A fascinating look at the rich but under-appreciated Eastern
sources behind the Narnia book C. S. Lewis was no great traveller
but he was a prodigious bibliophile who absorbed the world's
traditions of myth, religion, and cosmology. The Chronicles of
Narnia are steeped in allusions to the Bible, Greek mythology, and
medieval literature, all of which has been amply discussed by
critics. But, until now, what has been overlooked are Lewis'
significant borrowings from Eastern influences: Arabian Nights and
the Persian poets, great travellers from Herodotus and Marco Polo
to T. E. Lawrence and Robert Byron, and the famous fictional
adventurers Baron Munchausen, Gulliver, and Sindbad. In East of the
Wardrobe, Warwick Ball explores hitherto unrecognised and
unexpected Eastern aspects in and influences on C. S. Lewis' Narnia
books. These include storylines, themes, imagery, religious
elements, and even the cities and landscapes of the East, as well
as the 'Persian' style adopted by the illustrator of Narnia,
Pauline Baynes. Themes borrowed from the great epics can also be
found, from The Odyssey and Aeneid to the Kalevala and The Knight
in the Panther's Skin. Delve deeper and Christianity is there along
with paganism, but so too are Zoroastrian, Manichaean, and even
Islamic and Sufi messages. Ultimately, these influences act as a
reflection of the complex intellectual world that Lewis inhabited,
of both his own unique philosophy and the wider social and
intellectual climate of Oxford in the first half of the twentieth
century. All readers of Lewis will find in East of the Wardrobe
surprising new paths into the world of Narnia.
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