Intro to Narnia: Lesson 1

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis


Book Summary:

Four children are sent away to the countryside of England during the war to avoid the air raids. They go to the country to live with an old professor who has no wife, only a housekeeper in a large house. While there, the children find that walking through an old wardrobe in a forgotten room leads them to a magical place, the land of Narnia. A Magical Place where they have many adventures.

About the Author:

C.S. Lewis (Clive Staples) was a pseudonym used by Clive Hamilton when writing books. He was known as "Jack" to his friends. He was born November 29, 1898 in Belfast, Ireland. He married, but had no children. He taught at English Universities where he was a novelist, a scholar and critic of Literature. He won the Lewis Carrol Shelf Award in 1962 for the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Lewis and his good friend J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of the Lord of the Rings, were part of the Inklings, an informal writers’ club that met at a local pub to discuss story ideas. Lewis’s fascination with fairy tales, myths, and ancient legends, coupled with inspiration drawn from his childhood, led him to write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, one of the best-loved books of all times.

During the Second World War, when children from London were being evacuated to the country, four youngsters were billeted at Lewis' home, the Kilns. Surprised to find how few imaginative stories his young guests seemed to know, he decided to write one for them and scribbled down the opening sentences of a story about four children -- then named Ann, Martin, Rose and Peter -- who were sent away from London because of the air raids, and went to stay with a very old professor who lived by himself in the country.

That's all he wrote at the time, but, several years later, he returned to the story. The children (now named Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy) found their way into another world -- a land he would eventually call Narnia.

Introduction to the Book:

The Title of the story is The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. What could a lion, a witch, and a wardrobe have in common?

Read Chapters One and Two of the Text