Reading Group: Seven Discussion Points From 'Dawn Treader'

Reading Group: Seven Discussion Points From 'Dawn Treader' - NarniaWeb Forum https://community-dev.narniaweb.com/community/reading-group-seven-discussion-points-from-dawn-treader/ NarniaWeb Forum Discussion Board en-US Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:36:22 +0000 wpForo 60 Week 7: Other Passages in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader https://community-dev.narniaweb.com/community/reading-group-seven-discussion-points-from-dawn-treader/week-7-other-passages-in-the-voyage-of-the-dawn-treader/ Tue, 07 Dec 2010 19:12:21 +0000 Other Passages in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader that Raise Issues for Discussion? C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were faculty members at Oxford, good friends, and founders of the Inklings—a reading and writing group which met in Lewis’s rooms and at The Eagle and Child, a local pub. They were also the two greatest fantasy writers of the 20th Century. Although the worlds of Middle-earth and Narnia share many similarities (and the fans of one author are often fans of both), there are some interesting differences between The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. It has been said that one of the biggest differences is that when readers come to a door in Tolkien’s stories, he typically opens it and shows us what lies behind. By contrast Lewis leaves many doors unopened, allowing readers to wonder what might be on the other side. For example, when we first see the Stone Table in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe we are told, “It was cut all over with strange lines and figures that might be the letters of an unknown language.” At this point in the story, Tolkien would have given us a picture of the letters themselves, told us how they were pronounced in the original language, provided a translation, and told us who had carved them and who the carver’s parents and grandparents were. Lewis simply suggests there is something special about them by telling us, “They gave you a curious feeling when you looked at them.” Are there other passages that might make good discussion points? Are there other places in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where Lewis comes to a door he leaves unopened and in doing so invites us to wonder what might be on the other side? Can you think of other times where Lewis suggests more than he actually states? Questions for Discussion: 1. Does Lewis give us any hints about who gave the Scrubbs the picture of the Narnian sailing ship? 2. When Lewis places the very modern Scrubbs at Cambridge might he be suggesting something about his rival university? 3. Where might the mountain with the garden and well that Aslan leads Eustace to be located? 4. What might Lewis be hinting at in Lucy’s spell “for refreshment of the spirit” with of “a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill”?]]> Reading Group: Seven Discussion Points From 'Dawn Treader' Tirian https://community-dev.narniaweb.com/community/reading-group-seven-discussion-points-from-dawn-treader/week-7-other-passages-in-the-voyage-of-the-dawn-treader/ Week 6: Why Were You Brought to Narnia? https://community-dev.narniaweb.com/community/reading-group-seven-discussion-points-from-dawn-treader/week-6-why-were-you-brought-to-narnia/ Fri, 26 Nov 2010 12:08:48 +0000 “The Very Reason You Were Brought Here”: Why Were You Brought to Narnia? We could say that in Aslan’s statement to Lucy and Edmund, “This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there,” Lewis is speaking to his readers as well. In an often-quoted passage from “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” Lewis explains that during his childhood, ideas associated with God and Christ took on negative “stained-glass and Sunday school associations,” causing his own faith to become “paralyzed” for many years. In writing the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis sought to cast “all these things into an imaginary world” where they could “for the first time appear in their real potency” completely free from any off-putting connections. As Stephen Smith has proposed, through these stories Lewis intends “to awaken in us a hunger” and “to open our hearts to the reality of God as the one in whom power and goodness, majesty and compassion meet.” In his essay for Mere Christians, David Downing comments on Lewis’s decision to “recast” essential Christian truths in the stories of Narnia in an attempt to steal past the watchful dragons of “enforced reverence or tedious religious lessons.” Downing concludes, “By enlisting the unfettered powers of imagination, Lewis hoped to recapture the original beauty and poignancy of the Good News. In this strategy, Lewis has been brilliantly successful in the hearts and minds of millions of readers.” As they look back on the effect Lewis’s writing has had on their own hearts and minds, fans of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader would heartily agree. Lewis truly has been brilliantly successful. Questions for Discussion: In his celebrated essay “On Fairy-Stories,” J. R. R. Tolkien writes of the consolation which fairy-tales hold, the “catch of the breath,” the “lifting of the heart,” and the “fleeting glimpse of Joy” they provide, a joy “beyond the walls of the world.” 1. How would you describe what The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and the other Chronicles of Narnia offer readers in general? “This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.” 2. What has been the effect of your being brought to Narnia? How does Aslan’s statement resonate with your own personal experience? Why were you in particular brought to Narnia? Lewis said that he wrote the Narnia stories to steal past the kind of negative “stained glass associations” he had with the forced reverence and tedious religious lessons he experienced in youth. 3. What has been your experience with religious institutions and how do the Chronicles of Narnia either fit in with or complement it?]]> Reading Group: Seven Discussion Points From 'Dawn Treader' Tirian https://community-dev.narniaweb.com/community/reading-group-seven-discussion-points-from-dawn-treader/week-6-why-were-you-brought-to-narnia/ Week 5: Knowing Aslan by Another Name https://community-dev.narniaweb.com/community/reading-group-seven-discussion-points-from-dawn-treader/week-5-knowing-aslan-by-another-name/ Fri, 19 Nov 2010 19:21:48 +0000 Week 5: Knowing Aslan by Another Name: What Happens to Edmund and Lucy After They Are Back in England? Just before his transformation into a lion, the lamb tells Lucy, “For you the door into Aslan’s country is from your own world.” Now in his lion form, Aslan further explains, “I will not tell you how long or short the way will be; only that it lies across a river.” The river Aslan refers to is physical death, a requirement for all creatures except Reepicheep and those who are present at the end of time. Next, as he did with Peter and Susan previously, Aslan explains to Edmund and Lucy that they are too old to return to Narnia. In response to Lucy’s sobs, Aslan promises that they will meet him in their world though under a different name. He concludes, “This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.” In The Last Battle, Edmund, Lucy, and the others will be killed in a railway accident without even knowing it and will pass over the river of death to Aslan’s Country where they will be allowed to remain for good. For them the waiting will not be too long, for according to Lewis’s notes, around seven years of English time will pass between this scene when Edmund and Lucy are sent back to England and the episode in The Last Battle when they return to Aslan’s Country to stay. Lewis never tells us directly how or to what extent Edmund and Lucy get to know Aslan better in England during this time. In The Last Battle Eustace will explain to Tirian that during those seven years. the friends of Narnia—Professor Kirk, Polly, Peter, Edmund, Lucy, Eustace, and Jill—get together to “have a good jaw about Narnia,” but Lewis chooses not to say anything explicitly about the Pevensies’ Christian faith. Perhaps Aslan would tell the curious reader who wants to know to what extent they got to know Aslan by his other name the same thing he tells Lucy when she wants to know if Eustace will return: “Child, do you really need to know that?” Having said this, Lewis may have provided us with a hint. It will be seven years before we see Lucy again. When she and her siblings arrive at the stable in The Last Battle, Lucy’s very first words will be the only direct reference to Christianity found the Chronicles. She will point out, “In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.” In Lucy’s statement which alludes to the story of Christ’s birth, we can see her belief that in the Bethlehem stable the truly divine truly came to dwell among us. Following Lucy’s words about the stable the Bethlehem, Lewis reveals a bit about what led to them. The narrator states: “It was the first time she had spoken, and from the thrill in her voice, Tirian now knew why. She was drinking everything in even more deeply than the others. She had been too happy to speak.” Exactly what realization Lucy has had is left unspoken except for her words about the stable. Readers are left to ponder what put this thrill in her voice and made Lucy too happy to speak. Questions for Discussion: 1. What, if anything, do you think Lewis implies about what happens to Edmund’s and Lucy’s relationship to Aslan after they return to our world? 2. Beyond the what Lewis may be suggesting, what do you think happens in regards to Edmund’s and Lucy’s coming to know Aslan in our world? 3. Aslan tells the children that he is present in their world as well and then adds, “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name.” Given the story of Emeth, does Lewis suggest what name this might be?]]> Reading Group: Seven Discussion Points From 'Dawn Treader' Tirian https://community-dev.narniaweb.com/community/reading-group-seven-discussion-points-from-dawn-treader/week-5-knowing-aslan-by-another-name/ Week 4: Why a Lamb? https://community-dev.narniaweb.com/community/reading-group-seven-discussion-points-from-dawn-treader/week-4-why-a-lamb/ Sat, 13 Nov 2010 01:12:02 +0000 Questions for Discussion: 1. Why do you think Lewis chose to make Aslan appear as a lamb in this chapter? 2. How effective is this choice for you as a reader? 3. What do you think Lewis may be suggesting by the statement in The Last Battle that Aslan “no longer looked like a lion”?]]> Reading Group: Seven Discussion Points From 'Dawn Treader' Tirian https://community-dev.narniaweb.com/community/reading-group-seven-discussion-points-from-dawn-treader/week-4-why-a-lamb/ Week 3: What Would Their Dark Island Dreams Be? https://community-dev.narniaweb.com/community/reading-group-seven-discussion-points-from-dawn-treader/week-3-what-would-their-dark-island-dreams-be/ Fri, 05 Nov 2010 17:27:58 +0000 Questions for Discussion: Here at Dark Island, Lewis certainly could have told us in great detail what dreams each character had, but as in the other passages we have looked at, here again he chooses to suggest more than he states. 1. Why do you think Lewis chose not to give specific details here? 2. What do you think were the dark dreams that each character might have had—Lucy, Eustace, Rynelf, Caspian, the sailor mentioned, Drinian, and Edmund? 3. Here in Lucy’s plea, we find what may be one of the only prayers in the Chronicles. Why do you think Lewis places it here?]]> Reading Group: Seven Discussion Points From 'Dawn Treader' Tirian https://community-dev.narniaweb.com/community/reading-group-seven-discussion-points-from-dawn-treader/week-3-what-would-their-dark-island-dreams-be/ Week 2: What Was the Magician's Transgression? https://community-dev.narniaweb.com/community/reading-group-seven-discussion-points-from-dawn-treader/week-2-what-was-the-magicians-transgression/ Fri, 29 Oct 2010 22:51:00 +0000 What Was the Magician’s Transgression? In chapter fourteen, Ramandu reveals that Coriakin is also a former star. But when Lucy asks if Coriakin is a retired star, too, Ramandu provides an enigmatic answer. “Well, not quite the same,” Ramandu replies, “It was not quite as a rest that he was set to govern the Duffers. You might call it punishment, He might have shone for thousands of years more in the southern winter sky if all had gone well.” Caspian wants to know what the misdeed was that led to Coriakin’s punishment, and it is hard not to share his curiosity. What exactly was it that did not go well? Ramandu replies to Caspian, “My son, it is not for you, a son of Adam, to know what faults a star can commit.” Despite Ramandu’s statement, is it possible that Lewis provides some hints about Coriakin’s transgression? In chapter ten, we find the account of Lucy’s mission at the Magician’s house. After going upstairs, she must walk past room after room and dreads that “in any room there might be the magician—asleep, or awake, or invisible, or even dead.” At the sixth door, Lucy has what the narrator refers to as “her first real fright” when “a wicked little bearded face” seems to pop out of the wall. The scary face turns out to be nothing more than a little mirror with “hair on the top of it and a beard hanging down from it.” With it Lewis reminds his readers—young and old—that many of our fears exist only in our minds. Earlier the Dufflepuds turned out to be not as menacing as they first seemed. Here the Magician’s mirror is no threat at all—and, in fact, is actually comical. Lewis will repeat the lesson a few pages later when Lucy finally meets the Magician, whom she has been fearing the entire time, only to find an ally and a friend. Lewis leaves it to the reader to speculate why Coriakin has chosen to hang the little mirror with the hair and beard—the Bearded Glass, as it is called—in the hallway. Perhaps Lewis includes it just to reinforce the lesson about needless fears and to insert a comic break in the suspense Lucy is facing. However, perhaps Lewis wants to suggest that Coriakin became too prideful earlier in life and now has hung the mirror as a reminder that he must not take himself so seriously. In chapter eleven we find what may be another possible clue to the Coriakin’s transgression. After a brief visit with Lucy and the Magician, Aslan takes his leave, claiming that he must visit Trumpkin and bring him news. “Gone! And you and I quite crestfallen,” the Magician says to Lucy after Aslan vanishes. Then he adds, “It’s always like that, you can’t keep him.” The use of the word always implies that Coriakin has had other experiences with Aslan leaving sooner than desired. Perhaps Coriakin is referring to Aslan’s previous appearances on Dufflepud Island, but perhaps he is also remembering his days as a star in the Narnian heavens and Aslan’s visits with him back then. In the Magician’s first words to Aslan, he admitted, “I am a little impatient” and Aslan responded with the mild rebuke “All in good time.” Perhaps a lack of patience was Coriakin’s downfall, and this is why Aslan set him to govern the Dufflepuds—because the experience will help him acquire this virtue. There is another possible hint in the conversation after Aslan’s departure. After the Magician points out to Lucy, “You can’t keep him,” he adds, “It’s not as if he were a tame lion.” Again the former star may be speaking from experience. Perhaps when Coriakin was a star, he tried to enforce his own wishes on Aslan in some way—in some way tried to “keep” Aslan rather than accept Aslan’s will. Perhaps this is where his acknowledgement “You can’t keep him” comes from—from personal experience trying to do just this. If so, then perhaps an alternate reason Coriakin was set to govern the Dufflepuds was in order to see the role of authority from the side of the one doing the governing. Despite these possibilities, Lewis never reveals the exact nature of Coriakin’s transgression. We never get more than hints. Perhaps Ramandu would tell us, “It is not for you readers to know what faults a star can commit.” We can say for sure that Coriakin was guilty of some fault and was given a corrective punishment. In this sense the Magician, although an unworldly being of great power, is no different from the other characters in the Chronicles or, Lewis might say, from the readers themselves. Lewis describes the cure for our rebellious nature in The Problem of Pain where he points out, “While what we call ‘our own life’ remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make ‘our own life’ less agreeable to us?” Coriakin’s life was made “less agreeable” by being assigned the frustrating and thankless task of overseeing the Dufflepuds. At the conclusion of Eustace’s corrective punishment, the narrator reported, “The cure had begun.” When we meet the Magician in chapter ten, we might say that the cure for his earlier transgression seems to not just have begun but to have been very successful. Questions for Discussion: 1. Do you think that Lewis has given us any hints about the Magician’s earlier flaw? If so, what do you think it might have been? 2. Readers are told about Edmund’s and Eustace’s transgressions. Why do you think Lewis leaves Coriakin’s unspecified? In The Problem of Pain Lewis concludes, “We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.” 3. How do you see this statement as relevant here and elsewhere in the Chronicles? For someone being punished, Coriakin seems quite happy to see Aslan. By contrast, the Dufflepuds see Coriakin as their enemy. Coriakin regrets that he must govern the Dufflepuds by “rough magic” rather than wisdom. Here Lewis seems to be suggesting that the further along we are in our growth, the more we welcome the agents of correction in our lives and the opportunity for improvement they bring. 4. Where do we see this principle or its reverse to be true at other places in The Chronicles?]]> Reading Group: Seven Discussion Points From 'Dawn Treader' Tirian https://community-dev.narniaweb.com/community/reading-group-seven-discussion-points-from-dawn-treader/week-2-what-was-the-magicians-transgression/ Introduction https://community-dev.narniaweb.com/community/reading-group-seven-discussion-points-from-dawn-treader/introduction/ Sat, 23 Oct 2010 00:16:17 +0000 Introduction In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis records a turning point as he was learning to write. He tells readers, “Up to then, if my lines rhymed and scanned and got on with the story I asked no more. Now . . . I began to try to convey some of the intense excitement I was feeling, to look for expressions which would not merely state but suggest. . . . I had learned what writing means.” In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we find a number of intriguing passages where Lewis suggests more than he merely states, places where he invites the reader to first read carefully and then to think about the implications of what was written. In keeping with the Dawn Treader’s quest for the seven lost lords, I have provided seven discussion points from Lewis’s wonderful story, places where he invites us to speculate on what a passage may suggest.]]> Reading Group: Seven Discussion Points From 'Dawn Treader' Tirian https://community-dev.narniaweb.com/community/reading-group-seven-discussion-points-from-dawn-treader/introduction/ Week 1: How Ever Many Skins Have I Got To Take Off? https://community-dev.narniaweb.com/community/reading-group-seven-discussion-points-from-dawn-treader/week-1-how-ever-many-skins-have-i-got-to-take-off/ Sat, 23 Oct 2010 00:13:21 +0000 “How Ever Many Skins Have I Got to Take Off?”: What Is Lewis Saying? After six days on Dragon Island, Edmund wakes to find “a dark figure moving on the seaward side of the wood.” It is Eustace, now transformed from a dragon back into a boy, but so changed that we are told at first Edmund “thought it was Caspian.” This might seem a small detail, but the fact that the new Eustace may be mistaken for the young king says a great deal about him. The encounter goes like this:

A low voice calls out, “Is that you Edmund?” Edmund replies: “Yes. Who are you?” “Don’t you know me?” asks the voice. “It’s me—Eustace.” “By jove,” answers Edmund finally recognizing his cousin. “So it is.”

Edmund’s failure to recognize Eustace is understandable, and the exchange is full with meaning. Eustace is not the boy he was, but instead the boy he was meant to be, and so is only now truly Eustace. Gradually he shares with Edmund the details surrounding his return to his original form, or as he says, the story of how he stopped being a dragon. Eustace tells of his meeting with Aslan and their journey to a garden on the top of a mountain. Aslan then shows Eustace a well and—in a way that does not use words—tells him that he must undress before bathing in the healing waters. Eustace, who as a dragon is not wearing clothes, understands this to mean that he must remove his scaly skin, like a snake. And so he peels off a layer of his dragon hide and starts to go down into the well only to find that there is another layer of dragon skin beneath the one he has removed. Eustace tells Edmund what happens next, and this passage merits close reading if we are to understand what Lewis is suggesting by it. Eustace tells Edmund: “Oh, that’s all right, said I, it only means I had another smaller suit on underneath the first one, and I’ll have to get out of it too. So I scratched and tore again and this under-skin peeled off beautifully and out I stepped and left it lying beside the other one and went down to the well for my bathe. “Well, exactly the same thing happened again. And I thought to myself, oh dear, how ever many skins have I got to take off? For I was longing to bathe my leg. So I scratched away for the third time and got off a third skin, just like the two others, and stepped out of it, But as soon as I looked at myself in the water I knew it had been no good. “Then the lion said—but I don’t know if it spoke—‘You will have to let me undress you.’” Lewis scholars have somewhat differing views of this incident. In The Way into Narnia, Peter Schakel claims, “Three times Eustace peels off his dragon skin, and three times it grows right back,” as though Eustace accomplishes absolutely nothing on his own. Similarly in The World According to Narnia, Jonathan Rogers asserts that “the dragon hide grows back before he can get into the baptismal pool.” In C. S. Lewis: Spinner of Tales, Evan K. Gibson offers this comment: “The process of ‘undragoning’ Eustace expresses a truth which most adult readers probably recognize immediately. Man’s unassisted efforts to change himself always result in failure.” In The Keys to the Chronicles, Marvin Hinten explains Eustace’s efforts this way: “Despite several sheddings of skin, however, he is unable to change himself, thereby making one of Lewis’s favorites theological points from his adult nonfiction, that Christianity is not simply a matter of self-improvement but of becoming something entirely different.” Other scholars have suggested that Lewis intends this scene to say that on his own, man may well be able to accomplish minor changes and these may come relatively easily and without pain. By having Eustace shed some surface layers, Lewis may be saying that on our own we certainly may be able to do something: we can take the initial steps and make superficial improvements but not the kind of radical changes that go much deeper. In The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, we find a moving account of Lewis’s own spiritual transformation, one which mirrors Eustace’s attempt here to remove layer after layer of dragon skin. Lewis writes about his battle with his “besetting sin” of pride and observes: “I have found out ludicrous and terrible things about my own character…. There seems to be no end to it. Depth under depth of self love and self admiration.” When the “beastly” skin is finally removed, Eustace states describes it as “ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been.” Questions for Discussion: Here Eustace is able to remove one layer of skin but then immediately he finds “another smaller suit on underneath the first one.” 1. What do you think Lewis is saying through Eustace’s repeated attempts to shed his dragon skin? 2. What do you think about our own ability to change? Eustace tells Edmund that after he agreed to allow Aslan to remove his dragon skin: “The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt.” 3. What do you think Lewis is saying about the relationship between pain and real transformation? 4. Do you have any other thoughts on this passage?]]> Reading Group: Seven Discussion Points From 'Dawn Treader' Tirian https://community-dev.narniaweb.com/community/reading-group-seven-discussion-points-from-dawn-treader/week-1-how-ever-many-skins-have-i-got-to-take-off/