The Chronicles of Virtue

 

Lewis's Narnian Chronicles are among our family's most beloved stories. We have read and listened our way through them more than I can count and I love them more every time. I was fascinated when I learned a few years ago from Angelina Stanford (of House of Humane Letters) that C.S. Lewis wrote the Chronicles almost as a kind of fan fiction for the epic poem The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, of which Lewis was at the time the world's foremost authority. 
 
In August of this year I started a year-long class on The Faerie Queene, taught by my friend Kelly of Landscape Plotted and Pieced. As soon as we started reading, I was on the look out for all those Spenserian Easter eggs I knew Lewis had written into these stories, but  as we began to learn more about the layers of meaning in the poem, as we spent time in the work itself, I started to notice a lot more crossover between Book I of the FQ and the first book of The Chronicles of Narnia (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) than I expected. I was seeing not just literary Easter eggs, but parallels of theme and thrust. This continued as we began Book 2; so many parallels to Prince Caspian were jumping out at me. Parallels of characters, places, names, events, and the overarching virtue. It made me wonder if Lewis was writing each book not only to tell several wonderful stories full of Spenserian allusions, stories so delightful that they teach us to love Spenser before we even read him, but also to tell these stories in imitation of Spenser's purpose?

Each Book of the Faerie Queene was written with a main virtue in view. Other virtues come into play throughout the seven stories, but Spenser makes clear in his Letter to Raleigh, and in the titles of each Book, that his goal is to chronicle the 12 main virtues that make up his Ideal Knight, his Magnificent Knight, Prince Arthur.

My theory is that Lewis wrote the chronicles with the same virtues in view, and that those virtues in Books 1-7 of The Faerie Queene correspond in order to the Chronicles of Narnia. I plan to put my comparisons of Spenser's Books and Lewis's Chronicles here to see if my theory has any solid footing. I confess I am no literary critic or scholar; I am a card-carrying amateur, so I will approach this from that level of ability. I also should say that I have not looked this up or done any kind of Internet search to see if anyone else has the same theory as I do and what they may have said to validate or disprove it. For some reason that I can't quite explain, I want to figure this out for myself. So no spoilers if you already know whether I am barking up the wrong tree or not!

In my next post, I plan to compare Spenser's first Book of The Faerie Queene, the story of the Red Cross Knight, with the first Narnian Chronicle.