I Lived in Narnia

I lived in Narnia. Now before you conclude that I am crazy, let me explain. For most of 2004 my family and I lived and worked in Ireland with Douglas Gresham, the step-son of C. S. Lewis and co-producer of the Walt Disney/Walden Media Narnia movies. We lived with Gresham during the time that the first Narnia movie, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was being filmed. Our residence during that season of our lives was a four hundred year old house dubbed The Narnia Cottage by Gresham himself.

Furthermore, as anyone who has studied the life and work of C. S. Lewis knows, Lewis patterned the landscape of Narnia after the countryside of his beloved birthplace—Ireland. For example, the Dolmens which dot the terrain of Ireland inspired Lewis’s imaginative creation of the Stone Table in the first Narnia book. Dunluce Castle, perched prettily on a seaside cliff along the Antrim Coast of Ulster, was a place Lewis often visited during his childhood. This ancient but crumbling fortress provided a picture for Lewis of what would become the ruins of Cair Paravel in Prince Caspian.

Even our first drive across Ireland, with Doug Gresham at the wheel of his Land Cruiser, was reminiscent of Susan and Lucy’s ride on the back of the great lion, Aslan. . . .

"And you are riding not on a road nor in a park nor even on the downs but right across Narnia, in spring, down solemn avenues of beech and across sunny glades of oak, through wild orchards of snow-white cherry trees, past roaring waterfalls and mossy rocks and echoing caverns, up windy slopes alight with gorse bushes and across the shoulders of heathery mountains and along giddy ridges and down, down, down again into wild valleys and out into acres of blue flowers." (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, chapter XV)

Indeed, the windy slopes were alight with the golden color of gorse bushes on that early May morning as Doug sped across the Emerald Isle with five weary Americans in tow, counting the ruins of long-abandoned castles all along the way. It wasn’t quite the same as riding on Aslan’s back, but it sure came close. (To be continued. . . .)

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Will Vaus

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