'The next great adventure': portrayals of death in Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, unlike the rest of the books in the series, opens with two epigraphs. JK Rowling has said that “if [she] could use them at the beginning of book seven then [she’d] cued up the ending perfectly. If they were relevant, then [she] went where [she] needed to go.” The second quotation, from William Penn’s More Fruits of Solitude, concerns death, which Rowling had previously described as "possibly the most important theme" of the books:

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one
another still. For there must needs be present, that love and live in that which
is omnipresent. In this divine glass they see face to face; and their converse
is free, as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may
be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever
present, because immortal.

As she hoped, this quotation does sum up the philosophy expressed throughout the seven book series, of love surpassing death, which is arguably even more of an important theme, or the most important aspect of the most important theme. The way in which death and its relationship to love is handled throughout the series is reminiscent of the same theme's handling in an earlier seven book fantasy for children, C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.

That Rowling's approach to death and love shows remarkable parallels with Lewis's first became apparent at the end of Philosopher's Stone, when Dumbledore begins to explain to Harry just what happened when Voldemort killed his parents and why he survived:

"Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand,
it is love. He didn't realise that love as powerful as your mother's
for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign ... to have been
loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is
gone, will give us some protection for ever. It is in
your very skin. Quirrell, full of hatred, greed and ambition,
sharing his soul with Voldemort, could not touch you for this
reason. It was agony to touch a person marked by something so good."

PS, p.216

When I first read this, I was instantly reminded of the 'deeper magic from beyond the dawn of time' from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, another thing overlooked by the antagonist and which has power over death:

"It means," said Aslan, "that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a
magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back
only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little
further back, into the stillness and darkness before Time dawned, she would have
read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a
willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead,
the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards."

LWW, p.150

Of course, this idea is far older than either writer - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is an allegory of the Easter story with Aslan's self-sacrifice consciously imitating that of Christ, and Rowling has herself talked about the Christian influences on her work, so it is perhaps no surprise to find such similar treatment.

Love can be seen to transcend death in two ways - by robbing it of its power, and by living on beyond it. These could be seen as two sides of the same coin - the fact that love outlasts death automatically detracts from its power to hurt - but in the context of the fantasy fictions created by Lewis and Rowling, as in the story of the death and resurrection of Christ, the first is given a far more literal interpretation, as like Jesus, love enables both Aslan and Harry to be resurrected after their sacrificial deaths. This interpretation of the power of love over death is more akin to the heroic myth, as described by Joseph Campbell, than to the more theological consolatory aspect of eternal love and life through love:

At the return threshold, ... the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread
(return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir).

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, (Princeton University Press, 1949) p.246

In terms of Harry's story (Aslan and Narnia is a more complicated case, as Aslan has already been portrayed as God-like) this results in a compelling narrative pull for having Harry live beyond his sacrificial death. This could have set up a dichotomy with what we as the readers have been told over and over throughout the series - death is not to be feared, death is not the end, "after all, to the well organised mind, death is but the next great adventure" (PS, p.215). However, whatever Dumbledore might say, consciously facing death is not that easy, and Harry needs all the consolation about death he has obtained in order to help him walk into the forest to face Voldemort at the end of Deathly Hallows. It should be said that his being scared when it comes down to the actual moment does not negate his essential understanding of what he must do - likewise Aslan craved the comfort of Susan and Lucy on his walk to the Stone Table, and Jesus confessed his fear in the Garden of Gethsemane. He is rewarded for his understanding however by being offered the chance not to die, to return and live out his life, to complete his heroic journey, but in the knowledge that eternal life awaits him someday, unlike Voldemort, who has maimed his immortal soul beyond all recognition ('You have less to fear from returning here than he does.', DH, p.578).

Overcoming death is a central concern of both authors, but they have taken pains to show that there is a right and a wrong way to go about it. In Harry Potter, it is Voldemort's relentless pursuit of immortality (and belief that there is nothing worse than death) which drives his descent to evil, as he seeks out the blackest magics to safeguard his life and then goes way beyond what any wizard had ever imagined by creating multiple horcruxes, which of course drives the vicious circle ever on, as the more he maims his soul, the less human he becomes. It is notable that it is one of the first things he assumes about magic, that it can overcome death ('My mother can't have been magic, or she wouldn't have died.', HBP, p.257). But as implied in the scene in 'King's Cross' at the end of Deathly Hallows, Voldemort's methods only result in him being denied the opportunity that Harry and other wizards have of living beyond death:

It had the form of a small, naked child, curled on the ground, its skin raw and
rough, flayed looking, and it lay shuddering under a seat where it had been
left, unwanted, stuffed out of sight, struggling for breath.

DH, p.566

Lewis also explicitly includes a character who takes the wrong course to obtain immortality, the White Witch. In The Magician's Nephew, she is introduced as a queen who has destroyed her entire world and then put herself into an enchanted sleep so that she can live until someone comes who can take her to another world. She piggybacks into Narnia (via London) with Diggory and Polly, and after overhearing Aslan tell Diggory about the apple tree in the garden, climbs over the wall, takes an apple and eats it, heedless of the warning on the gates ('Come in by the gold gates or not at all, / Take of my fruit for others or forbear. / For those who steal or those who climb my wall / Shall find their heart's desire and find despair.', MN, p.146). This grants her "endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it." (MN, p.162). Of course, like Voldemort, the Witch is eventually killed, all her efforts ultimately in vain, but not before she has caused great harm to many people.

In contrast, Lewis's 'good' characters are all offered eternal life, through their love of Aslan. The Chronicles of Narnia has to be almost unique, at least amongst books written for children, in having all its characters die at the end, but in writing an eschatological myth for his subcreation (to use Tolkien's term), Lewis is able to discourse on the consolation of life through love after death, in terms strikingly similar to those Dumbledore would use half a century later.

But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their
life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover
and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great
Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every
chapter is better than the one before.

The Last Battle, p.172

In keeping with Lewis's overt adherance to Christian theology, this eternal life is only offered to those that believe in Aslan, others are either consumed by the false god Tash (to whom their belief has given life - ie, they get what was coming to them) or remain trapped in the stable of non-belief:

They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own
minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they
cannot be taken out.

LB, p.140

The 'right' way to obtain immortality is therefore shown in both Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia to be essentially selfless, in contrast with the selfish pursuit of the evil characters. True immortality can only be achieved by embracing death, a position clearly symbolised by Rowling in her use of the phoenix motif - representing continued life through death, as well as two other aspects important to her work as a whole: loyalty and faithfulness, and the healing power of grief, both very human aspects of love.

The importance of human love in this philosophy is largely irrelevant to Lewis's work, focused as he is on the divine. By contrast, the love that overcomes death in Harry's world is very human. Throughout the course of the series, Harry loses a lot of people who are close to him, and the cumulative effect of their deaths motivate him ever more to find a way to defeat Voldemort. And it's not just Harry who is motivated in this way - by the end we come to understand that the persistence of love beyond death is responsible for the actions of Dumbledore, and even more importantly, of Snape:

From the tip of his wand burst the silver doe: she landed on the
office floor, bounded once across the office and soared out of the window.
Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to
Snape, and his eyes were full of tears.

"After all this time?"

"Always," said Snape.

DH, p.551-2

But hand in hand with this idea is the one that "the ones that love us never really leave us" (Sirius to Harry in the Prisoner of Azkaban film), and this brings us back to the epigraphic quote from William Penn, the wording of which even reflects the moment where Harry sees his parents in the Mirror of Erised in The Philosopher's Stone, as well as the pivotal moment where he turns the Resurrection Stone on his way into the forest to confront Voldemort for the last time, bringing back the shades of his parents and friends to comfort him on his lonely walk to his death:

Beside him, making scarcely a sound, walked James, Sirius, Lupin and Lily, and
their presence was his courage, and the reason he was able to keep putting one
foot in front of the other.

DH, p.561

Sirius even tells Harry that 'we are part of you', and this moment is emblematic of the way that throughout Harry's story, he has been accompanied and guided by those who have died for him, his parents helping to show him how the Mirror of Erised works, helping him to fight off the dementors (whether or not Harry believed it was James, the fact remains the patronus is a stag), Dumbledore showing him what he must do to find the horcruxes and defeat Voldemort, Snape passing on his memories of Lily and showing him the final step required of him, and finally Dumbledore showing him the way to live in their meeting in the King's Cross of Harry's mind. In this way, the accumulated experience of death, inextricably bound up with love, enables Harry to perform his own act of heroic self-sacrifice, but also, Christ-like, to live beyond it and bring his knowledge of love back as his boon for the world.

Recreating myth in Narnia

This approach adds a second filter, that of a fictional world, and sets the mythic at a remove from the everyday world of the reader, encouraging them to go to the myth rather than have the myth brought to them. The impulse to create secondary worlds is as deeply rooted in the human psyche as the impulse to myth itself, and many authors have chosen to create explicitly alternative worlds for their stories rather than the equally alternative but on the surface congruent world of a story set in familiar surroundings. J.R.R. Tolkien is the acknowledged master of what he termed ‘the sub-creative art’ (Tolkien, 1938, p.53), and has been much imitated since the publication of The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s, by some more successfully than by others. Tolkien established the parameters for modern fantasy with his creation (or sub-creation), and I would argue, put myth centre-stage for this genre. The world of The Lord of the Rings only achieves the reality it does by Tolkien’s creation of the mythic history behind it, as described in The Silmarillion and his many other writings expounding the history of Middle Earth. He created a world that lived and breathed, that can almost be believed to be true as it hangs together consistently and therefore stands up in a way that many of the imitative ‘fantasylands’ (Jones, 1997, [web page]) cannot. I make this point to stress the influence of Tolkien’s work on modern children’s fantasies which are set in other worlds. Successfully realised, approaching Tolkien’s achievement, such ‘sub-creative acts’ can be seen as recreating myths, legends and folklore for an alternative world, reflecting them as our own world is reflected in the new one, and casting a new light on them in this way. To explore this further, I would like to look in particular at the sub-creative act of Tolkien’s fellow Inkling, C.S. Lewis, and the way he recreated myth in his new world of Narnia.

The story of Narnia is a tale that grew as the series went on, from relatively simple beginnings in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where four children follow the pattern of the universal hero myth (see above) in travelling to another world, enduring a series of tests and trials, before helping to redeem it from the clutches of the evil White Witch and ruling it for many years, as prophesised. The five central (in chronological terms) books of the Chronicles fit nicely into the categories of reworkings or reusings as explored above, introducing such traditional motifs as the ‘once and future King’ (Prince Caspian) and the fairy-lover (The Silver Chair). However, with the last two books Lewis wrote, covering the beginning and the end of Narnia’s existence, The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle, the mythic nature of Narnia is brought into focus, and the horizons of the sequence expand accordingly.

Lewis’s Christianity informs his sub-creation as thoroughly as it did his life, so it is no surprise that when he recreated the creation and end of the world for Narnia he imbued them with Christian perceptions. As Wood (2001) puts it: ‘The Narnia series reinvents the narrative of Christian teleology while leaving the values untouched’ (p.256). The creation of Narnia, a magical sequence delayed until half way through the book, begins with light (the stars and then the sun), moves on to plants, then animals, then man, or at least, the Narnian equivalent of talking animals, selected two by two like Noah’s Ark. Man in the human sense is not overlooked in the creation of Narnia, but it is significant that this is the one thing Aslan does not create, at least, not literally. He does set the Cabby in the place of Adam, as the first man and King of Narnia, and brings his wife (reflecting Eve being created from Adam) from London to be the first woman and Queen, but they are transformed, not created:

But it was neither hair nor clothes that made them look so different from their
old selves. Their faces had a new expression, especially the
King’s. All the sharpness and cunning and quarrelsomeness which he
had picked up as a London cabby seemed to have been washed away, and the courage
and kindness which he had always had were easier to see. Perhaps it
was the air of the young world that had done it, or talking with Aslan, or both.

The Magician’s Nephew, p.154-155

Lewis also does not neglect the question of the Fall of Man, but, almost to preserve Narnia’s utopia, he has sin come into Narnia from outside, in the form of Jadis, later to become the White Witch. Her presence is necessary, both logically in terms of explaining the events of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and also theologically, in terms of sin being a necessary evil as the reverse side of good, the Jungian Shadow if you like. Narnia is utopian, at least in relation to our own world (standing in psychological terms as the ideal in the same way as Garner expressed the shadow with Elidor), but it is not, and cannot be, perfect. If Narnia were perfect, then there would be no need for the children to be brought there, and it would teach them, and all those who read it, nothing. Perfection is empty, two-dimensional. A fully realised sub-creation must reflect the original creation in both its good and bad aspects. Wood (2001) has discussed the implications of Lewis’s use of the Tree of Knowledge, and the motif of eating the forbidden fruit, in comparison with Philip Pullman’s treatment in the His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman casts this episode in a solidly positive light – for him, Lyra and Will have to eat of the fruit in order to gain the mature self-knowledge and love upon which the whole of creation depends. Lewis remains true to the Bible in showing eating the fruit as an act which can only be regretted: ‘That is what happens to those who pluck and eat fruits at the wrong time and in the wrong way. The fruit is good, but they loathe it ever after’ (The Magician’s Nephew, p.162). Having Jadis eat the fruit also allows Lewis to cast her very early on as the Serpent or Devil, as she tries to persuade Digory to eat the apple he picks and not take it back to Aslan. This establishes an allegory which will persist into The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where it is not just the White Witch who is defeated, but the Devil and sin itself (Aslan’s raid on the Witch’s house can be seen as Lewis’s version of the Harrowing of Hell). In the events of The Magician’s Nephew therefore, Lewis is creating a mythic history for Narnia which echoes and recreates a mythic history of our own world.

Having written a creation myth, Lewis then attempted an eschatological one in The Last Battle, which is the most overtly didactic of the Chronicles. Recreating the end of the world is unusual in children’s fiction, presumably because it is by its very nature an uncomfortable subject, and authors tend to prefer the process of creating a world to destroying it. I would argue that it is Lewis’s Christianity which allowed him to end his creation, as only a firm belief in a better life after the end of the world could enable an author to tackle this most difficult of topics and present it in an uplifting way for children. It is the epitome of Tolkien’s theory of the fantastic eucatastrophe, ‘a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.’ (Tolkien, 1938, p.69). This is precisely what Lewis achieves in the ending of Narnia – his characters face the possibility of defeat, but move beyond the world to the poignant joy of everlasting life in Aslan’s country. His intention is surely purely consolatory, as his final words indicate, to show his readers that death is not the end, that Narnia lives on even though he has destroyed it. His recreation has achieved its goal, reflecting and informing the Primary World through his use of the mythic in his sub-creation:

“There was a real railway accident,” said Aslan softly. “Your father and mother
and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead. The term
is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended, this is the morning.”

The Last Battle, p.171

References

Jones, Diana Wynne (1997) ‘Inventing the Middle Ages’ [web page] <http://www.leemac.freeserve.co.uk/medieval.htm> Accessed 20th October 2004

Lewis, C.S. The Chronicles of Narnia:

--- (1950) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, London : Collins, 1987

--- (1951) Prince Caspian, London : Collins, 1987

--- (1952) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, London : Collins, 1987

--- (1953) The Silver Chair, London : Collins, 1980

--- (1954) The Horse and his Boy, London : Collins, 1980

--- (1955) The Magician’s Nephew, London : Penguin, 1963

--- (1956) The Last Battle, London : Collins, 1980

Pullman, Philip, His Dark Materials:

--- (1995) Northern Lights, London : Scholastic, 1998

--- (1997) The Subtle Knife, London : Scholastic, 1998

--- (2000) The Amber Spyglass, London : Scholastic, 2001

Tolkien, J.R.R. (1938) ‘On fairy stories’, in Tree and Leaf, London : HarperCollins, 2001

--- (1968) The Lord of the Rings, London : HarperCollins, 1995

--- (1977) The Silmarillion, London : HarperCollins, 1999

Wood, Naomi (2001) ‘Paradise lost and found: obedience, disobedience, and storytelling in C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman’, Children’s literature in education, v.32:no.4 (December 2001), pp.237-259

Reusing myths in children's literature

This could be viewed as the ‘pick and mix’ approach to rewriting traditional material for a modern audience, and refers to the way in which authors ‘borrow’ or introduce mythic story elements into their work. The list of authors who do this, to a greater or lesser extent, is extensive, and the ways in which they use the material is as varied as the material they borrow, but there are three main ways in which mythic elements are used by modern authors: transposed directly in their original form, translated to suit the story, or as archetypes. I would like to illustrate these three approaches by considering the ways in which modern authors have used mythic characters, before studying a work which makes use of all sorts of mythic elements in all three ways, namely Elidor by Alan Garner.

Characters from myth, legend and folktale can be used by modern authors as individuals, as stock characters or as archetypes. The first of these ways is least common as it can have a Verfremdungseffekt[1], introducing something alien into the story, and requiring an effort on the part of the author to assimilate this character into their world. This is what Diana Wynne Jones does in The Homeward Bounders, explaining the presence of legendary characters such as Prometheus, the Flying Dutchman and the Wandering Jew by making them exiles (‘homeward bounders’) in the same way as her main characters, and by extension, re-explaining their roles in their own stories by recasting them in this new light:

Have you heard of the Flying Dutchman? No? Nor of the
Wandering Jew? Well, it doesn’t matter, I’ll tell you about them in
the right place; and about Helen and Joris, Adam and Konstam, and Vanessa, the
sister Adam wanted to sell as a slave. They were all Homeward
Bounders like me.

p.7

The effort required to assimilate mythic characters leads to them more usually being used as stock characters or archetypes, where the character can be altered as necessary to fit the modern story. So in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Cerberus becomes Fluffy, guarding the trapdoor to the ‘underworld’ where Dumbledore has hidden the stone to keep it from Voldemort. This gives an added resonance to Harry’s trip through the trapdoor, casting it in terms of the heroic pass through death (as described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces). However, often characters are used merely to add colour to a narrative, to give it the flavour of a fantasy tale, as in The Chronicles of Narnia, where Lewis peopled his world with all the creatures of classical mythology, Dryads and Naiads, fauns, centaurs and satyrs. Most of these have no function in the narrative, much as their equivalents often don’t in the Harry Potter books, where in both for example the seer nature of centaurs is useful (Glenstorm and Roonwit in Prince Caspian and The Last Battle respectively and Firenze in Harry Potter), but hardly essential, and their function could arguably be fulfilled by some other means. It is interesting that this is one of the main criticisms levelled at the Harry Potter books by Pennington (2002):

Rowling also seems to purchase her marvellous assorted creatures from the Sears
catalogue of fantasy clichés: poltergeists, longing ghosts, dragons,
hippogriffs, giants, humongous spiders, vampires, werewolves, trolls, unicorns,
a sphinx, sirens, Pegasus horses (and I am certain that I have missed
some). With such a menagerie, Rowling is unable to develop any of
the fantastical creatures; in fact, she seems to expect the readers to bring
that magic to her creations, a dubious technique at best.

Pennington, 2002, p.82

I would dispute that this is a ‘dubious technique’ and argue instead that expecting readers to bring magic to such creations is a perfectly valid use of this sort of stock mythical character. That is precisely the reason they are there, to help readers experience the magic by the associative process of recognising them. From a very young age children are able to pick up on these stock characters and so the authorial use of them helps to create the parameters within which the story will be received and interpreted. A book chock-full of centaurs and dragons is asserting its identity as a mythic fantasy, much like wearing a badge or a uniform. This is not to say that it is necessary to create the desired ambience, merely that it is one way of doing so.

The use of archetypal characters is far more subtle, and not restricted to this kind of fiction, but as a function of the human psyche can be found in all literature. Archetypes underpin myth in the most fundamental way, due to their prevalence in human thought, and therefore are taken up most enthusiastically by mythic writers. A full discussion of the Jungian interpretations of children’s fantasy fiction is too wide a topic to explore here, and one which has been considered in some depth by many critics (see for example Mills (2003) and Cech (1992)). I wish merely to stress that as characters in myths are often as much archetypes as fully-fledged personalities, so too are their equivalents when used by modern authors attempting to harness the power of myth in their work. The adult fantasy author David Eddings referred to his conscious use of archetypes in writing The Belgariad as ‘mythic fishhooks’, designed to ‘catch’ the reader (Eddings, 1998, p.12). He may be unusual in using archetypes so deliberately, but most authors of modern mythic fiction, particularly that written for children or ‘genre fantasy’ for adults, do so to a more or less conscious extent. The use of archetypes lends psychological depth to a work, and the mythic and archetypal are inextricably entwined in any consideration of the role and value of literature which seeks to be built on such foundations. Authors often play with archetypes, twisting and subverting them, as for example Diana Wynne Jones having her heroine transformed into an old woman in Howl’s Moving Castle, undermining the received picture of the Old Woman as a threatening character in hundreds of fairy tales, but maintaining the archetype itself in the background.

Alan Garner’s Elidor is a very heavily mythic book, possibly the most weighted in this sense of any of his works. It is packed full of borrowings from myth, legend and folklore, assimilated to a greater or lesser extent. At its most basic level, it is an almost bare but very atmospheric story about four children who find themselves taken into a parallel world, dark and wasted, where they are prompted by a mysterious guide, Malebron, into retrieving four ‘treasures’ from a mound. They are then chased from Elidor by shadows and return to their own world, where they hide the treasures, but continue to be pursued by shadows until eventually a unicorn, which they’d been told by Malebron had to sing before Elidor could be redeemed, breaks through and is killed, at which point the children are able to get one last glimpse of the light returning to Elidor as they throw the treasures back. However, this surface story belies its inner complexity as it is deeply layered with mythic resonances that work on both a symbolic and an archetypal level.

On a symbolic level, Elidor can be read as a Grail story, with numerous references to Grail mythology. Malebron, the mysterious fiddler who calls the children into the other world, is Garner’s version of the Fisher King, the ‘maimed king’ (Elidor, p.38) of a wasted land, awaiting the arrival of a boy who will save him and his world. His name even echoes that of the Fisher King in Robert de Boron – Bron. Roland is Perceval, in the same way, the naïve boy who does not understand what he has to do the first time he comes to the ‘Grail Castle’, and has to leave and travel elsewhere for a long time before he understands and can return. The treasures, despite their more straightforward mythic correspondence with the treasures of the Celtic Tuatha Dé Danann[2], also equate with the ‘treasures’ of the Grail legend – the bleeding spear, the stone (the form the Grail takes in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s version), and of course the cauldron, the most common form the Grail takes. The Biblical aspect of the Grail legend is reflected in the climax of the book where Findhorn, the unicorn (the unicorn being a medieval symbol for Christ) is stabbed in the side by the spear from Elidor (the bleeding spear associated with the Grail in medieval legend was said to be the spear of Longinus which pierced the side of Christ on the cross) and is comforted in his death by Helen, who carried the cauldron, remembering the Grail as the cup in which the blood of Christ was collected by Mary Magdalene. And of course, it is Findhorn’s death which saves Elidor and cleanses it of its ‘sin’. Such potent use of mythological symbols endows the story of Elidor’s redemption with much more meaning than it might otherwise have. When taken in conjunction with an archetypal reading, this depth of meaning increases yet further to transform Elidor into a universal tale of redemption.

There are many ways in which Elidor can be seen to reflect archetypes, but two of the archetypal readings are particularly pertinent, that is, Roland’s story as a hero myth, and Elidor’s relation to our own world as its dark shadow. Joseph Campbell, in his work The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), describes how the universal hero, as found in myths, legends and stories of all kinds the world over, shares fundamental characteristics and follows the same pattern in their quest, whatever their goal may be. As such, this can be applied to the heroes of all the books I am discussing, and David Colbert, for example, has described how Harry Potter fits the description of the universal hero (Colbert, 2001, p.155-166), but in the context of examining the universality of Elidor it is worth comparing Roland’s story to this fundamental blueprint.

Campbell summarises the heroic adventure as follows:

The mythological hero, setting forth from his commonday hut or castle, is lured,
carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of
adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the
passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive
into the kingdom of the dark […] or be slain by the opponent and descend in
death. Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world
of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him
(tests), some of which give him magical aid (helpers). When he
arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal
and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero’s
sexual union with the goddess mother of the world (sacred marriage), his
recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinisation
(apotheosis), or again – if the powers have remained unfriendly to him – his
theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is
an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination,
transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the
return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under
their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation
flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold the transcendental
powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread
(return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world
(elixir).

Campbell, 1949, p.245-246

Roland is ‘called to adventure’ (Campbell, 1949, p.58) by the chance of finding Thursday Street and the abandoned church, and ‘crosses the threshold’ into Elidor, which is the ‘zone unknown, the fateful region of both treasure and danger’ (p.58). His journey through Elidor, for example the dead forest of Mondrum and his entry into a tumulus, equates to the heroic pass through death. Roland then faces the trials of the stone circle, entry into the Mound of Vandwy and the temptation of the branch of apple blossom, before he and his brothers and sister achieve the treasures. They are then able to return to their own world, having succeeded in the quest, or at least the first part of it. For Garner doubles the hero quest, in much the same way as medieval Arthurian romances did, by forcing his hero to pass through a dual cycle where at first he achieves what he initially set out to do but does not resolve the problem, and must continue to wander before finally gaining the knowledge to complete the quest in the second cycle. This is what Roland must do once he has returned to his own world. He has the treasures, now he must learn about them, and Elidor, so that when the moment comes, when Findhorn breaks through, he will know what must be done to save Elidor and fulfil his prophesised role.

Structurally therefore, Elidor follows the pattern of the universal hero myth. Garner’s use of this pattern (although to what extent this was or could have been a conscious decision is debatable – Campbell’s point is that in writing of heroes and the heroic, this is the pattern that the story will take) makes Roland’s story relevant to everyone, everywhere. Heroes are there ‘as scapegoat[s] […] [having] to do the suffering for everyone’, and reading about them ‘gives you this sense of something other and better, […] a sort of blueprint of how to manage’ (Jones, 1992). This is why both authors and readers are drawn to the idea of the universal hero, and why it is one of the most fundamental ways in which myth informs modern literature.

If Roland is a universal hero, undertaking a universal quest, then his goal must also be universal. And this is where a Jungian interpretation of the land of Elidor and its relationship to our world comes in. One of the interesting features about Elidor in Garner’s work is its non-presence. ‘Garner has been criticised for creating a new world and then abandoning it (only five of the twenty chapters are set in Elidor), but he is essentially interested in Elidor as an idea rather than as a reality. Elidor’s value is as a point of reference by which we may understand the emptiness and futility of our own world’ (Philip, 1981, p.45-46). I would go further and say that Elidor actually represents the Jungian Shadow, the dark obverse of our world. Cech (1992) has discussed Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea as a ‘dramatization of one young person’s discovery of and reconciliation with his own shadow’ (Cech, 1992, p.84), a reconciliation which, according to von Franz, ‘is the beginning of individuation, the lifelong process of coming to know our own unconscious and its “regulating center”, the Self. The shadow represents “those qualities and impulses [an individual] denies in himself but can plainly see in other people”’ (von Franz, The process of individuation, quoted in Cech, 1992, p.83). The childrens’ journey into Elidor and attempts to come to terms with this shadowy land that they were shown and which increasingly impinges on their own world can be seen as Garner’s attempt to achieve reconciliation with the shadow aspects of the modern world. The importance of attempting this reconciliation, of facing the shadow, was described by Le Guin in terms strikingly similar to the scenes in Elidor where the shadows break through:

The less you look at it […] the stronger it grows, until it can become a menace,
an intolerable load, a threat within the soul.

Le Guin, 1979, p.64

Again Roland felt the charge as abruptly as if it had been switched on, and he
arranged everybody in a tight group on the lawn facing the spot where the
shadows had appeared. […]
“Watch the rose bed. And keep
watching,” said Roland. […]
The two shadows stood on the rose bed. […]
“Is
this one of your hallucinations, eh?” said Roland, and tried to turn his head to
see how Nicholas was reacting. But his neck muscles were
locked. The shadows darkened.

Elidor, p.148-149

The children had to face the shadows in order to shift them from being a threat to being a physical presence and therefore able to play their part in the ultimate redemption of Elidor through Findhorn’s death. In Jungian terms then, through the children being made aware of Elidor, our world’s shadow, recognition and understanding is made possible for all those living in our world, and Elidor becomes a universal hero myth. Garner’s work shows therefore how the use of mythic elements, in various ways and to various extents, gives a modern story additional depth and resonance. Many of the authors of such mythically based stories which fall into this category, would I’m sure agree with Diana Wynne Jones’s aim ‘to write fantasy that might resonate on all levels, from the deep hidden ones, to the most mundane and everyday.’ (Jones,1992, [web page]). This multilevelled resonance might not always be completely achieved, but even an imperfect achievement is significantly more satisfying for the reader than one which ignores the deeper levels of the human psyche. The use of mythic elements in modern stories allows authors to come closer to achieving this than they would be able to on their own.

Notes

[1] Effect of distancing or alienation
[2] ‘Their former homes were four magical cities, Falias, Findias, Gorias, and Murias. From them they take their principle treasures: from Falias Fál or Lia Fáil, the stone of destiny, which cries out under a lawful king; from Findias the sword of Nuadu, which allows no one to escape; from Gorias Gáe Assail, the spear of Lug Lámfota, which guarantees victory; from Murias the cauldron of the Dagda, which leaves everyone satisfied.’ The Oxford dictionary of Celtic mythology, p.415. Garner also uses the names of the cities as the names of the four castles in Elidor.

References

Campbell, Joseph (1949) The hero with a thousand faces, London : Fontana, 1993

Cech, John (1992) ‘Shadows in the classroom: teaching children’s literature from a Jungian perspective’, in Sadler, Glenn (ed.) Teaching children’s literature: issues, pedagogy, resources, New York : Modern Language Association of America, pp.80-88

Colbert, David (2001) The magical worlds of Harry Potter: a treasury of myths, legends and fascinating facts, London : Penguin.

Eddings, David; Eddings, Leigh (1998) The Rivan Codex, London : HarperCollins

Garner, Alan (1965) Elidor, London : Collins, 1974

Jones, Diana Wynne (1981) The Homeward Bounders, London : HarperCollins, 2000

--- (1986) Howl’s Moving Castle, London : HarperCollins, 2000

--- (1992) ‘Heroes’ [web page] <http://www.leemac.freeserve.co.uk/heroes.htm> Accessed 20th October 2004

Le Guin, Ursula (1968) A Wizard of Earthsea, London : Penguin, 1993

Lewis, C.S. The Chronicles of Narnia:

--- (1950) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, London : Collins, 1987

--- (1951) Prince Caspian, London : Collins, 1987

--- (1952) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, London : Collins, 1987

--- (1953) The Silver Chair, London : Collins, 1980

--- (1954) The Horse and his Boy, London : Collins, 1980

--- (1955) The Magician’s Nephew, London : Penguin, 1963

--- (1956) The Last Battle, London : Collins, 1980

MacKillop, James (2004) Oxford dictionary of Celtic mythology, Oxford : Oxford University Press

Mills, Alice (2003) ‘Archetypes and the unconscious in Harry Potter and Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock and Dogsbody’, in: Anatol, Giselle Liza (ed.), Reading Harry Potter: critical essays, Westport ; London : Praeger, pp.3-13

Pennington, John (2002) ‘From Elfland to Hogwarts, or the aesthetic trouble with Harry Potter’, The Lion and the unicorn, v.26:no.1, pp.78-97

Philip, Neil (1981) A fine anger: a critical introduction to the work of Alan Garner, London : Collins

Rowling, J.K. (1997) Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, London : Bloomsbury

--- (1998) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, London : Bloomsbury

--- (1999) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, London : Bloomsbury

--- (2000) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, London : Bloomsbury

--- (2003) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, London : Bloomsbury

--- (2005) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, London : Bloomsbury