan suddenly appearing in mid-century England. We might also look at
The Wind the Willows' which famously has
a very strange chapter in the centre
called 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn'
where the Otter's child gets lost and they
have to go and look for him and they
find him asleep by a figure playing the
panpipes that appears to be Pan, the
titular Piper at the Gates of Dawn - from whom
Pink Floyd borrowed the phrase. Even,
since I cited Dorothy L Sayers in the
last episode, there's an episode in a Sayers' novel, 'Murder Must Advertise'
where the spoilt little rich girl
Dian de Momerie is lured away from
her party by what turns out to be Lord
Peter Wimsey, dressed as a harlequin
under the title of De'ath Bredon, who
lures her to a wood and plays a flute
and lectures her about the fact that there is
a kind of  fear called panic fear
which afflicts people in woods and wild
places and this is what she's currently
experiencing, so even in Sayers' detective
novels there seems to be this
tinge, this idea of the god
Pan in the background. Now obviously this
is slightly surprising for a novel
which is famous for being about the
Christian religion rather than any other
religion, and it's tempting to speculate
why we have this image here. I won't go
into great theological detail here but
certainly my instinct here is that Pan
is at the centre of those other stories -
Pan is sort of the final thing people
find, he's the truth, or the wildness
or the power in the story. Here an
image of what looks like the god Pan is
actually at the beginning. It's something
that people go through in order to find
the real meaning in things and I wonder
whether there's not perhaps a
deliberate choice there but an instinct
of Lewis' that an interest in the
English countryside and folktale and
legend is splendid and wonderful and can
lead to great spiritual insight but
it is not itself that insight. It should
be gone through. That's just a
speculation based upon the position of
the episode in the novel. So Lucy meets
Mr Tumnus
and another thing I'd like to pick up on, which perhaps is the dominant mood or
the dominant atmosphere of this chapter
for me, the dominant theme is that Lucy
goes through the wardrobe into this
magical land and where we might expect
lots of descriptions of what the land's
like and what happens there and lots of
exposition to happen to her, in fact the
first thing that happens, and it happens
all the way through the chapte,r is that
Lucy's identity is questioned and that
she's encouraged and we're encouraged to
see her in a new light. And it seems to
be more about explaining who she is
rather than these extraordinary creatures,
extraordinary places that she comes
across. So when she meets the faun: '"Good
evening, good evening," said the faun. "Excuse me, I don't want to be inquisitive,
but should I be right in thinking that
you are a Daughter of Eve?"
"My name is
Lucy," she said, not quite understanding
him. 
"But you are - forgive me - you are what
they call a girl?" said the faun.
"Of course I'm a girl!" said Lucy.
"So you are in fact human?"
"Of course I'm human" said Lucy, a little
puzzled.
"To be sure, to be sure." said the
faun. "How stupid of me. But I've never
seen a Son of Adam or a Daughter of Eve
before. I am delighted." 
Now as I say it
seems striking to me that the first
thing that we get here is not an
elaboration of the world that Lucy's
entered but a reflection back on her. We
might compare this with something like
the Harry Potter novels - another richly
realised fantasy - that obviously came
somewhat later in literary history, in
which as soon as Harry gets into the the
Wizarding World there are pages and
pages of detailed description
which a lot of readers find very
charming and very absorbing as to how
things work in the Wizarding World. How
things are different from our world, what
sort of food people eat, how they travel
up and down staircases, how doors work.
Any in later novels you get
details like how the Ministry of Magic
works and how the the bureaucracy and
the money works, all this kind of thing. And this is not what happens here. The
novel seems to be, as I say, interrogating
the identity of the character that we
see it through. So rather than us
discovering about the the hierarchies of
the royal family of this world,
she is addressed as if she's from some
great noble line. 'But should I be right
in thinking that you're a Daughter of
Eve' and he says 'you are what they
call a girl, you are in fact human?' Three
different ways of classifying Lucy: that
she's a girl rather than a boy, that's she's a
character in a children's story, that she
is human rather than animal or vegetable
or mineral, I suppose, then that she is
part of a biological way of of
classifying things and that she's a
Daughter of Eve - that she is part of the
biblical narrative, that she is at at the
end of something very old and very
ancient and very complex. I spoke in the
previous episode about that's how one of the
sort of dominant feelings of this book
is discovering that what appear to you
to be ordinary things are in fact part
of a much larger story. So here again we
have a hint to Lucy if she's smart enough to pick it up
or the reader if they're smart enough to
pick it up that what seems normal to her
is extraordinary, remarkable, ancient and part of an
ongoing and important story. This gets
picked up actually in a lovely detail,
one I always smile at when I come
across it in this in this chapter, where
she's invited to Tumnus' cave for tea
and she finds books on the shelves. "Lucy
looked at these while he was setting up
the tea things. They had titles like "The
Life and Letters of Silenus" or "Newts and
their Ways" or "Men, monks and gamekeepers:
a study in popular legend" or "Is Man a
Myth?"' Now from one point of view
obviously this is a gentle parody of the
sort of books that might be found on the
shelves of Lewis and his friends. Well this
is a worldly wise faun who was
interested in legend and in historical
biography and in literary culture,
but also there is another kind of
inversion, here another kind of of drama
where Lucy is becoming the subject of
scrutiny rather than the fantastical
world she's wandered into. Because these
two books, 'Men, Monks and Gamekeepers: a
study in popular legend" or "Is Man a Myth?" are of course exactly the sort of books
that you might find in our world called
things like 'Nymphs and Fauns and Sprites:
the faeries in popular culture'
or 'Are there such things as ghosts?'
The sort of paperbacks you might
find on the shelf of an enthusiast of
either folklore and legend or perhaps
UFOs and the paranormal these days,
except we,  the ones who are reading the
book, are the subject of this
investigation. We're the ones being
called into question so we're the ones
being doubted whether we actually exist
and this is I think a deep part of Lewis's
approach both to fiction and his
approach to religion the sense that
searching for God, searching for faith is
an experience that may feel as if we're
setting out to look for something,
as if we're seeking something in the
universe, as if we are the spectating
subject that's going to pin down some object
of knowledge and in fact we find
ourselves being questioned, we find
ourselves being the subject of the quest
so to speak and we find ourselves being
exposed to view and called into question.
We find ourselves being the object of
scrutiny rather than the subject of it.
Now as I say I don't think there's some
allegory going on here or some specific
symbol but the general feeling and the
general tone of this chapter seems to me
congruent with the way Lewis approached
faith and approached knowledge. Now
whilst Lucy's reading his book titles
Tunmus is getting tea ready and we have a
loving description of the tea that they
had. 'And really it was a wonderful tea. There was a nice brown egg lightly
boiled for each of them and then
sardines on toast and then buttered
toast and then toast with honey, then
a sugar-topped cake and when Lucy
was tired of eating the faun began to
talk.
He had wonderful tales to tell of life
in the forest. He told about the midnight
dances and how the nymphs who lived in
the wells and the dryads who lived in the
trees came out to dance with the fauns.
About long hunting parties with the milk
white stag - that stag from last
episode - with the milk white stag  - who
could give you wishes if he caught him - about
feasting and treasure seeking with the
wild red dwarves in deep mines and
caverns far beneath the forest floor and
about how summer when the woods were
green and old Silenus on his fat donkey
would come to visit them and sometimes
Bacchus himself and then the streams would
run with wine instead of water and the
whole forest would give itself up to
jollification for weeks on end and I've
just turned a page there given that
that's such a long run-on sentence. I
think that's deliberate that the sentence
itself sort of picks you up and carries
you with its many many clauses as Lucy
is being taken in by these extraordinary
stories that Tumnus is telling her. I
think we have an image of conviviality,
an image of comfort and wholesomeness
and it's interesting that it centers
for Lewis around a meal as it does for
many other fictional writers.  You imagine
the banquets in Beowulf or in
Tolkien perhaps, the meals that are taken
with the elves of the last homely house
and obviously as well as that there is
storytelling. Here we have an example of
a good meal. In a subsequent chapter
we're going to see an example of a bad
meal, and we might pause longer than that,
but it's worth noting here that it's
shared they both have an egg there's
food for both of them they both partake
in it and it comes with storytelling.It
comes with a remembrance of things that
are important and which are going to be
passed on. Things that are not evident in
the world as Luciy and Tumnus are
currently experiencing it but things
that are strong and deep and fundamental.
Now even as I'm saying this you can
probably see that there's a comparison
there perhaps with the religious life of
Lewis himself. Lewis loves stories and
legends and sagas, and he also had a
devotion to the Eucharist - to Holy
Communion - another deeply important
shared meal where stories are told where
we're made aware of the great narrative
that we are swept up in and things - 
stories are told which make things
visible which would otherwise not be
visible in the mundane world around us.
There's other things but I think
that's a certainly one function of the
the Liturgy of the Eucharist.  Again I'm
not suggesting that he's written a
Eucharistic scene in here, but that
certain elements in Lewis's imagination
of what a a good meal is like and what a
good meal does are tinged with his
religious practice. However, of course,
this wonderful storytelling is also
serving another end. It can be corrupted
because Tumnus is in fact keeping her
there in the hopes that he will lull her
to sleep and then he'll turn her over to
White Witch.  As he then confesses as a
moment later: "She asked Mr. Tumnus
whatever is the matter for the faun's
brown eyes had filled with tears and
then the tears began trickling down his
cheeks, and soon they were running off
the end of its nose.  And at last it
covered its face with its hands and
began to howl ." She gives him a
handkerchief:
"And even when Lucy went over and put her arms around him and lent him a
handkerchief he did not stop. He merely
took the handkerchief and kept on using
it, wringing it out with both hands
whenever it got too wet to be any more
use, so that presently Lucy was standing
in a damp patch." I think he's had that
off Lewis Caroll by the way. I think there's an Alice echo there because Alice also
has a scene where there's a an animal crying
and crying and gradually she gets - where
she's standing gets wetter and wetter
indeed she gets sort of submerged in
tears. Here I think there's a little
little children's literature reference
going on. But more crucially I think Lucy
is offered an opportunity to recognise
herself in narrative, in which she initially
fails and then succeeds.  So she says "what's
wrong?" and Tumnus says "oh I'm a terribly
bad faun, I do these terrible things" and
and he said "Would you believe I'm the
sort of faun to meet a poor innocent
child in the wood, one that had never
done me any harm and pretend to be
friendly with it and invite it home to
my cave, all for the sake of lulling her
to sleep and then handing it over to
the White Witch ." "No," said Lucy,  I'm sure
you wouldn't do anything of the sort." "But
I have," said the faun. "Well," said Lucy
rather slowly, for she wanted to be
truthful and yet not be too hard on him,
"Well that was pretty bad but you're so
sorry for it that I'm sure you will never
do it again."
"Daughter of Eve don't you understand" said
the faun, "It isn't something I have done.
I'm doing it now this very moment."
"What do you mean?" cried Lucy, turning very
white." "You are the child," said Tumnus, "I
had orders from the White Witch"... etc etc
Now that "you are the child"
pings my memory very strongly and here's
a passage which we might put next to it.
From the second Book of Samuel, Chapter
Twelve: "and the Lord sent Nathan unto
David and he came unto him and said unto
Him:  There were two men in one city, the
one rich, the other poor. The rich man had
exceeding many flocks and herds but the
poor man had nothing save one little ewe,
lamb which he had brought and nourished
up, and it grew up together with him and
with his children. It did eat of his
own meat and drank of his own cup and
lay in his bosom and was unto him as a
daughter. And there came a traveler unto
the rich man, and he spared to take his
own flock or his own herd to dress for
the wayfaring now that was come unto him.
But he took the poor man's lamb and
dressed it for the man who was come to
him. And David's anger was greatly
kindled against the man and he said to
Nathan: As the Lord liveth the man that
hath done this thing shall surely die.
And he shall restore the lamb fourfold
because he did this thing, and because he
had no pity. And Nathan said to David:
"Thou art the man".'
Now this is part of the famous narrative
in which King David is rebuked for his
sins by the prophet, and he is shown that
in the story that he's so angry about
he's actually the the aggressor, and the
the criminal, rather than the victim
or the sufferer. And here we obviously
have a rather different story, in that
Lucy is the victim but we have a very
similar phrase there: "You are the child"
"Thou art the man". And apart from moving
the plot forward, which I think it does
rather well, I think there's something
here in which Lucy's being encouraged to
first question her own identity when
she's asked-  you know-  "Are you a daughter
of Eve, are you a girl, are you a human?" etc To
place herself in a particular kind of
context or story. And then a story is
told to her in which she doesn't yet
recognise who she is, but then she's
encouraged to recognise who she is. And
of course this has immediate concern for
her, because she's suddenly realised she's
sitting in the parlour of a man who has
fed her food and lulled her to sleep and
then says "Well I'm actually I'm a
kidnapper by trade." And it's, er, it's
skipped over relatively lightly, but Lucy
sort of turning white and saying "What
do you mean?" I think is a recognition that
there's real peril underlying this story.
A children's writer like Antonia
Forrest, perhaps, goes into this in in more
detail and with more emotional trauma. But she has, after all, wandered off
with a goaty old man from the woods, and
she's been led away. But yeah, so, so, Lucy
comes to recognise herself in the story.
And this links up, I think, with the idea
that ,that, appears with the titles at the
beginning of the - beginning of the
chapter, where she's offered these titles
like are you a daughter of Eve, are you a girl,
or human. And she is encouraged to
recognise herself in a particular
narrative and I think the same is
happening for the reader. Because - after
all - the reader - whether the son of Adam
or the daughter of Eve -
is also those glorious and high
sounding titles that appear at the
beginning of the chapter. And they are
reading a story about someone in a
magical world experiencing strange
things, who themselves is then encouraged
to identify themselves with a character
and story and to recognise their true
identity. Which I think reflects on us:
that we are then encouraged to wonder
whether we might recognise ourselves in
this story. And it's relatively early on
in the book yet, but I think Lewis's
narrative here is... either we might say
teaching us how to read this book,
teaching us that there may be moments in
it where we should look into the story
and find ourselves and think, you know,  "thou
art the man", "you are the the boy", you
are the girl" etc. Or we might say it's
offering us opportunities for that kind
of identification. Either way at this
relatively early stage I think the book
is presenting this this wonderful
magical world, but keeping wrong footing
us, keeping suggesting that there is
something wonderful and magical about
the mundane world that Lucy is supposedly
leaving and going toward. Because people
in this world seem to be terribly
impressed and excited about it. And also
suggesting that we might start to look
for ourselves in these great long
magical ancient stories, and wonder what
we might find out about ourselves and
about the story that's that's sweeping
us up. So those are the things that
occurred to me whilst reading chapter 2.
I'd be very interested to hear about
what occurred to you and what struck you,
so do please leave leave comments. Next
time we'll be looking at chapter 3,
"Edmund in the Wardrobe". So your reading
is from "Lucy ran out of the empty room
into the passage and found the other
three. 'It's alright,' sherepeated, 'I've
come back.'" and read all the way to "'Please
your majesty." said Edmund. 'I don't know
what you mean.
I'm at school - or at least I was - it's the
holidays now.'" I look forward to seeing
you next time.
