The Creation of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew (and in the Classroom)

Of all the scenes in The Magician’s Nephew, the creation of Narnia is one that tends to stay with students. Aslan sings a world into being, and something about the strangeness of it—a world that arrives as music rather than as machinery—lodges in the memory. It is also one of the most rewarding scenes to teach, because its beauty is immediate but its meaning runs deep.

After the desolation of Charn and the cold arrogance of the White Witch, Digory and Polly find themselves present at the birth of a world—and what they witness is not an explosion or a chaos settling into order, but a song. In the darkness a voice begins to sing, so far off it seems to come from every direction at once, its lowest notes deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself; Digory has never heard anything so beautiful. As the song swells, other voices join it and the black sky suddenly blazes with stars, and then the land itself answers—hills, rivers, grass, and trees rising into being as the music calls them. Watching, the Cabby speaks for everyone present: “Glory be!” he says—he’d have been a better man all his life, he adds, if he had known there were things like this.

The whole scene repays reading aloud in class; Lewis’s prose does much of the teaching on its own. What it quietly establishes is a claim about the kind of world Narnia is: not a machine assembled part by part, but something composed—ordered, alive, and good at its root.

Aslan does not build Narnia piece by piece. He sings it into existence, and the choice of image is worth dwelling on with students.

The picture recalls the oldest accounts of how the world begins. In Genesis, God creates through speech—“Let there be light.” Lewis keeps that sense of a world called into being by a voice, and gives the voice a music. (I trace the parallel with Genesis more fully in a separate article on The Magician’s Nephew and the Bible.) Song is an especially apt image for creation because it holds structure and freedom together at once: a melody follows a pattern and yet stays alive, moving, unrepeatable. A world sung into being is ordered but not mechanical—composed like a piece of music rather than assembled like a machine.

There is a detail here worth slowing down over with a class. When the first stars appear, they do not merely light up—they sing. In the same moment, Lewis writes, the single voice is joined by more voices than you could count, cold and silvery, high above the deep voice of Aslan, and the black sky blazes into stars. The world does not just receive the song passively, the way clay receives a shape. It answers. From its very first instant Narnia is a place where the right response to being made is to join in the singing—and that, quietly, is already a picture of what the whole novel will go on to explore: the difference between those who answer the song and those who cannot hear it. A student who notices that the stars sing back has found the seed of everything the book has to say about wonder.

The world that emerges from the song will not stay unspoiled; suffering and death will enter it soon enough. But the scene places goodness at the very origin of things, before anything has gone wrong—and that is what makes it worth pausing on. It lets students ask a question far larger than the novel:

Some of the best discussions I have had with a class began exactly there.

Soon after the world is made, its animals begin to speak—and the gift of speech immediately sorts the people watching into two groups. Digory, Polly, and the Cabby (and later the Cabby’s wife) can understand the Talking Beasts and speak with them. The White Witch and Uncle Andrew hear only growls and brays.

The difference is not one of ability. It is one of willingness. Lewis makes this unforgettable, and a little comic, in Uncle Andrew, who works so hard to convince himself that the singing is mere noise that in the end he manages it:

“Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song.”

(The Magician’s Nephew, Chapter 9)

He could hear the beauty of Aslan’s song; he refuses it, because it presses on him thoughts and feelings he would rather not face, and his refusal hardens into a real inability. Understanding, Lewis suggests, is not simply a matter of cleverness—Uncle Andrew is clever enough. It is a matter of openness: of being willing to receive what is in front of you rather than reducing it to something you can manage. To listen is to let the world be more than you had decided it was.

The White Witch fails in the same way, from the other direction. She treats words as instruments—tools for getting what she wants (I look at her conception of power in the article on the White Witch and tyranny)—and so she too is deaf to the Talking Beasts, and deafer still to the song behind them. Both she and Uncle Andrew grasp at the world instead of receiving it, and grasping, they cannot hear it.

This is the thread that runs through the whole novel, and I follow it from beginning to end in the pillar article on its themes: in Narnia, as in life, it is the willingness to listen that lets us understand. In my own classroom this passage has opened some of the most thoughtful conversations of the year—students see at once what Uncle Andrew is doing to himself, and they recognize it, because they have felt the pull to do it too.

The birth of Narnia is also an awakening for Digory and Polly. Until now their adventures have been strange and often frightening—magic, the ruins of Charn, the Witch loose in London. The creation of Narnia shows them something they had not met in such pure form before: goodness and beauty that ask to be trusted.

Here Lewis is doing on purpose what he argued for elsewhere—using the imaginative world of the story to carry meaning that plain statement cannot. He put the principle memorably in one of his essays:

“For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.”

C.S. Lewis, Rehabilitations and Other Essays

Imagination, in this view, is not an escape from reality but a way of entering it more deeply. It is a conviction Lewis came to slowly, and famously owed in part to Tolkien: as a young man Lewis had dismissed myths as “lies breathed through silver,” and it was Tolkien who persuaded him that a made-up story could carry truth rather than betray it. It is worth saying this to students plainly, because many of them still know it in their bones—that a made-up story can tell the truth about real life—and are at just the age when they might be talked out of it. The creation of Narnia is a good place to remind them that the wonder they feel is not something to grow out of.

Students usually notice the beauty of this scene at once; the work of teaching it is to help that first response deepen into reflection. These are the questions I have found open the richest discussion:

However the conversation goes, the scene leaves students with something worth keeping: that wonder is not childish, and is often the beginning of understanding rather than the opposite of it.

If you have taught this novel, I would love to hear which moments landed most with your students.

Happy teaching — and happy reading!

Chiara

If you’d like to bring this novel into your classroom without building everything from scratch, I’ve created a comprehensive bundle of ready-to-use resources for it on Teachers Pay Teachers:

And to make the most of it, I wrote a step-by-step guide to teaching The Magician’s Nephew in middle school, showing exactly how these resources work in the classroom.