Today is the 119th anniversary of the birth of C.S. “Jack” Lewis on November 29, 1898. Lewis was a firm believer in the ability of mythical stories to illuminate “true truths” like the ones he discovered when he returned to the Christian Bible after years of being away from it.
When I was in junior high, I saw a cartoon about four English children who stepped through a magical cabinet during a game of hide-and-go-seek and emerged in a snowy forest in a land with talking animals and magical beasts. There was something sad, sweet, and haunting about that story, especially the ending. Imagine spending years in that other world, growing up there, and forgetting about home. Then one day you stumble back through that hidden doorway in the forest. Suddenly you’re back on earth, and you’re a kid again.
The name of the show I’ve just described was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The author, I discovered, was a literature professor who had taught in England. He had been an atheist in his teens and early adulthood. Empty experiences with Christians and church had killed any interest he had in the faith of his childhood. The early loss of his mother to cancer and his strained relationship with his father hadn’t helped either. As an adult, however, he reluctantly passed through his own magical doorway into belief in God.
Many Christian apologists focus on the intellectual side of C.S. Lewis’s faith journey, but there were other factors at work too. He encountered somethingin the works of writers like fantasy novelist George MacDonald that stirred something in him. He called it joy and described it as a hunger for something not of this world.
Friends like Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien played a role in his conversion too. Tolkien told him once that his inability to embrace Christ wasn’t due to any failure in his intellect but in his imagination. They talked about it for hours as they walked down a trail on the Oxford campus.
As a young Christian with a love for science fiction and fantasy literature, it was only natural that I would try to write stories like Lewis had written. The Sign of the Sword is a direct result of that time of life. Even though it’s obviously an attempt to imitate Lewis and Tolkien, I still get a sense of sad, sweet, and hopeful longing when I read it. It might have started out as a knock-off, but I think it has grown into something more. There is still plenty of Narnia and Middle-Earth in its DNA though, and it would be ungrateful to claim otherwise.
This video clip takes scenes from Prince Caspian, the second book of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia series, and sets them to music. (The “One Breath” song was written by Harry Gregson-Williams and Lisbeth Scott, and vocals are performed by Lisbeth Scott.)