Hog’s Head Interview with Michael Ward

by Johnny

Michael Ward is the author of Planet Narnia, a groundbreaking work in C.S. Lewis and Narnia studies, which is stirring excitement and discussion. In his book, Ward argues that each novel in the Narnia series corresponds to one of the seven planets of Medieval Cosmology. I met him at the February 2008 meeting of the New York C.S. Lewis Society, and I’m grateful to interview him for the Hog’s Head just in time for the film release. This interview will discuss the Mars element in the book Prince Caspian:

Michael Ward, thank you for taking the time to do this interview for the Hog’s Head. Can you explain the evidence for the martial element in Prince Caspian?

Thank you for having me as your guest at the Hog’s Head.

In brief, the evidence for the martial theme of Prince Caspian comes in two forms: background context and foreground details. Since we’re talking about the seven heavens, let me give seven pieces of background context, followed by seven pieces of foreground detail. The background evidence includes the following:

1) Lewis loved the planets all his life. He writes about them all over his work: in his academic writings, his poetry, and his Ransom Trilogy. From an early date he found that the planets had ‘a peculiar heady attraction’ for him. And he had a high view of the planets imaginatively. He described them as “spiritual symbols of permanent value”.

2) As a scholar of the sixteenth century, Lewis had a deep interest in the cosmological revolution brought about by the Polish astronomer, Copernicus, who introduced the new heliocentric (sun-centered) model of the universe. Lewis’s longest academic book, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, begins with a discussion of the imaginative effects brought about by this Copernican revolution. He felt that the universe had, in the modern astronomical model, become disenchanted, devoid of spiritual life, and that the planets and stars were no longer considered to have any symbolic significance. The heavenly bodies had been reduced to mere matter and mechanism.

3) Lewis’s favorite psalm was Psalm 19, which opens with the sentence: ‘The heavens are telling the glory of God.’ He describes it as the greatest poem in the psalter and one of the finest lyrics in the world. The heavens declare divine artistry and creativity, even though they declare it silently.

4) Lewis had a fully worked out theory of literary hiddenness. He wrote an essay about it called ‘The Kappa Element in Romance’. Kappa is the initial letter of the Greek word meaning cryptic or hidden. Lewis argues that it is the atmosphere of a story (romance) which is its main attraction, – the flavor or feel of a tale, which is nowhere explicit but everywhere implicit. When he wrote Narnia he gave each Chronicle the atmosphere associated with one of the seven heavens.

5) Lewis believed that God’s nature was in part hidden from us because it was always present to us. He wrote: ‘We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.’ Portraying this hidden aspect of the divine nature was one of reasons behind keeping his planetary theme secret in the Narniad. If he had told everyone, ‘I’m portraying the hiddenness of God’, he would have blown his own cover.

6) Lewis knew that many great writers, like Spenser and Milton, often chose to portray God by means of the pagan gods: ‘Jove is often Jehovah incognito,’ Lewis wrote. He also wrote that ‘Paganism is the religion of poetry through which the author can express, at any moment, just so much or so little of his real religion as his art requires.’ He called this technique, ‘Transferred classicism’ – transferring classical pagan gods into the presentation of the true God of Christianity. The way Lewis takes the pagan gods of Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, and Saturn, and uses the images associated with them to express something about the nature of Christ, is Lewis’s own very sophisticated continuation of this technique.

7) Lewis thought that we know things in one of two ways, either by ‘contemplating’ things from the outside or by ‘enjoying’ them from the inside. ‘Enjoyment’, in his view, is the deeper level of consciousness. When we ‘enjoy’ things, we don’t look ‘at them’, we look ‘along them’. The experience is more like seeing than it is like something seen. He once wrote that ‘an influence which cannot evade our consciousness [that is, our 'contemplation'], will not go very deep’. Only when you are immersed in an experience, ‘enjoying’ it, not ‘contemplating’ it, will you get the deepest knowledge of it.

So, those seven points give some background evidence for Lewis’s love of the planets and his interest in different kinds of hiddenness. They help provide the context for understanding what Lewis was up to when writing the Narnia Chronicles. Now, in brief, here are seven pieces of detailed foreground evidence indicating that Lewis wrote Prince Caspian to embody and express the qualities of Mars:

1) Mars is the god of war and Prince Caspian is a war story. The four Pevensie children find that they have arrived in Narnia ‘in the middle of a war’. The war in question is ‘the Great War of Deliverance’, as it is referred to in a later Chronicle, or simply the ‘Civil War’ in Lewis’s ‘Outline of Narnian History’. It is ‘a real war to drive Miraz out of Narnia’ and restore the kingdom to Caspian. At the start of the story he is a mere boy, hardly aware of the Martial spirit which is already abroad. When Glenstorm tells Caspian: ‘I and my sons are ready for war. When is the battle to be joined?’, Caspian replies that he had ‘not been thinking of a war’. Glenstorm asks why it is, then, that he goes ‘clad in mail and girt with sword’; he informs him that the omens are good: the planets foretell success. Nerved for the conflict, Caspian thinks it ‘quite possible that they might win a war and quite certain that they must wage one’, so he convenes a ‘Council of War’. The Council authorizes action and Caspian leads the skirmishing forces as they engage the usurper’s army. Once the Pevensies arrive, Peter challenges Miraz to ‘monomachy’. Miraz is killed, not by Peter as it turns out, but by one of his own side, after which ‘full battle’ is joined.

2) Mars makes you ‘martial’, and the very word ‘martial’ appears twice in “Prince Caspian”, the only one of the seven Chronicles in which it occurs at all. Reepicheep is described as a ‘martial mouse’ and Miraz frets over his ‘martial policy’.

3) In his study of sixteenth-century literature, Lewis quotes Sir John Bourchier: ‘I know by the course of the planettes that there is a Knyght comynge’. In Prince Caspian he dramatises that sentence. Glenstorm tells Caspian, ‘The time is ripe. I watch the skies . . . Tarva and Alambil have met in the halls of high heaven’. Tarva, the Lord of Victory, ‘salutes’ Alambil, the Lady of Peace, in a conjunction witnessed by Caspian and his tutor, Dr. Cornelius, who declares: ‘Their meeting is fortunate and means some great good for the sad realm of Narnia’. The conjunction tells us that there is, indeed, ‘a knight coming’, – namely Peter, who will fight the tyrant Miraz and right the wrongs under which Narnia suffers.

4) Knightliness is one of the key, recurring images throughout the story: we hear of ‘knights-errant’; in the ruins of Cair Paravel we see ‘rich suits of armour, like knights guarding the treasures’; Peter is ‘Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Lion’; Edmund is ‘Knight of the Noble Order of the Table’, a ‘very dangerous knight’; Caspian is knighted and then, in turn, knights Trufflehunter, Trumpkin and Reepicheep; even the chess piece discovered at the start of the story is a ‘chess-knight’. This War of Deliverance is a good, medieval, knightly conflict, formalised by the art of heraldry and the rules of chivalry; hence the shining armour, the banners, the ornamented shields, the elevated language of Peter’s challenge.

Peter is the model knight, able to hew the treacherous and murderous Sopespian in pieces (slashing his legs from under him and walloping off his head with the backswing of the same stroke), but gentle enough to kiss the furry head of the badger. He has physical courage (risking his body in the single combat) but also pays attention to forgotten and seemingly unimportant traditions (the Bears’ hereditary right to be Marshals). He is sensitive to his army’s morale (cheering up Wimbleweather by appointing him to the parley); adroit in decision-making (his handling of the bumptious Reepicheep is diplomatic); and self-effacing towards Caspian (‘I haven’t come to take your place, you know, but to put you into it’). He demonstrates the summit of knightliness in refusing to attack Miraz when he is down; this to the frustration of Edmund: ‘Oh, bother, bother, bother. Need he be as gentlemanly as all that? I suppose he must. Comes of being a Knight and a High King’. This is that knightly behaviour, which Lewis wrote about elsewhere, ‘in which morality up to the highest self-sacrifice and manners down to the smallest gracefulness in etiquette were inextricably blended by the medieval ideal’. For more about this tradition of knighthood, take a look at Lewis’s essay, “The Necessity of Chivalry”.

5) The Martial temperament is one of ‘sturdy hardiness’, according to Lewis’s book, The Discarded Image, and the Martial visage is ‘hard and happy’, according to his poem, ‘The Planets’. This ‘hard virtue of Mars’ (to quote his poem, ‘The Adam at Night’) appears frequently throughout Prince Caspian: Peter looks ‘hard’ at Lucy; the soldiers escorting Trumpkin have faces that are ‘bearded and hard’; we meet three badgers called the ‘Hardbiters’; when the children are lost in the woods they find that retracing their steps was ‘hard work, but oddly enough everyone felt more cheerful’; Aslan tells Lucy ‘it is hard for you [to wake the others] . . . it has been hard for us all’; Peter’s army at the end of the battle are found ‘breathing hard . . . with stern and glad faces’. More significantly, certain characters visibly become Martial as the story progresses: Caspian begins ‘to harden’ as he sleeps ‘under the stars’; the children, ‘jingling in their mail’, begin to look and feel more like Narnians and less like schoolchildren; the ‘hard’ ground and ‘the air of Narnia’ work on Edmund so that ‘all his old battles came back to him’; he and Peter have become ‘more like men than boys’ by the time they march to Aslan’s How. The iron has entered their soul, as is to be expected, for these characters are responsive to the Martial ‘influnce’, to that same ‘magic in the air’ that has saved Susan’s bowstring from perishing.

6) In addition to being the god of war (Mars Gradivus), Mars was a god of trees and forests. He was known in this capacity as ‘Mars Silvanus’. This explains why trees have such an important part to play in Prince Caspian. Lewis puts ‘Silvans’ into his cast of characters in this story; they never again appear in any other Narnia Chronicle. Caspian and Dr. Cornelius cannot clearly see the conjunction of Tarva and Alambil because of the interposition of a tree; Cornelius repeatedly mentions waking the trees; Caspian is brought to Trufflehunter’s cave by the intervention of a falling tree; Trufflehunter laments that they cannot ‘wake the spirits of these trees’ for ‘once the Trees moved in anger, our enemies would go mad with fright’; Aslan’s How now stands in the middle of ‘the Great Woods’ and there Caspian’s army must flee; Lucy tries to wake the trees in Chapter 9, but fails; in Chapter 10 the children’s progress is hampered by the fir wood, but it provides them with cover when they have to run from the arrows of Miraz’s sentries; later in Chapter 10 Lucy, at night-time, finds the trees awake in the presence of Aslan; in Chapter 11 the trees stir at the sound of his roar and then join in the riotous procession of Bacchus and Silenus.

7) The month of March, when the trees come back to life after winter, is called March because it is named after Mars in his capacity as Mars Silvanus. It is the only month of the year that is named after one of the planets. Interestingly, the only Narnian month ever named in the Chronicles is ‘Greenroof’, during which all the events of Prince Caspian take place. In ancient Rome, the festival of Mars (the Feriae Marti) began on the first day of March and Bacchanalian festivities followed on the sixteenth and seventeenth, just after the Ides of March (the fifteenth) on which, famously, Julius Caesar was assassinated by being stabbed by his own disloyal Romans. Given the Bacchanalian revelry recorded in this story (in chapters 11 and 14), and given the fact that Miraz is betrayed and stabbed in the back by one of his own men, the connections with Mars grow ever more evident. There are many more reasons why Prince Caspian is a Martial story, and I explain some of these things in my book, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis.

In his poem “The Planets”, C.S. Lewis writes in the Jupiter portion, “Of wrath ended / And woes mended, of winter passed / And guilt forgiven”, which describes the plot of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Does the same thing happen with the Mars section of the poem and the plot of Caspian?

Basically, yes. ‘The Planets’ describes various aspects of Mars’s influence, as do a number of his other poems and his two novels, Out of the Silent Planet and That Hideous Strength, and we see these aspects of Mars being made into the storyline of Prince Caspian. As with all seven heavens, Lewis turns the planet into a plot.

Recently I reread Caspian and I noticed the exclamation “By Jove!” several times in the book (I counted four in the first three chapters alone). Since Jove is Jupiter, how do you explain its presence in a novel that is supposed to be imbibed with the characteristics of Mars?

When Peter says ‘By Jove!’ in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (as he does a couple of times), he doesn’t know the significance of what he’s saying. He doesn’t know that he is in a world and in a story that is created and sustained (as it were) by Jupiter (The Lion was written to embody and express the qualities of Jupiter). And Peter’s unawareness of this fact is a reflection of that common human condition mentioned above in my answer to the first question. In one way, God’s nature can be overlooked because it is so fundamental to our experience as His creatures. He has created and is sustaining us from moment to moment. If we had eyes to see, we would realise that all his works speak of Him and manifest His glory (”the heavens are telling the glory of God”). But we tend to miss it, because it is everywhere.

It is highly ironic that Peter should say ‘By Jove!’ in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Peter, ignorantly, is saying something highly apt. When ‘By Jove!’ is said in Prince Caspian, it is equally ignorant, but apt in a slightly different way. Mars was one of Jupiter’s children. The things that occur in Prince Caspian do indeed occur ‘by Jove’ (so to speak), but at one remove, via his son, Mars. But Peter isn’t aware of this, any more than he was aware of the Jovial influence in the first story. As the king of the planets, Jupiter’s influence is especially important and is evident throughout all seven Narnia Chronicles. Jupiter’s wisdom ‘dominates the stars’, as Lewis put it elsewhere; and so we should expect to find Jupiter occurring in all seven Chronicles and not just The Lion. In fact, Jupiter is explicitly mentioned in The Magician’s Nephew, because there was, in Lewis’s view, a particularly close connection between Jupiter and Venus (The Magician’s Nephew is the Venus story).

Explain the different role that Aslan, the Christological figure in the Chronicles of Narnia, has in Caspian as opposed to Lion, and what Mars has to do with it?

In Prince Caspian, Aslan both wakes the trees (in his role as a Christianized Mars Silvanus) and gives a great war-cry in that chapter entitled ‘The Lions Roars’, summoning and inspiring all the faithful Narnians for the climactic battle (in his role as a Christianized Mars Gradivus). Aslan in this book embodies the qualities of Mars, – Mars ‘baptized’ and put to use as Christian imagery. The martial spirit which is otherwise spread about in the larger Narnian cosmos of this book (a story of Civil War, of boys becoming men and hardening into noble knights, of girls romping with trees and vines in a Bacchanalian riot) is made local (we might say, is incarnated) in Aslan. By using the technique of ‘Transferred Classicism’, Lewis is skilfully portraying something important about Christ’s nature, – that it is both cosmic and located in Jesus. We can overlook it in the cosmos, but we can see it much more clearly in the person of Jesus Christ.

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan’s role is not Martial, but Jovial. The atmosphere of this book is very different from the atmosphere of Prince Caspian. In The Lion, Aslan is described as ‘royal’, as ‘the king’, he brings winter to an end, he crowns the children, promising them eternal kingship and queenship, and he bleeds in self-sacrificial death for the guilty Edmund. All these things were aspects of the influence of Jupiter, as Lewis understood it. For more details, see Planet Narnia.

In your book, you discuss the two sides of the Martial influence. How do Peter and Lucy embody Mars Gradivus and Mars Silvanus respectively?

It is Aslan who embodies the two sides of Mars’s nature. Peter and Lucy don’t embody Mars; they participate in Aslan’s Martial spirit. Peter becomes a ‘great warrior’; Lucy dances among the awakened trees. And, of course, it is not just Peter and Lucy who participate in Aslan’s Martial spirit, but all the characters, in various different ways.

Why do you think C.S. Lewis after finishing Lion and putting aside work on The Magician’s Nephew, chose Mars as the next planet to write a story about?

Lewis had a great love for the ideal of chivalry. He also thought that there was a tendency to try to understand chivalry only from the outside, – by ‘contemplating’ it , rather than ‘enjoying’ it. As he says in ‘Meditation in a Toolshed’: ‘It has been assumed without discussion that if you . . . want to understand some ‘ideology’ (such as medieval chivalry . . . ), you must listen not to those who lived inside it, but to sociologists’. Perhaps the most obvious message conveyed by means of the Martial imagery of Prince Caspian is what Lewis communicates explicitly in Mere Christianity, namely that ‘the idea of the knight – the Christian in arms for the defence of a good cause – is one of the great Christian ideas’. Writing in the aftermath of a the Second World War, which had threatened his country with Nazi rule, Lewis had obvious reason to champion this tradition of gallantry. In Prince Caspian he aims to acquaint (and to delight) the reader with what it feels like to live inside that chivalric tradition. His purpose is not to point out any deficiencies it might have had; rather, he says to the reader, ‘Instead of stripping the knight of his armour you can try to put his armour on yourself’ (as he wrote in A Preface to Paradise Lost). He is attempting to provide his audience with imaginative access to the ‘discipline and the freedom from anxiety’ that arise out of participation in the Martial spirit.

Have you seen the trailers for the film installment of Caspian and what do you look forward to when you see the final product when it comes out?

Yes, I have seen the trailers. I look forward especially to the way that the film portrays the conjunction of Tarva, the Lord of Victory, and Alambil, the Lady of Peace. I am told that this moment will be featured very prominently in the film, which I’m delighted about, because although all seven planets are foundational to Lewis’s imaginative purposes in the Narnia Chronicles, it is rare for him actually to feature the planets explicitly. His planetary purposes were much more implicit than explicit. The Tarva / Alambil meeting is the only planetary conjunction that we hear about in detail, in any of the Narnia books, so it is good that it should be at the forefront of the film version of Prince Caspian.

So ends my interview with Michael Ward.

I appreciate Michael Ward for taking the time to do this interview on the Mars element in Prince Caspian. He has written an excellent book on the planetary influence in Narnia, so click on the title to purchase Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis.

For more information on Michael Ward and Planet Narnia, go to his official website: www.planetnarnia.com.

Tagged as: C.S. Lewis, Michael Ward, Narnia, Prince Caspian