Narnia lay all around Lewis. There is a germ of the thaw in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in a passage from a letter he wrote to Arthur Greeves in 1945: “It is bitter cold this morning but lovely to see the green earth after all the snow and to hear the birds singing. I have just seen the first celandines.” He spotted them along Addison’s Walk, a footpath surrounding an island meadow on the grounds of Magdalen, named for the early eighteenth-century writer, editor, and politician who favored it when he was a fellow at the college. It was on Addison’s Walk, late one autumn night in 1931, that Lewis engaged in the hours-long conversation with Tolkien and another don, Hugo Dyson, which led to his conversion to Christianity. The Walk’s connection to Lewis’s religious life makes it a pilgrimage site for his Christian devotees, but its celandines and crocuses were what captivated me the first time I strolled there on a raw day in early spring.
Lewis’s own backyard was Narnia, too. He and Warnie decided to pitch in with Mrs. Moore to buy the Kilns even before they set foot in the house itself; for the brothers, the cottage’s main attraction was the nine acres of sylvan land that came with it, climbing up the northern side of Shotover Hill. A path from the back of that land leads to the southern slope of Shotover, where a former royal forest has been converted into a country park, including, to the east, the four-hundred-year-old oaks of Brasenose Wood.
Not long after moving in, Lewis recorded sightings of gregarious “bright-eyed robins,” squirrels, owls, and even a badger’s burrow (which thrilled him to the bone) on the grounds behind the Kilns; all these creatures would eventually find their way into the Chronicles as talking beasts. Lewis made a habit of walking in his “little wood” in all seasons, and observed it with a care that never seemed to diminish with familiarity. “We had about a week of snow with frost on top of it,” he wrote to Arthur, “and then the rime coming out of the air and making thick woolly formations on every branch. The little wood was indescribably beautiful. I used to go and crunch about on the crusted snow in it every evening — for the snow kept it light long after sunset. It was a labyrinth of white — the smallest twigs looking thick as seaweed and building up a kind of cathedral vault overhead.”
After books, the natural world is the most frequent subject of the letters Lewis wrote before he became a celebrated apologist. (Once famous, he often exhausted his epistolary energy in theological correspondence with his readers.) He prided himself on his appreciation of all kinds of weather, even those that other people found harsh or dull; he was a connoisseur of skies, classifying for Warnie’s benefit the three types of English overcast: “spring gray — long level clouds of white, silver, pearl, and dove-color … winter gray — ragged and pleated clouds of iron color [and] the hot summer gray or celestial damp blotting paper.” The 1930s and early ’40s were the golden age of Lewis’s informal nature writing, after the conversion that loosened him up imaginatively and before the Second World War and Mrs. Moore’s deterioration made any absences from home difficult. His letters from those years are full of long, vibrant descriptions of the epic walking tours he took in Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and western England with his brother or friends. But he could also extract remarkable impressions from the humblest things lying close to home:
I suddenly paused, as we do for no reason known to consciousness, and gazed down into a little ditch beneath a grey hedge, where there was a pleasant mixture of ivies and low plants and mosses, and thought of herbalists and their art, and what a private, retired wisdom it would be to go groping along such hedges and the eaves of woods for some herb of virtuous powers, insignificant to the ordinary observer, but well known to the trained eye — and having at the same time a stronger sense of the mysteries of living stuff than usual, specially the mysteries twining at our feet, where homeliness and magic embrace one another.
All that from staring at a ditch! Herbalism notwithstanding, Lewis’s interests were never especially botanical (unlike, say, Tolkien, who used to exasperate the Lewis brothers by interrupting the “ruthless” pace of their country walks to stop and examine plants and trees). For Lewis, the ivies and mosses evoked a way of life — earthy and modest, yet not without enchantment; in other words, medieval — that he found appealing. Nature was a wellspring of moods and reflections, an extension and magnification of his own sensibility and sense of history, not a realm apart from the human or an object of science. He loved to exercise his literary skill in describing those clouded English skies and the subtle shadings of ambience they suggested, but he never cared much about the meteorological factors that distinguished the cumulus clouds from the stratus.
England is a good place for people of this inclination; few landscapes have been so continuously worked and shaped by human hands, and so it makes sense to see the natural world there as profoundly integrated with human affairs. Stories as well as trees are rooted in the earth of Britain, and every major landmark, it seems, is encrusted with tales and rumors. At Shotover Country Park, on the other side of the hill from the Kilns, I wandered over to a kiosk to pick up some photocopied leaflets from a box, expecting guides to the plants and animals around me. I wasn’t disappointed in that, but in addition to a map of the park and lists of notable trees, I also found a handout called “Myths and Legends on Shotover.”
The local tales attached to the hill feature an Oxford student who fended off a wild boar with a volume of Aristotle, a fugitive empress who disguised herself as a corpse, highway robbers, Robin Hood, and Oliver Cromwell. Few Britons would find the little leaflet in any way remarkable. But I stood puzzling over it, under a suitably damp blotting-paper sky, realizing that I’d just experienced one of those moments of unexpected cultural dissonance that pop up every so often between Americans and the British. There are many state parks where I grew up on the southwest coast of the United States, most of them much bigger than Shotover, and in none of them are visitors regaled with local “myths and legends.” The original inhabitants of western American parks, if any, were wiped out in the not so distant past, along with whatever stories they might have told about those places. No wonder England seemed almost as strange and magical to me as Narnia did when I was a child.
One of Shotover’s legends concerns a giant who lived in the forest and was said to be buried in the barrow that once stood on the top of the hill. (The barrow was destroyed by tank-testing operations during World War II.) When bored, the giant played marbles with the small boulders that can still be found scattered over a sandpit at the park’s center. Did Lewis know this story? It seems likely, given that he loved folktales, lived at the foot of Shotover for thirty years, and had regarded giants with a “queer fascination” since childhood.
It doesn’t seem too great a leap to conclude that the giants Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum encounter on the moors beyond the northern border of Narnia in The Silver Chair owe something to the Oxford giant. Lewis’s giants, idle and stupid, lean with their feet at the bottom of a river gorge, resting their elbows on the edge, “just as men might stand leaning on a wall — lazy men, on a fine morning after breakfast” (or men propped up against a bar in a pub presumably, though that wouldn’t have been a suitable comparison for a children’s book). The giants commence a game, throwing large stones at a nearby cairn. This makes a dangerous situation for the travelers; Puddleglum mutters that they would be a lot safer if the enormous dolts were actually trying to hit them.