The meaning of Mr. Tumnus: classical epic and the making of modern fantasy

Abstract

When readers first accompany Lucy Pevensie to Narnia in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first creature we meet is Mr. Tumnus, a faun. In what follows, I will argue that it is significant that Mr. Tumnus is a faun because fauns, in Roman poetry, are associated with a certain kind of narrative temporality, namely a layering of pasts within pasts that is characteristic of classical epic. I will show that Lewis and his colleague and friend J. R. R. Tolkien described this kind of epic temporality in their literary scholarship, including especially in their scholarship on Virgil’s Aeneid, and that they incorporated it into their fiction. By introducing Narnia with a faun, Lewis sets up the Chronicles of Narnia as an epic story, not so much because of its scale or heroic subject, although those are also epic, but because of its association with the epic past, which Lewis saw as a fundamental literary characteristic of the genre.

Epic and fantasy seem to go together, but it is not always easy to analyse with precision how exactly that is. There have, however, recently been some successful attempts to analyse the relationship between epic and fantasy. The theme of the 2017 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, for example, was ‘Epic Fantasy’. Two keynote addresses from that conference, by Edward James and Steven Erikson, were published in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, with an introduction by Brian Attebery, and both those addresses and Attebery’s introduction grapple in serious ways with the relationship between the two genres.¹ From the perspective of Classical Reception Studies, the first chapter in Brett Rogers’ and Benjamin Stevens’ 2017 volume on Classical Traditions in Modern Fantasy is Jesse Weiner’s ‘Classical Epic and the Poetics of Modern Fantasy’, which identifies shared conventions between the two genres.² My own argument extends those analyses by focussing on narrative temporality, opening a new perspective in the ongoing discussion of the relationship between classical epic and modern fantasy.

It is typical of The Chronicles of Narnia, and of children’s literature in general, that it is possible to appreciate Mr. Tumnus in multiple ways. In one way, he can simply be a marker of estrangement or defamiliarization, emphasizing the alterity of the magical world of Narnia. Here is Lewis’ initial description of the character:

He was only a little taller than Lucy herself and he carried over his head an umbrella, white with snow. From the waist upward he was like a man, but his legs were shaped like a goat’s (the hair on them was glossy black) and instead of feet he had goat’s hoofs. He also had a tail, but Lucy did not notice this at first because it was neatly caught up over the arm that held the umbrella so as to keep it from trailing in the snow. He had a red woollen muffler round his neck and his skin was rather reddish too. He had a strange, but pleasant little face, with a short pointed beard and curly hair, and out of the hair there stuck two horns, one on each side of his forehead. One of his hands, as I have said, held the umbrella: in the other arm he carried several brown-paper parcels. What with the parcels and the snow it looked just as if he had been doing his Christmas shopping. He was a Faun. And when he saw Lucy he gave such a start of surprise that he dropped all his parcels. (Lewis 2008: 8)

The passage confronts readers with almost oxymoronic disjunctions, and the contrast between a mythical creature and the modern mundanity of Christmas shopping and an umbrella drives home the unreality of Narnia.³ There are also, however, other ways to read the character. For example, his horns, tail, and goat’s hooves, and perhaps also his ‘reddish’ skin, make Mr. Tumnus resemble a devil, and in this context, it is relevant that he is a threat to Lucy, being compelled to capture her for the White Witch. Even reading Mr. Tumnus as a creature of classical mythology, it is possible to understand him as a rustic character, emphasizing the rural qualities of Narnia. All of these are meaningful understandings of Mr. Tumnus, but my goal in this article is to read the character with a focus on temporality, showing that the faun associates Narnia with classical epic.

Fauns in Latin poetry

A reading of Mr. Tumnus focussed on temporality depends on the fact that Lewis calls him a faun. He might easily have made the character a satyr, and there are those who argue that there really is no difference between fauns and satyrs.⁴ Fauns, however, are not just Roman or Latin versions of satyrs but have their own literary significance linked to narrative temporality, prophecy, and the development of epic poetry.⁵ Because, as I argue below, Virgil’s Aeneid held a special place in Lewis’s scholarship, it is worth emphasizing that poem in a brief overview of fauns in Latin literature. We first encounter in book 7 a singular faun, the god Faunus, as the father of the current king Latinus:

rex arua Latinus et urbes

iam senior longa placidas in pace regebat.

hunc Fauno et nympha genitum Laurente Marica

accipimus; Fauno Picus pater, isque parentem

te, Saturne, refert, tu sanguinis ultimus auctor. (Aen. 7.45-49)⁶

King Latinus, now older, was ruling the fields and the peaceful cities in a long period of peace. We hear that he was born from Faunus and the Laurentine nymph Marica. Faunus’s father was Picus, and he claimed you, Saturn, as his parent. You are the ultimate originator of the line.

In this passage, Faunus belongs to a kind of ‘plupast’ — a past of a past.⁷ Not only does the Aeneid tell the story of Rome’s ancient past, but Faunus is of an even older generation, belonging to a time before the Trojans arrived in Italy.⁸ He is closely linked here with Saturn, the ruler of the ages before the reign of Jupiter.

The link between Faunus and the past of Italy returns in Aeneid 12, when the stump of a tree sacred to Faunus catches and holds Aeneas’s spear during his duel with Turnus. When we first read about the tree, Virgil already uses the pluperfect, Forte sacer Fauno foliis oleaster amaris / hic steterat (Aen. 12.766–7; ‘By chance there had stood here a wild olive tree with bitter leaves, sacred to Faunus’).⁹ The tree had stood there until the Trojans arrived and cut it down to clear the field for the duel between Aeneas and Turnus (Aen. 12.770–1). When Aeneas’s spear sticks in the stump and he is unable to pull it out, Turnus prays to Faunus to hold on to the spear, and he does, but Venus comes to Aeneas’s rescue and returns the spear to him (Aen. 12.772–87). Richard Thomas identifies this as ‘the final instance of the replacing of the Saturnian (Latin) order by the Jovian (Trojan)’ (Thomas 1988: 270n.30; see also Fantham 2009: 62). Faunus is here a representative of an old order, to be replaced by the new one in the narrative, which is itself the story of an ancient time. He is the past of the past, consulted by Latinus for prophetic guidance (Aen. 7.81–106) and prayed to by Turnus for help against the new order, but relegated to the past by the coming of the Trojans.

Mr. Tumnus is not, however, an incarnation of the singular god Faunus but rather a representative of a type of creature. This kind of faun, a whole species rather than an individual, also appears in the Aeneid, and it too is part of a Saturnian age. Evander explains to Aeneas that fauns and nymphs were the original inhabitants of Italy:

Indigenous Fauns and Nymphs used to inhabit these woods, and a race of men born from trunks and hard oak, who had neither custom nor civilization, and they did not know how to yoke bulls or to put aside resources or to save wealth, but tree branches and uncivilized hunting nourished them. First from heavenly Olympus came Saturn, fleeing the arms of Jove and exiled from his taken realm. He ordered the ignorant race, scattered on the high mountains, and he gave them laws and decided that it be called Latium, since he had once hidden safely on these shores.

Like the god Faunus, the plural fauns belong to the old age of Saturn, superseded by the reign of Jupiter and the arrival of Evander from Arcadia and Aeneas from Troy. In fact, in this passage, the fauns are even older than the age of Saturn, and they seem to have disappeared when Saturn gave laws and order to the human inhabitants of the area.

The faun as an original inhabitant of Italy that has disappeared even before Aeneas arrives is more like the species of fauns that inhabit Narnia, but it was confusing, even to ancient scholars, why there should be both a singular god and a plural species.¹⁰ Varro explained that there was a god Faunus and a goddess Fauna, who could be referred to together as Fauni:

Fauni dei Latinorum, ita ut et Faunus et Fauna sit; hos versibus quos vocant Saturnios in silvestribus locis traditum est solitos fari <futura, a> quo fando Faunos dictos. (Varro, de Lingua Latina 7.36)¹¹

Fauns are gods of the Latins, so that there is both a Faunus and a Fauna. It is said that they were accustomed, in wooded places, in the verses which they call Saturnians, to speak the things to come, from which speaking they were called Fauni.

Varro’s attempt to reconcile the singular and plural does not fit well, however, with the ways in which Roman authors used that plural. Cicero, for example, has Quintus explain in De Divinatione, Saepe etiam et in proeliis fauni auditi et in rebus turbidis veridicae voces ex occulto missae esse dicuntur (1.101; ‘Also it is often said that fauns have been heard in battles and that in troubled times, truthful voices have been sent from hiding’). These fauns seem like invisible, prophetic voices rather than a pair of a god and goddess. Not only was there a singular god Faunus, but Romans also wrote about a separate species of creature that was like Faunus but was not just him and a singular companion.

It was these plural fauns that Roman authors associated with satyrs as goat-like inhabitants of wild places. Lucretius, for example, mentions fauns in conjunction with satyrs and nymphs:

Haec loca capripedes satyros nymphasque tenere

finitimi fingunt, et faunos esse loquuntur,

quorum noctivago strepitu ludoque iocanti

adfirmant volgo taciturna silentia rumpi. (4.580–-3)¹²

The locals imagine that goat-footed satyrs and nymphs live in these places, and they say that there are fauns, by whose night-wandering noise and merry play they commonly say that the quiet silences are broken.

These fauns are less prophetic voices in times of trouble and more merrymaking spirits of the woods. They are not satyrs or nymphs, but they are associated with them, inhabiting the same spaces. Ovid similarly associates fauns with nymphs and satyrs in the first book of the Metamorphoses, when Jupiter wants to save the inhabitants of the wild places from human encroachment:

sunt mihi semidei, sunt rustica numina nymphae

Faunique Satyrique et monticolae Siluani. (1.192–3)¹³

There are my demigods, rustic spirits, the nymphs, Fauns, Satyrs, and mountain-dwelling Silvani.

Just as Lucretius did, so Ovid also distinguishes fauns from satyrs and nymphs but places them together in the same setting, here, as in Evander’s description of them in the Aeneid, as original inhabitants of the wild places. Fantham argues that the pluralization is a poetic strategy designed to trivialize and anonymize the pastoral Italian deities, taking over the Italian tradition of fauns with a Greek one of satyrs (Fantham 2009: 4). Statius even more fully assimilates fauns with satyrs in the Thebaid, as Liber promises to protect the nymphs from the assaults of satyrs and fauns, nocturnaque furta licentum / cornipedum et cupidas Faunorum arcebo rapinas (4.695–6; ‘I will ward off the nocturnal assaults of the unrestrained hoofed ones and the lustful rapes of the Fauns’). Although Statius does not mention satyrs by name here, he associates the fauns with their typical behaviour toward nymphs. Fauns and satyrs are not exactly the same, but as time goes on, they grow closer. Nevertheless, fauns never quite lose their distinction from their Greek counterparts.

While this article is not the place for a full survey of the descriptions of fauns in Latin poetry, one more example is worth discussing.¹⁴ When Varro attempted to explain the plural use of fauni, he was discussing a frequently quoted passage from Ennius’ Annales, scripsere alii rem / uorsibus quos olim Faunei uatesque canebant (206–7 Skutsch; ‘Others have written of the matter in the verses which once the Fauns and bards were singing’).¹⁵ Ennius takes the disembodied, prophetic voices of the rustic demigods and casts them as an early phase of epic poetry. Naevius had written a Latin epic on the First Punic War, but Ennius could characterize his coverage of the same material as the first real Roman epic because he was the first to write about it in the epic metre of dactylic hexameter. Naevius had written in the so-called Saturnian metre, which Ennius identifies as the metre that Fauns and uates used. Representing himself as a new kind of poet, Ennius uses the figure of the faun to characterize his predecessor as an old poet to be surpassed.¹⁶ Ennius’s fauns are not the satyr-like original inhabitants of the countryside that we see in later poetry, but something closer to Cicero’s sources of divination, only for Ennius they are an early phase of the development of Latin epic poetry. From the point of view of a modern reader, or even a later Roman one, fauns are the past of the past, older than the old poet Ennius. This is why Gellius could, when discussing archaic Latin, refer to, auctoritates…ex Faunorum et Aboriginum saeculo repetitas (Noctes Atticae 5.21.7; ‘authorities recalled from the age of Fauns and Aborigines’).¹⁷ Fauns are an embodiment of an ancient time, sometimes connected to the present through remembered prophecies, but belonging to a deep and lost past. Later poetry associates them with satyrs and with nymphs, but in such associations, they are still kept separate, and they maintain their sense of a lost past and their association with an early form of epic poetry.

Fauns in Narnia

When Lewis introduces readers to Narnia with a faun, he evokes not only the sense of strangeness of a mythological creature but also the sense of the lost past that is particular to fauns. For such an evocation to be meaningful, it is not necessary that Lewis specifically intended it, but it is nevertheless worth articulating a few reasons why it is plausible that Lewis did have such a meaning in mind. The first of those reasons is that, although scholars sometimes treat fauns and satyrs as interchangeable and they are certainly associated with each other even in antiquity, Lewis distinguishes clearly between them, and he makes Mr. Tumnus specifically a faun rather than a satyr. In Prince Caspian, for example, Lewis (2002: 51, 54) twice describes ‘Old Narnia’ as the land of ‘Fauns and Satyrs’, referring to the way Narnia used to be before humans corrupted it. The ‘and’ not only joins fauns and satyrs but also distinguishes them from each other. When Caspian dances with fauns the night before a council meeting, they are different from the satyrs who separately attend the meeting the next day (Lewis 2002: 82–5). Moreover, the fauns Caspian meets have names sounding as Latin as Tumnus, including Mentius, Obentinus, Dumnus, Voluns, Voltinus, Girbius, Nimienus, Nausus, and Oscuns. The name ‘Tumnus’ may or may not be related to ‘Vertumnus’, as Nancy-Lou Patterson suggests, or to ‘tumulus’, as Paul Ford thinks, but whatever its specific origin, it is unmistakably Latin.¹⁸ One reason why Lewis may have favoured a faun for the first encounter in Narnia is that Latin fauns do not always have the same kind of sexuality that Greek satyrs do.¹⁹ Lewis could make Mr. Tumnus a faun without the risk of implying a satyr’s sexuality to readers with classical training. Even so, fauns do in Latin literature adopt the sexuality of satyrs, as, for example, in Statius’s Thebaid (4.695–6, quoted above). Even if domesticating potentially dangerous mythology was part of Lewis’ motivation, the way he uses fauns suggests he was at least aware of the temporal sense of the creatures.

In Prince Caspian, a sequel set after enough time has passed that the castle from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is only a ruin, the sense of the faun seems to fit with the image we get from Latin epic.²⁰ Satyrs appear only three times in that novel, and always in conjunction with fauns, while fauns appear in that novel twelve times, almost always connected with ‘Old Narnia’ and a sense of a lost past. Susan, for example, remembering the old days, mentions playing chess with fauns (Lewis 2002: 19), and when Caspian describes nostalgically the way Narnia used to be, he says, ‘And there were lovely little Fauns in all the woods’ (Lewis 2002: 42). In the end, the restoration of Narnia to its former state means that ‘Narnia would henceforth belong to the Talking Beasts and the Dwarfs and Dryads and Fauns and other creatures quite as much as to the men’ (Lewis 2002: 213). The connection of fauns to the past and the distinction between fauns and satyrs in Prince Caspian suggests that the choice to make Mr. Tumnus a faun at the beginning of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe carries some significance. In fact, Lewis (1966: 42) explained that the image of the faun with parcels and an umbrella was the first idea he had that would make it into Narnia. The whole series began with that one image. Fauns were particularly significant to Lewis; they were connected to a nostalgic sense of the past, and they were to be distinguished from satyrs, who are similarly rustic but lack the temporality of fauns.

The epic past in Tolkien’s scholarship

The association of the type of past fauns represented with classical epic is clear in Lewis’s literary scholarship and even clearer in Tolkien’s. The two did not agree on everything, but on this point, they express similar ideas, and Tolkien’s earlier formulation will help to clarify Lewis’ later one, which I will discuss below. In Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, Tolkien identifies what he calls the ‘impression of depth’:

Beowulf is not an actual picture of historic Denmark or Geatland or Sweden about A.D. 500. But it is (if with certain minor defects) on a general view a self-consistent picture, a construction bearing clearly the marks of design and thought. The whole must have succeeded admirably in creating in the minds of the poet’s contemporaries the illusion of surveying a past, pagan but noble and fraught with a deep significance—a past that itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity of sorrow. This impression of depth is an effect and a justification of the use of episodes and allusions to old tales, mostly darker, more pagan, and desperate than the foreground. (Tolkien 1936: 28–9)

The ‘impression of depth’ in Beowulf is a layering of pasts within pasts that creates the melancholy tone of the epic.²¹ Even for the contemporaries of the poet, hearing the poem was an experience of looking to a deep past with a deeper past behind it. Such a layering of pasts is similar to what Faunus does in the Aeneid. He represents a past deeper than the past of the story. The connection with the Aeneid, moreover, is one that Tolkien makes explicitly:

To a similar antiquarian temper, and similar use of vernacular learning, is probably due the similar effect of antiquity (and melancholy) in the Aeneid—especially felt as soon as Aeneas reaches Italy and the Saturni gentem…sponte sua veterisque dei se more tenentem [The people of Saturn, conducting themselves by their own will and by the custom of the old god; Aeneid 7.203-4]. Ic þa leode wat ge wið feond ge wið freond fæste worhte, æghwæs untæle ealde wisan [That people do I know to be formed in steadfast mould, be it toward foe or friend, in all things without reproach after the good ways of old; Beowulf 1863b-1865, translation Tolkien (2014: 67)]. Alas for the lost lore, the annals and old poets that Virgil knew, and only used in the making of a new thing! (Tolkien 1936: 29)

While Tolkien remains agnostic on the question of whether the Beowulf poet might have read the Aeneid (Tolkien 1936: 24), he notes that the kind of epic past he identifies in the Old English poem is the same as the type of past that gives the Aeneid its ‘effect of antiquity’. For Tolkien, the temporality of Beowulf and the Aeneid is characterized by a layering of pasts.

Before turning to Lewis’s scholarship, it is worth making the point that Tolkien did not confine his thinking about epic temporality to his literary analysis. He also used the idea in the writing of his fiction. In a letter to Naomi Mitchison, who had read and commented on a draft of The Lord of the Rings for him, he wrote:

There is of course a clash between ‘literary’ technique, and the fascination of elaborating in detail an imaginary mythical Age…As a story, I think it is good that there should be a lot of things unexplained (especially if an explanation actually exists); and I have perhaps from this point of view erred in trying to explain too much, and give too much past history. (Carpenter 1981: 174)

By creating a detailed backstory and then fragmenting it and including only hints of it in the story he is writing, Tolkien artificially recreates the tone of antiquity and melancholy that gives Beowulf and the Aeneid their impression of depth. For readers of the Aeneid, the epic’s allusions to a past deeper than that of Aeneas’ time infuse the poem with a melancholy sense of a lost past. The loss or fragmentation of Virgil’s literary sources, like Ennius’ Annales, intensifies the effect for modern readers, but it was active even for Virgil’s contemporaries, who had read Ennius, in the way the Aeneid represents its characters’ engagement with the pre-Trojan past of Italy. If The Lord of the Rings is epic, that is at least in part because Tolkien used the same temporal technique in representing his characters’ engagement with the past of Middle-Earth.

The epic past in Lewis’s scholarship

Tolkien described the impression of depth in Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics in 1936, and then in 1941, Lewis identified a similar temporality as characteristic of the Aeneid in his Preface to Paradise Lost, which, incidentally, is notable for scholars of Latin epic because it gave us the term ‘secondary epic’.²² In the chapter, ‘Virgil and the Subject of Secondary Epic’, Lewis first identifies Virgil’s achievement as telling a single, relatively small story, but giving the impression that a ‘vaster theme’ is implicit in that story:

[The Romans’] great poem, unless it was to be a mere pastiche of Homer, would have to deal with the same sort of material as Naevius and Ennius. Yet, on the other hand, so true an artist as Virgil could not be content with the clumsiness and monotony of a mere chronicle. His solution of the problem—one of the most important revolutions in the history of poetry—was to take one single national legend and treat it in such a way that we feel the vaster theme to be somehow implicit in it…He must locate his action in a legendary past and yet make us feel the present, and the intervening centuries, already foreshadowed. After Virgil and Milton, this procedure seems obvious enough. But it is obvious only because a great poet faced with an all but insoluble problem, discovered this answer and with it discovered new possibilities for poetry itself. (Lewis 1942: 34)

The technique of narrating a smaller story that somehow includes a vaster theme, which Lewis identifies here in the Aeneid, is in fact characteristic of epic in general. For example, Homer’s Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War by narrating a brief episode in the tenth year of the war. Edward James, in his address on epic fantasy at the 2017 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, argues that this dynamic of small stories with vast themes is the defining characteristic of epic (James 2018: 11). What Lewis identifies in this passage as Virgil’s particular innovation is the temporal aspect of that relation between the larger theme and smaller story. The location of the poem in the legendary past is epic, but in Virgil’s Aeneid, that legendary past already contains within it a foreshadowed present.

As Lewis continues in his analysis of the Aeneid, he identifies the importance of the poem’s allusions not only to the poet’s present but also to the deeper past that lies behind the narrative past:

The third paragraph of the [Aeneid] (ll. 12 to 33) furnishes us with examples of nearly all the methods whereby [Virgil] makes his comparatively simple fable carry the weight of so much destiny. Notice the key words. Carthage is an ancient city, facing the Tiber’s mouth a long way off. He is already spreading out his story both in time and space…We are not, you see, at the beginning. The story on which we are embarked fades backward into an even remoter past. The heroes whose adventures we are to follow are the remnant (reliquias) of some earlier order, destroyed before the curtain rose; survivors, and, as it were, ghosts. (Lewis 1942: 34–5; emphasis in original)

Here it is crucial for Virgil’s epic that the poet represents the past of the main narrative against a background of a deeper past that has been destroyed, the fragmented remnants of which readers see in the poem. Lewis’s formulation of the temporal dynamic of the Aeneid is very similar to what Tolkien described as the impression of depth in the poem, and both Lewis and Tolkien identify it as a crucial aspect of Virgil’s epic. Lewis may be overstating Virgil’s innovation in this aspect of epic, as scholars have identified similar layering of pasts in both Homer and Apollonius.²³ Nevertheless, Virgil’s version of the temporal dynamics of epic was certainly his own, and it was the version that most captured the attention of Lewis and Tolkien.²⁴ For Tolkien, the impression of depth provides a key technique in his writing of fiction, and less obviously it also makes its way into Lewis’s fiction.

The epic past in the Chronicles of Narnia

Like Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, Narnia does not exactly represent the past for its readers but instead presents an alternate and unreal version of the world that bears premodern characteristics. What is crucial for both is that within that unreal past, the ‘sub-created’,²⁵ secondary world offers fragments of its own deep past.²⁶ In the Chronicles of Narnia, this is most apparent in the second volume, Prince Caspian. In that novel, the Pevensie children who first visited Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe have left Narnia, and when they return, centuries have passed. The castle they ruled from as kings and queens of Narnia is now in ruins, and the people they encounter have only fragmentary and distorted memories of the time when the Pevensies ruled.²⁷Prince Caspian is the novel that emphasizes this aspect most, and it is not coincidentally the novel in which fauns appear most often, but all the Narnia novels use layered pasts in one way or another. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Pevensies help the creatures of Narnia restore a barely remembered past to a world the White Witch has taken out of time, since it is always winter. More subtly, the professor who owns the house in which the children find the titular wardrobe hints that he has an undisclosed history with Narnia, which in The Magician’s Nephew (written after but set before Prince Caspian and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) turns out to be the origin of the mysterious lamp-post that appears where Lucy first enters Narnia. The remaining novels do not engage as thoroughly as the first two do with attempts to remember a lost past, but each does contain fragments of Narnia’s past until the final volume, The Last Battle, collapses the layers of Narnian time by bringing back the characters from those layers to witness the end of Narnia. The layering of pasts in the series gives it, and each novel within it, an aspect of epic time that Lewis associates especially with the Aeneid.

We can reconstruct a kind of timeline that looks something like this: In about 1914, according to his own much later account in ‘It All Began with a Picture’, Lewis ‘had in [his] mind’ the ‘picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood’ (Lewis 1966: 42). In 1926, Lewis and Tolkien met in Oxford. In 1936, Tolkien published Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, in which he comments on time in the Aeneid. In 1937, Tolkien published The Hobbit. In 1938, in his later recollection, Lewis decided to write a story about the image of the faun in the snow. In 1941, Lewis delivered the lectures that he would publish in 1942 as A Preface to Paradise Lost, in which he also comments on time in the Aeneid. In 1950, Lewis published The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, followed by Prince Caspian a year later. These are the Narnia novels in which both fauns and the layering of pasts are most prominent. In 1954, Tolkien wrote his letter to Mitchison, linking the impression of depth to his own fiction writing, and in 1954–55, he published The Lord of the Rings.

One interesting aspect of this timeline is that it makes it extremely unlikely that Lewis had in mind the epic past when, at the age of sixteen, he first conceived of the image of a faun carrying parcels and an umbrella. The image of the faun occurred to him for other reasons, but that does not preclude the possibility that he later associated the faun with epic time. The same pattern of conception and association is well documented for his conception of the lion Aslan as a Christ figure. Lewis (1966: 42) explains that he wrote Aslan as a lion because he had been having dreams about lions. He denies that he decided to write a Christian allegory for children and conceived of the Chronicles of Narnia as a way to do that. Instead, he invented the characters and the story and subsequently shaped them to communicate his vision of Christianity.²⁸ As he developed the story that grew out of the image of the faun that came to him in 1914, it is hard to believe that Lewis did not consider Faunus and Evander’s description of fauns in the Aeneid. He read Virgil’s epic in Latin as a schoolboy and began translating it at least as early as 1922, going so far as to read portions of a translation he had been working on to his literary group, the Inklings, in 1943 (Reyes 2011: 3–4). In his nursing home in 1963, the two books Lewis requested that his secretary bring to him were The Worm Ouroboros and The Aeneid (Reyes 2011: 1). Lewis’s enduring interest in the Aeneid, combined with his argument that Virgil’s most significant innovation was his version of the layering of pasts, makes it plausible that the faun in Narnia represented epic temporality in his novels. Ultimately, however, even if it was not Lewis’s intention for the faun to resonate in that way, it is undeniable that he was both interested in the layering of pasts in the Aeneid and that he wrote multiple layers of pasts in the Chronicles of Narnia. In fact, both Lewis and Tolkien, who were veterans of the trenches in the industrial, mechanized First World War, wrote fiction valorizing a deep, multilayered, pre-industrial past that they did not invent out of nothing but adapted from epic poetry in general and from Virgil’s Aeneid in particular. Tolkien artificially recreates the melancholy sense of the lost past that he takes from epic by creating a detailed background but fragmenting it and including hints of it in his fiction. Lewis not only writes layers of pasts in his novels but also symbolizes the epic sense of the past by introducing Narnia with a faun.²⁹

Conclusion: epic time and the politics of Narnia

One way in which Lewis’s version of the temporality of epic differs from Tolkien’s is that Tolkien focuses entirely on the layering of pasts, while Lewis includes a more explicit sense of the connection between the past, present, and future. He writes that Virgil ‘must locate his action in a legendary past and yet make us feel the present, and the intervening centuries, already foreshadowed’ (Lewis 1942: 34). For Virgil, and for Lewis reading Virgil, the connection between the past and the present is not a continuous, causal chain of events, but a complex and discontinuous relationship of prophecy and its fulfilment. As Lewis put it, Virgil avoids ‘the clumsiness and monotony of a mere chronicle’ (Lewis 1942: 34). More recent scholarship shows in greater detail just how Virgil’s engagement with his own Augustan period depends on complex manipulations of prophecy and memory.³⁰ The past of the Aeneid is not a static world to be appreciated objectively, nor is it simply a prior stage of development in historical time, but instead, it is a rhetorical creation of the present that aims to influence the future. Time in the poem is not a straightforward path from the past through the present to the future but an arrangement of layers that allows connections between different times in a discontinuous fashion. In this context, it is significant that the faun is not just a symbol of the ancient, multilayered past but also a figure of the prophetic and poetic uates. When Cicero notes the prophetic voices of the fauns that inhabit the countryside, he notes that they appear in troubled times (De Divinatione 1.101). Virgil’s characters lived in troubled times, as did Virgil himself. The epic he wrote was not only about the ancient past but also about the ways in which the past we imagine connects to and shapes the present. Lewis’s times were troubled too, and the past he turned to in the Aeneid was one not just created by the present but one connected to the present in a particularly epic manner.

I began this argument with the image of the faun in the snow as Lucy entered Narnia for the first time. What drew Lucy to the spot where she met Mr. Tumnus was a lamp-post, at first seemingly just a mundane object from Lucy’s world that further emphasizes the contrast between the pagan, Roman, mythological, magical faun and the mundane, commercial, English, and Christian idea of Christmas shopping. But the lamp-post is a genuine connection between Lucy’s world and Narnia. Mr. Tumnus only seems like he might have been doing his Christmas shopping. In fact, he is frozen in time in Narnia ruled by the White Witch, where it is always winter and never Christmas (Lewis 2008: 19). The lamp-post is a fragment of an older story that Lewis would later tell in The Magician’s Nephew, and that story reveals the connection between Narnia and the real world. When Jadis, not yet called the White Witch, left her own world, she came through the Wood Between the Worlds to the ‘real’ world of the Pevensie children, but in the late nineteenth century. In a fight outside of Andrew Ketterley’s house in London, where the young Digory Kirke was living while his father was in India, Jadis tore off a crossbar from a lamp-post and used it as a weapon to defeat the police officers on the scene, and then took it with her to Narnia, where she similarly attempted to use it as a weapon against Aslan. When it proved ineffective against the lion and fell to the ground, it grew into the magical, always-lit lamp-post that Lucy would find in the so-called Lantern Waste marking the beginning of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. At the end of that novel, after the Pevensies have ruled for a lifetime over a Golden Age in Narnia,³¹ it is the lamp-post that reminds them of their home world and prompts them to return to it and to their lives as children. There, they are evacuees from London during the Second World War, staying at the house of a professor later revealed in The Magician’s Nephew to be Digory Kirke. The lamp-post provides a literal and thematic connection between the unreal past of Narnia and the real present of Lewis. It came from the world of Digory Kirke and the Pevensie children, ostensibly our own world, but grew magically in Narnia as though a plant growing from a cutting. It partakes of both worlds and brings them together.

The faun at the beginning of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe evokes the epic past, but it is the lamp-post that shows just how complex the layers of time in Narnia are. For Lewis, it was an artefact of an earlier time, being a gas lamp from nineteenth-century London, but for the Pevensie kings and queens of Narnia, it was a reminder of the industrialized world of the mid-twentieth century. It also serves as a monument of the violence and evil the White Witch brought to Narnia and of her defeat by the Pevensies with the help of Aslan. It marks both the children’s escape from and return to the dangerous violence of the real world, which they had yet to overcome. Just as the ancient past of the Aeneid is not wholly divorced from the real world of Virgil’s present but instead plays a role in the present through prophecy and memory, the sub-created world of Narnia is not wholly divorced from the real world of Lewis’s present, where the violence and danger of Narnia similarly play a role. And just as it would be a mistake to characterize the Aeneid as a straightforward or explicit statement of Virgil’s political positions, it would also be a mistake to read The Chronicles of Narnia as a statement of Lewis’s political positions. Nevertheless, in neither case does that mean that the stories of the past are an escape from the politics of the present. The violent and authoritarian regimes that dominate the fauns, as the White Witch does in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or marginalize them, as Miraz does in Prince Caspian, offer the Pevensies and their readers strategies for mobilizing the past in their own circumstances. The epic past, like the faun that represents it, is, for both Virgil and Lewis, a vitally important element of the struggle to make sense of the present and shape the future.

Acknowledgements

I presented versions of this paper at meetings of the Atlantic Classical Association, the Classical Association of Canada, and the University of Western Ontario Department of Classical Studies Research Seminar Series. I received helpful feedback and encouragement at various stages from my colleagues at Western and from many others. I owe thanks, especially to Neil Bernstein, C. G. Brown, Fionntan Ferris, Christopher Neibert, Benjamin Porteous, Kathryn Simonsen, Katharine von Stackelberg, Aara Suksi, and Jesse Weiner. I owe special thanks to Kyle Gervais, with whom I developed the idea for this article over the course of many enjoyable discussions. I am also grateful to CRJ’s editors and to the anonymous readers they commissioned.

References

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR

Randall Pogorzelski is an associate professor in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Western Ontario. His publications include ‘The “Reassurance of Fratricide” in the Aeneid’ (2009) and Virgil and Joyce: Nationalism and Imperialism in the Aeneid and Ulysses (2016).

Footnotes