With Halloween approaching at the end of October, it seemed appropriate to write about some of the scary characters in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia books.
Jadis, the White Witch, is featured in The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. In The Magician’s Nephew, Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer become unwilling “guinea pigs” in a test of Andrew Ketterly’s magic rings. Digory and Polly find themselves in a Wood Between Worlds, where pools of water lead to different worlds. One of the pools leads to the city of Charn, where Digory awakens the evil Jadis from her slumber. The children then return to Earth, inadvertenly bringing Jadis along, where she begins her plans to take over England, and then the world. The children manage to get Jadis back to the Wood Between Worlds, and then they all travel to the world that will become Narnia, as the great Lion Aslan sings the world into existence.
In chapter 13, Jadis tempts Digory to take a forbidden fruit that promises to cure his ailing mother. The scene will remind readers of the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3. Ultimately Digory does not take the fruit.
Many years pass on Earth and in Narnia.
In the opening chapters of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the four Pevensie children live with Digory, who is now an old professor living in the English countryside. Jadis is now the White Witch and self-proclaimed “Queen” of Narnia, a land where it is “always winter, but never Christmas.” Edmund Pevensie encounters the White Witch, who tempts him with Turkish Delight. Unlike Digory, Edmund makes choices that go from bad to worse, and ultimately betrays his brother and sisters.
At age 31, The White Witch in the animated version of the story still gives me the creeps. And she hangs out with a creepy crowd, including “ogres with monstrous teeth, and wolves, and bull-headed men; spirits of evil trees and poisonous plants... Cruels and Hags… Wraiths, Horrors, Efreets, Sprites, Orknies, Wooses, and Ettins. I don’t know what some of them are, but they all sound scary.
All the Narnian characters—good and bad—are “just pretend,” but they remind us of the good and bad in each of us.
