Over time, as I read and re-read the Chronicles of Narnia and the Harry Potter books, I want to draw the parallels between Aslan and Gryffindor and highlight their status as Christ symbols. Let’s lay the initial groundwork.
Aslan is the manifest Christ symbol of Lewis’ Narnia books. Son of the Emperor over the Sea and sacrifice on behalf of the traitor Edmund, raised to life and to victory over the evil White Witch, Jadis, he is clearly a representation of Christ, “the Lion of the tribe of Judah.”
Rowling, being a great lover of Lewis’ Narnia series, would certainly be quite aware of this well-chosen imagery. Placing Harry in Gryffindor house is clearly no coincidence; positing the griffin against the serpent of Slytherin is just as deliberate. Let’s dissect “Gryffindor” for a moment.
A griffin is a two-natured creature: body of a lion with the head of an eagle (see Wikipedia entry). “Dor” should be read “d’or,” as in the French of “of gold” (Granger, 92), making “Gryffindor” literally mean, golden griffin. But you’ll notice that the “coat of arms” symbol used for Gryffindor house is consistently a lion and not a griffin, something the Wikipedia entry for “Griffin” refers to as “odd.” So we have, then, a golden lion as the context for Harry’s “family” at Hogwarts.
The connection with Narnia should be obvious: In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, for example, a “flat gold image of Aslan the Lion” is mounted on the wall above the door of Lucy’s cabin on the Dawn Treader. Perhaps Rowling’s use of a golden lion rather than a griffin for the coat of arms is not so “odd,” but rather a deliberate pointer to Lewis’ Narnia series, and more importantly, to Christ Himself.
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5 responses so far ↓
1 Pauli
// Dec 19, 2005 at 10:39 am
A huge difference between HP and Narnia is that the Narnia story is very much an allegory. Harry Potter is more like Lord of the Rings in that there is no “Christ figure” - Tolkien didn’t like allegories at all - but both HP and LotR contain massive amounts of Christian symbolism in the narrative.
So you have symbols of Christ everywhere in HP - the griffin, the phoenix, the hippogryff, even Harry and Dumbledore - but no allegorical character that you can point to and say “He’s supposed to be Jesus.” Likewise a Christian can find incredible parallels to Christ in Tolkien’s characters of Gandalf, Frodo and Aragorn especially in the sacrifices they make, but none of them is an Aslan.
In a sense, these characters are like the saints who recreate the life of Christ in their own life and times. Thus the characters themselves put Christ into these symbolic narratives rather than the author directly.
2 Merlin
// Dec 19, 2005 at 11:39 am
Pauli’s comment gets to the heart of it, the technical difference between a Christ Symbol and “THE Christ FIGURE” in an allegorical story.
But on Allegory I would make a few classifications. On Lewis, I think the Narnia books are a cut above something like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. I say this not to slam on the latter but simply because the consideration has sort of illuminated my thought on the matter of allegory recently.
What makes them different is that Narnia is an Allegory of the Biblical story, which is itself a narrative, a story. This opens it up to more possibilities of what Tolkien would call the “sub-creation” of the author’s own unique adaptations of the images. A prime example would be the great image of the “Further up and Further In” chapter from The Last Battle, which has alsways been one of my faves. Bunyan, on the other hand is an Allegory of later discursive understanding of the story, so his characters are not as interesting because they are so straightforwardly one element, such as the “Slough of Despondancy/Despair.” I’m not trying to knock on Bunyan, God Bless him and good things have been done through that book. But I think it is helpful to see the different levels of allegory (even Tolkien admitted that allegory had a place, and that he used it too, such as Bombadil being allegorical or pure nature)
3 dramaturge
// Dec 21, 2005 at 4:38 pm
actually, Lewis would argue against you that [i]Narnia[/i] is an allegory. Aslan is much more definitely an allegorical representation of Christ, but the stories themselves are not allegories.
4 Pauli
// Jan 13, 2006 at 11:08 pm
Wanted to throw a link here to Rialb’s post on griffins.
Regarding allegory, I think you are absolutely correct that the stories are not allegories as stories. But the characters and events are more allegorical that those characters and events in Lord of the Rings, that being the work that Narnia is often compared to. For example, the death and resurrection of Aslan is much more an allegory for Christ’s death and resurrection than Gandalf’s fall and return which parallel’s the Norse myth of Odin much more closely.
5 Travis Prinzi
// Jan 14, 2006 at 9:00 am
Pauli, thanks for the comment. I’m taking a course in Mythology this semester, so I’m looking forward to picking up a lot more when I re-read my way through Tolkien and Lewis in the future.
You know, after I commenting on the Narnia post last night, I realized both that it was a very old post and that you were already aware of this post (since you’ve already commented on it).
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