Narnia on it's way

I am fascinated by the etymology of ideas.

I'm getting fired up about The Chronicles of Narnia movie coming out and I'm prepping myself to see it, so I'm doing some research and reading. Just thought I'd share some Narnia etymology.

C.S. Lewis traced the idea for Narnia back to a picture he saw when he was sixteen years old. He once wrote an essay titled "It All Began with a Picture." He explained "the lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture has been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: 'Let's try to make a story about it'."

It started with a paragraph on a scrap of paper in September of 1939. It wasn't till almost a decade later that the first book: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, was written.

All the ideas and characters in the book have an etymology. Lewis said he made Aslan a lion because Jesus was called the Lion of Judah. And he had been dreaming about lions when he started writing the story.

For what it's worth, Lewis sent a draft of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe to Owen Barfield and his wife Maud read it. She was concerned that kids would read the book, walk into the closet, and accidentally lock themselves in. Lewis added five warnings in the book about not closing and locking a wardrobe door. One little boy in Oxford did take a hatchet and chop a hole in the back of the family wardrobe hoping to find Narnia :)

One more idea etymology. Lewis got the name Aslan from The Thousand and One Nights. Aslan is turkish for lion. He saw the word in a footnote of Edward William Lane's classic 1840 translation.

It took Lewis more than four decades to turn an idea from a picture into a series of books that have sold 85 million copies!

The etymology of ideas is an amazing thing!