Posted by: @starkat

For Netflix to throw this big of a monkey wrench into the storyline doesn't make a lot of sense unless they have completely missed the point of the Chronicles as a whole.

Yes. And the thing is, it's no big secret who Aslan stands for, especially not now. Back in the 1970s, maybe, but not in the 2020s, after several previous screen and radio adaptations of the Chronicles, and so many written commentaries on them, many of them by religious writers (including one very good one by the former Archbishop of Canterbury — The Lion's World by Rowan Williams — which is in itself a pretty big hint).

And Greta Gerwig herself attended a Catholic school and studied theology (and has spoken about this positively on several occasions), so there's no way I can believe she'd miss the significance of Aslan, even if some of the Netflix executives may have.

And if it is happening, and it's being done as a theological statement — since that's the only thing it could be, if it's not ignorance — then why do something so controversial and provocative that (it's already obvious from all the public reactions) will lose far more viewers than it gains??? It patently just does not make any sense...  

@starkat I'd already seen his comments, sent to me by a friend- from wherever he originally posted.  I just tagged the explanation on to clarify it, and hope one or more people see the point.

@courtenay it seems to be more prevalent in America. I read The Chronicles a few months after studying Pilgrim's Progress at University (English Literature was my major, and we had some very emphatic lecturers).

Posted by: @coracle

@courtenay it seems to be more prevalent in America. I read The Chronicles a few months after studying Pilgrim's Progress at University (English Literature was my major, and we had some very emphatic lecturers).

Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools??

Sometimes it's not worth getting into an argument with other people over the actual meaning of "allegory", of course. After all, regarding this particular issue — whether or not it would be OK for a new adaptation to make Aslan female (or to use a female voice actor for him) — you and I and probably most Narnia fans would still agree in principle with somebody who says "No, it's not OK, because Aslan is an allegorical representation of Jesus Christ." The basic reasoning there is correct even though that use of the term "allegorical" is wrong!

I've just done some searching and rediscovered a NarniaWeb article from a few years ago explaining why Lewis said that Narnia is "not allegory at all" — that has some useful quotes and references if any of us do find ourselves needing to explain why it's wrong to refer to Narnia in general or Aslan in particular as "allegory". But really, at the moment I'd rather keep it all in perspective. Better for people to see the Christian concepts integral to the Narnia stories and mistakenly call them "allegorical", than for people to miss those concepts altogether. Especially when it comes to understanding why making Aslan female (or feminised) really would not work, and why the vast majority of Narnia fans are not comfortable with the idea. 

Posted by: @courtenay

Sometimes it's not worth getting into an argument with other people over the actual meaning of "allegory", of course. After all, regarding this particular issue — whether or not it would be OK for a new adaptation to make Aslan female (or to use a female voice actor for him) — you and I and probably most Narnia fans would still agree in principle with somebody who says "No, it's not OK, because Aslan is an allegorical representation of Jesus Christ." The basic reasoning there is correct even though that use of the term "allegorical" is wrong!

You are right that you could probably spend all day debating the precise semantic meaning of the word "allegory", and you are right that most people would easily get what someone meant if they used it to refer to those particular aspects of Narnia in any sense.

But I would also argue that whether we are talking about perfect/pure allegories, or just casual/general allegories, that Aslan in MN has an entirely different allegorical representation than he does in say LWW.

i.e. in LWW Aslan predominantly represents Christ, but in MN he predominantly represents the creator.

Whether that has any material impact on whether people consider a female portrayal to be any more or less objectionable is perhaps another matter, but I do think it's important that when considering MN by itself, the allegory is largely (if not exclusively?) based on the old testament.

@courtenay thanks for that refocusing.  Yes, the essential fact is who Aslan represents,  whether it be simile, metaphor, or other symbolic representation 

I thought that the whole Narnia series was a "supposal", in fact, a hypothesis. If you have the destruction of a world, how was it created in the first place? If you accept that people have to die if they betray their Creator, who made that law, and why? And so on. If you have 7 lords chucked out of Miraz' kingdom, where did they get to and why? Or when the lost prince vanishes after his mother's death, is it revolution or did he just go down a rabbit-hole like Alice? 

Posted by: @icarus

 

But I would also argue that whether we are talking about perfect/pure allegories, or just casual/general allegories, that Aslan in MN has an entirely different allegorical representation than he does in say LWW.

i.e. in LWW Aslan predominantly represents Christ, but in MN he predominantly represents the creator.

Whether that has any material impact on whether people consider a female portrayal to be any more or less objectionable is perhaps another matter, but I do think it's important that when considering MN by itself, the allegory is largely (if not exclusively?) based on the old testament.

Jesus as creator is in line with scripture, so Aslan as creator fits that as well. 

1. Colossians 1:16–17 (ESV)

"For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible... all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together."

2. John 1:1–3 (ESV)

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made."

Two verses directly attributing Jesus with creation. 

At the moment, on Talking Beasts there is a very interesting talk given by Dr Crystal Hurd, who starts her talk by pointing out:

One important aspect to remember is that the Chronicles of Narnia, although deeply beloved, is at root a fantasy story.

Lewis mentions this fact in the preface of another book The Great Divorce, so people would not react hastily as they did with The Screwtape Letters (readers accused him of sympathizing with the devil). At the end of the day, this is make-believe, not a bible tale. It cannot be held to the same standard as catechism. Unbridled imagination is what led Lewis to write the series in the first place, and Lewis admits that he did not set out to write an overtly Christian tale. 

I'm sure that C.S. Lewis drew up these Narnia books as a "supposition", mentioned in the Doctor's lecture. I'm also sure I read at some place or other, that Lewis hypothesized that a Supreme Being could take as long or short a time over creating a world that is necessary and, after all, he wrote Magician's Nephew in that sort of light. 

Lewis, himself, wrote: 

“Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then collected information about child-psychology and decided what age-group I’d write for;  then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out ‘allegories’  to embody them. This  is  all  pure  moonshine.  I  couldn’t  write  in that  way  at  all. Everything  began  with  images;  a  faun  carrying  an  umbrella,  a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord”  

Sometimes Fairy Stories Say May Best What’s to be Said", 

I found the article insightful, and thought-provoking, & though I haven't left a comment, I'd be interested in seeing the response to it, here.  I suspect this move to have an actress speak for Aslan is likely more due to a push by Netflix, rather than Greta Gerwig, herself, to make themselves & the films they produce relevant to the twenty-first century, when its audience will still be children. 

I'm familiar with the New Testament Gospels, and also with the Genesis creation tale. It took me some time to realise that Genesis Chapter 1: versus 1-11 was actually a song or a chant with verses, and a refrain, and its eternal relevance & primary purpose was time management, rather than a scientific treatise, as we understand the term, spelling out the details of how our earth came to be. But this discussion really belongs to another thread in Spare Oom, called Christianity, Religion & Philosophy. 

@waggawerewolf27 I was going to share that here too — I assume you mean this new article: https://www.narniaweb.com/2025/05/dr-crystal-hurd-on-the-implications-of-a-female-aslan/

I'd say it's quite a balanced and thoughtful look at the whole issue, but this claim from Dr Hurd is a bit disconcertingly inaccurate:

For example, while The Chronicles of Narnia isn’t strictly allegorical, C. S. Lewis mentioned in his correspondence that Aslan is influenced by Jesus, not a direct one-to-one comparison, but a “supposition.”

She's spot on about the books not being strictly allegorical, but the rest is off the mark. It's not true that Lewis "mentioned in his correspondence that Aslan is influenced by Jesus, not a direct one-to-one comparison, but a 'supposition'".

Lewis made blatantly clear — in the books themselves (implicitly) and in numerous letters and articles (explicitly) — that Aslan IS intended to be Jesus. He is indeed a "supposition" in the sense that he is an imagined answer to the question of what Jesus might be like if he came into another world in a different form. But that's far more than the character merely being "influenced" by Jesus. Whether or not someone personally comes from a Christian background, this surely shouldn't be difficult to understand.

I'm also a bit baffled by Dr Hurd's assertion that Queen Helen in The Magician's Nephew is "directly inspired by Helen Joy Davidman Lewis". Apart from being female and sharing the same first name, there's no resemblance I can see between the two. Joy (as she was known) was, from all I can gather, an incredibly tough and feisty and brilliantly intelligent woman who came to faith in Christ as an adult, in the midst of personal crisis (particularly a failing first marriage), and found romantic love in the form of "Jack" Lewis himself even as she battled terminal illness, dying after four deeply happy years of marriage to Jack.

Queen Helen of Narnia, on the other hand... we simply do not know enough about her to make proper comparisons with anyone in real life. She barely plays any role in the story at all — certainly doesn't make any active contribution to the plot, and I think only gets one or two lines of dialogue. She just comes across as a sweet young working-class woman who's suddenly plucked from her laundry and brought into Narnia by Aslan, whom she seems to recognise at once for who he is. (Unlike Dr Hurd, slightly ironically.  ) Seriously — apart from the given name, there is absolutely nothing that suggests a connection with the real-life Helen Joy Davidman Lewis.

There are some good points in the article, but those two glaring misconceptions rather spoil it for me, I'm afraid, because they indicate that the author doesn't have a very firm grasp of what she's talking about. Quite disappointing. 

@courtenay thank you. I was a bit alarmed when I read it, but then the younger generation of Lewis scholars seem to grab at all the strange and new ideas put forward by people who never knew Lewis. Some of them seem to believe that they know better than Lewís' contemporaries, and the first generation of scholars.

I have not had the opportunity to read Hurd's doctoral thesis, so I do not know what a 'Transformational Leader' is. Does it involve gender swopping for the leading character in the Lewis's series of seven children's books? If not we can move on. 

Posted by: @coracle

@courtenay thank you. I was a bit alarmed when I read it, but then the younger generation of Lewis scholars seem to grab at all the strange and new ideas put forward by people who never knew Lewis. Some of them seem to believe that they know better than Lewís' contemporaries, and the first generation of scholars.

That is a bit strange to me. I mean, I'm not specifically a Lewis scholar, but I do have a degree in history, and I'm still young — well, under 45 (just).   And I was definitely explicitly taught that in "doing" history, primary sources — those dating from the time of the events or as close as possible — are much more valuable and should be leaned on much more heavily than secondary sources, which are writings / comments / analyses made by people (including other historians) well after the historical events.

So to put it simply, writings and comments from Lewis himself, and from those who knew him personally, are a lot more valuable in understanding his life and works and intentions and ways of thinking than later works written about him by people who didn't know him, and who, instead of paying the closest attention to those primary sources, are putting their own interpretation on things. (Well, everybody puts their own interpretation on things, including the writers / producers of primary sources, but good historians are trained to recognise that and indeed to recognise their own personal biases. We certainly were at university, and I'm talking less than 20 years ago.)

I'm pretty sure this isn't difficult to understand, so it always baffles me when any scholars ignore or play down things Lewis himself said (about Aslan or about any other issues), or insights from people who actually knew him, and go on with their own pet theories that may sound good on the surface — that Lewis didn't intend Aslan to be compared directly to Jesus, just "influenced" by him, or that Queen Helen is directly based on Helen Joy Davidman (or, in another famous example, that each of the seven Narnia books corresponds to a planet in medieval astrology) — but that, when you look at the primary evidence, have little or nothing to support them.

No personal insult to any of these scholars, whom of course I've never met and who I'm sure in most cases are honest and well-meaning — but if I'd written any assignments for uni (let alone my Honours thesis) on that kind of dodgy basis, I would have been absolutely run through by most of my lecturers and I most certainly wouldn't have got the very good grades I did!!  

I have not had the opportunity to read Hurd's doctoral thesis, so I do not know what a 'Transformational Leader' is. Does it involve gender swopping for the leading character in the Lewis's series of seven children's books? If not we can move on. 

I've no idea either. I'd speculate that it ought to be a leader who transforms others into the best they can be, rather than a leader who is transformed into something else (like a male lion into a lioness), but without further info, we really can't tell.

And to be fair on Dr Hurd, she goes through several of the arguments we've also considered here as to why a director might want to have Aslan as a female figure — creation being seen as a feminine act, wanting to have more female lead characters, and so on — and eventually concludes overall that it isn't a good idea. I'm just concerned that the reasoning in several other parts of the article isn't sound and is contradicted by the actual primary evidence about Lewis and his intentions (and indeed about Joy Davidman), and that really doesn't show good scholarship.

Just another point about this article (sorry to be going on!) — I've just been thinking about one specific thing that I reckon is possibly the most problematic aspect of it.

Precisely because Dr Hurd asserts that C.S. Lewis conceived of Aslan as merely "influenced" by Jesus but "not a direct one-to-one comparison", the remainder of her essay rests on the assumption that it's "spiritual fans who interpret Aslan as a Jesus figure". In other words, it's the fans of Narnia who are interpreting Aslan as Jesus, but that (according to Hurd) isn't really what Lewis intended.

This, to put it bluntly, is completely wrong — we have NUMEROUS statements from Lewis about what, and who, he intended Aslan to be interpreted as — and it unfairly implies that "spiritual fans" are reading something into Aslan that Lewis didn't exactly mean, and that therefore these fans are getting worked up unnecessarily, almost as if it's their (our) fault for doing so.

(What's wrong, by the way, with saying "religious fans" or "Christian fans", since "spiritual" is one of those handy words that can mean almost anything?? ) 

I'm not even what would be classed as a "mainstream" Christian and I can see so much wrong with that position that it's quite jaw-dropping. This isn't an issue of whether or not one personally happens to believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. It's an issue of fairly and accurately representing what C.S. Lewis, as the author of these stories, wanted readers to find in them. And he really was not obscure at all about that. 

We've got a couple of very specific statements from Lewis on this subject from letters that he wrote, as quoted in another NarniaWeb article, the one about why Lewis stated that Narnia is "not allegory at all":

But Laurence can’t really love Aslan more than Jesus, even if he feels that’s what he is doing. For the things he loves Aslan for doing or saying are simply the things Jesus really did and said. So that when Laurence thinks he is loving Aslan, he is really loving Jesus: and perhaps loving Him more than he ever did before. Of course there is one thing Aslan has that Jesus has not — I mean, the body of a lion. (But remember, if there are other worlds and they need to be saved and Christ were to save them as He would — He may really have taken all sorts of bodies in them which we don’t know about.) - C.S. Lewis, Letters to Children

In reality however [Aslan] is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’ — Letters of C.S. Lewis

(I would add that in more than 35 years of reading Narnia commentaries, I've never encountered any other writer — appreciative or critical — who raised any doubts as to Aslan being very specifically a representation of Jesus.)

It's good, of course, for us to hear and discuss a variety of opinions on a controversy like this one — including opinions we don't all agree with! — and I really appreciate the NarniaWeb news team for reaching out to Lewis scholars for that reason. But... is it really a good idea for NarniaWeb to look like it's endorsing a claim about Lewis's concept of Aslan that is blatantly not accurate?? I'd truly appreciate a response from @Impending-Doom or another member of the news team on this. 

@Courtenay  (I would add that in more than 35 years of reading Narnia commentaries, I've never encountered any other writer — appreciative or critical — who raised any doubts as to Aslan being very specifically a representation of Jesus.)

Perhaps Aslan might be specifically a representation of Jesus, but only in another world, but very definitely a fictional, & decisively hypothetical sort of world, in which stars are not merely balls of fire, endlessly zapping nearby planets, but have personalities as well. However, the critics like Phillip Pullman attack C.S. Lewis precisely because of that Narnian association with Christianity in the themes explored.

 In 2004, Neil Gaiman, whose upbringing was Jewish, published a book of short stories called Fragile Things, in which he included his take on "The Problem of Susan". At the beginning of this particular story, he wrote from Susan's point of view, expressed through a nightmare she had.  He depicted her doubt which she might have experienced when there was a talk between Aslan & the White Witch after Edmund was rescued, the contents of which none of the onlookers, including Susan were privy. He said that without knowing or believing the Easter Story, of Jesus' sacrifice, the whole parallel story of LWW falls down. The Lion and the Witch are conspirators dividing up the spoils and there is nothing left but some children accidently locked in a wardrobe.