Posted by: @courtenay

(Now I'm wondering if Lewis ever read Animal Farm by George Orwell and that was what put him off the idea of having talking pigs in Narnia... but I doubt that was the sort of book he would have been interested in, even if it is an amusing thought. )

From "The Four Loves", Chapter 5: Eros (page 60 of my edition)

No one has indicated the nature of that reorganisation more briefly and accurately than George Orwell, who disliked it and preferred sexuality in its native condition, uncontaminated by Eros.  [NOTE: Lewis uses 'eros' to refer more-or-less to romantic love.]  In Nineteen-Eighty-Four his dreadful hero (how much less human than the four-footed heroes of his excellent Animal Farm!), before towsing the heroine, demands a reassurance ..."

C. S Lewis also apparently did a book review in which he compared "Animal Farm" to "1984", where he lamented that more people knew about the latter than the former (See C.S. Lewis compares 1984 and Animal Farm).  So Lewis had read both 1984 and Animal Farm.  Your theory that he avoided talking pigs because of this association may be true. 😊 

Posted by: @davidd

So Lewis had read both 1984 and Animal Farm.  Your theory that he avoided talking pigs because of this association may be true. 😊 

Oh, very interesting indeed! Both of those most famous books by Orwell were written in the 1940s, and (not having read all of Lewis's other writings) I wasn't sure whether or not Lewis read them at all, or if so, what he thought of them. Obviously he got the point of Animal Farm and really appreciated it! Thanks for that, Pete. 

Mind you, the remark I quoted about there being no Talking Pigs in Narnia comes from Douglas Gresham rather than Lewis himself, and as I said, it's not clear whether Lewis may have told his stepson some of these extra details about Narnia while they were discussing the stories in person, or whether Gresham himself is expanding on what we know canonically about Narnia.

So we don't know for sure whether Lewis made a conscious decision to not include pigs among the Talking Beasts (and if so, whether there was an Orwellian connection there!), or whether Gresham just picked up that there are references to ham and sausages in the books but never any references to Talking Pigs, and extrapolated from there. 

As something further to consider regarding Lewis, Orwell, and pigs - it might be worth remembering that in PC, Aslan turns those nasty school boys into pigs - or at least, it's suggested that they may have turned into them!

@pete I was thinking of exactly that scene as well!  

Did Lewis like Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows?  I don’t remember that book as having non speaking animals in it, whereas Narnia had both animals that could talk and those that could not. I think Lewis’ creation of the talking beasts seemed more real with the animals acting more like those in our world.  The “dumb beasts” were much like the fauna in our world, and Narnia was much more realistic and believable than The Wind in the Willows. I think probably all the animals in Narnia had their non speaking counterparts, but that is just my own view. It just seems to me that they were created that way.

@narnian78 I can't say Yes or No, but he did dislike what he called 'dressed animals'. I remember lots of such characters in the children's magazines I grew up reading (early 60s), and plenty of English children's classics of the earlier 20th century had animal characters living somewhat human lives. (best known are Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, and the Beatrix Potter books).

Compared to this, most Narnian talking beasts don't wear clothes, and are likely to live in traditional animal ways, except for little details here and there.  

Posted by: @coracle

@narnian78 I can't say Yes or No, but he did dislike what he called 'dressed animals'.

Mildly ironically, since the stories he wrote as a child were all about "dressed animals" behaving in ways that were far more human-like than animal-like! I get the impression that in later life he saw those tales as a bit silly — though of course he and his brother had lots of fun collaborating on them as children — and he deliberately wanted to make the Narnian Talking Beasts less anthropomorphic. 

I remember lots of such characters in the children's magazines I grew up reading (early 60s), and plenty of English children's classics of the earlier 20th century had animal characters living somewhat human lives. (best known are Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, and the Beatrix Potter books).

Lewis definitely read and loved Beatrix Potter's books, though — his particular favourite was The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, with the beautiful atmosphere of Autumn all through it. It makes me feel slightly awed to think he was reading her books, as a child, right at the time they were first published, and Edith Nesbit's books too, long before anyone knew they would become absolute classics still in print over 120 years later!! (And long before Lewis knew that he himself would write a children's series that would achieve the same status.) 

Compared to this, most Narnian talking beasts don't wear clothes, and are likely to live in traditional animal ways, except for little details here and there.  

Yes, as I said, he seems to have made that decision early on. The Beavers in LWW live in a rather human-like house with all kinds of furnishings, and they wear snowshoes, but I don't think we're told about them wearing any other clothes, much though Mrs Beaver is devoted to her sewing machine! They don't have clothes, other than the snowshoes, in the illustrations by Pauline Baynes, or in any of the screen adaptations. In the later Narnia books, I get the impression he was even more determined not to humanise the Talking Beasts too much. We don't hear of any other animals living in a furnished house like the Beavers do, and the only other one I can think of who wears anything approaching clothing is Reepicheep, who has a belt for his sword (necessary) and a gold circlet on his head with a feather in it (purely decorative, but it suits his character). Other than that, I can't imagine most Narnian animals finding clothes at all useful or necessary. 

I liked The Wind in the Willows ever since I read it decades ago in children’s literature course in college.  But I always felt that Narnia was more real because it had better talking animals. Books such  as Black Beauty and Lassie Come Home did have animals which had stories about them, but they were not talking animals. The authors were certainly understanding and sensitive to animals’ needs, but they didn’t portray talking animals. Did you prefer stories in which animals talked when you were a child or didn’t it make any difference to you?  I have to say that I liked both kinds of stories, but having dressed animals seemed kind of fake. In The Wind in the Willows some of the animals act like people.  That makes them less believable than the talking animals of Narnia, although they are still interesting as characters.  It is entertaining like the cartoons we watched on television when we were children (they often also had dressed animals), but they seemed quite far from reality. What makes Narnia better is the realistic talking animals in fantasy. 

Posted by: @narnian78

Did Lewis like Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows?

From "On Stories":

Does anyone believe that Kenneth Grahame made an arbitrary choice when he gave his principal character the form of a toad, or that a stag, a pigeon, a lion would have done as well? The choice is based on the fact that the real toad's face has a grotesque resemblance to a certain kind of human face--a rather apoplectic face with a fatuous grin on it. This is, no doubt, an accident in the sense that all the lines which suggest the resemblance are really there for quite different biological reasons. The ludicrous quasi-human expression is therefore changeless: the toad cannot stop grinning because its 'grin' is not really a grin at all. Looking at the creature we thus see, isolated and fixed, an aspect of human vanity in its funniest and most pardonable form; following that hint Grahame creates Mr. Toad--an ultra-Jonsonian 'humour'. And we bring back the wealth of the Indies; we have henceforward more amusement in, and kindness towards, a certain kind of vanity in real life.

But why should the characters be disguised as animals at all? The disguise is very thin, so thin that Grahame makes Mr. Toad on one occasion 'comb the dry leaves out of hishair'. Yet it is quite indispensable. If you try to rewrite the book with all the characters humanized you are faced at the outset with a dilemma. Are they to be adults or children? You will find that they can be neither. They are like children in so far as they have no responsibilities, no struggle for existence, no domestic cares. Meals turn up; one does not even ask who cooked them. In Mr. Badger's kitchen 'plates on the dresser grinned at pots on the shelf'. Who kept them clean? Where were they bought? How were they delivered in the Wild Wood? Mole is very snug in his subterranean home, but what was he livingon? If he is arentierwhere is the bank, what are his investments? The tables in his forecourt were 'marked with rings that hinted at beer mugs'. But where did he get the beer? In that way the life of all the characters is that of children for whom everything is provided and who take everything for granted. But in other ways it is the life of adults. They go where they like and do what they please, they arrange their own lives.

To that extent the book is a specimen of the most scandalous escapism: it paints a happiness under incompatible conditions--the sort of freedom we can have only in childhood and the sort we can have only in maturity--and conceals the contradiction by the further pretence that the characters are not human beings at all. The one absurdity helps to hide the other. It might be expected that such a book would unfit us for the harshness of reality and send us back to our daily lives unsettled and discontented. I do not find that it does so. The happiness which it presents to us is in fact full of the simplest and most attainable things--food, sleep, exercise, friendship, the face of nature, even (in a sense) religion. That 'simple but sustaining meal' of 'bacon and broad beans and a macaroni pudding' which Rat gave to his friends has, I doubt not, helped down many a real nursery dinner. And in the same way the whole story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual.

Sorry, long quote - but clearly C.S. Lewis was familiar with The Wind in the Willows.  (He also quoted it in "The problem of Pain" when he talks about 'numinous' fear - fear of the super-natural.)

There is a paper online which also goes into detail about C. S. Lewis's love of "The Wind in the Willows": C.S. Lewis and The Wind in the Willows

So, though Lewis may have disliked having animals in human's clothing, he did very much appreciate the Wind in the WIllows. 🙂 

@davidd Thanks so much for the extended quotation from Lewis and for the link to that fascinating essay! I never read The Wind in the Willows in full until I was an adult too, like Lewis himself, I note with interest. (I did make a start on it as a child, with Mum, but my interest flagged around the third chapter and we never got any further.)

I had picked up that there are definite similarities between Ratty and Mole's encounter with Pan and the children's encounter with Aslan in LWW, so I was wondering if Lewis was familiar with Kenneth Grahame's story and deliberately drawing on it. Not a bit surprising that he was! And I now realise I have read Lewis's own comments on the improbabilities of WITW (how does Badger make a living, where does Mole get his beer from, and so on) quoted somewhere before, but I forget where.

I wasn't sure whether or not Lewis actually liked Grahame's creation, though, given the oddities and anomalies (and occasional absurdities) in WITW, so it's nice to discover that it was definitely a favourite of his.

I think my own reluctance, for a long time, to read WITW all the way through (I tried it several more times as an adult and only succeeded in finishing it about 3 or 4 years ago) had something to do with what A.A. Milne says in the introduction to his stage adaptation, quoted in the essay you linked to:

In reading the book, it is necessary to think of Mole, for instance, sometimes as an actual mole, sometimes as such a mole in human clothes, sometimes as a mole grown to human size, sometimes as walking on two legs, sometimes on four. He is a mole, he isn’t a mole. What is he? I don’t know. And, not being a matter of fact person, I don’t mind. At least I do know, and still I don’t mind. 

That aspect of WITW does do my head in a bit, to this day, and I think I had problems with it even as a kid, although I didn't get very far into the book then. Sometimes the animal characters are living semi-naturalistic lives by the river and in the woods, sometimes they're totally human-like, and they interact with human beings on near-equal terms, too. Toad is able to disguise himself in a human washer-woman's clothes while escaping from prison (where he's been put for his reckless driving of motor cars that he bought from humans), and yet at another point somebody picks him up by the leg and throws him, as a human could do with an ordinary toad-sized toad. It's fun and indulgent as fantasy, but you REALLY have to set aside a lot of adult-level disbelief. I honestly feel that both Beatrix Potter and C.S. Lewis handled their anthropomorphic animals much more convincingly, although they have occasional oddities as well. (And I also very much prefer Aslan to Pan, but that's just me.)