The Magician’s Nephew and the Bible: An Intertextual Comparison

When we read The Magician’s Nephew together in class, students soon notice something familiar in the birth of Narnia. As Aslan sings the world into being, the scene reminds them of another account of creation: the opening of Genesis. The conversation quickly grows lively—similarities surface, questions multiply—and it leads, as it always does, back to Lewis himself, whose Christian faith runs everywhere beneath the imaginative surface of The Chronicles of Narnia.

Something similar may already have happened in your classroom with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where the kinship between Aslan and Christ is so plain that students rarely miss it. Lewis, though, was insistent that he had notwritten an allegory of the Gospel. He described the books instead as an imaginative experiment: not representing Christ by a Lion, but asking what he “might be like” supposing he chose to be incarnate in a world such as Narnia. The parallels, in other words, are echoes rather than a cipher—a distinction that turns out to be one of the most interesting things to explore with a class, and one I take up in a separate article on Christian symbolism and Aslan’s role in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

The Magician’s Nephew offers a different point of contact. Where The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe echoes the figure of Christ, this book echoes the very first pages of the Bible: the making of a world, and the first choices made within it. What follows are three of the parallels that have opened the richest conversations in my own classroom.

In the Book of Genesis, creation begins with a word.

“Let there be light.”

(Genesis 1)

The universe comes into being through divine speech: God speaks, and order answers out of the darkness. Narnia begins the same way—reality called into existence by a voice, light rising where there had been none. Lewis simply gives that voice a different music: in Narnia, the making word is sung.

At first there is only darkness. Then Aslan’s music rises in the emptiness, deep and far off; the sky fills, star by star; and at last the sun climbs over a land that did not exist a moment before. The resemblance to Genesis is unmistakable: in both, creation begins in darkness and unfolds through sound, and in both the world arrives not out of chaos or struggle but as an act of meaning—a world given, called into being by one who means it well.

The song is Lewis’s own note, sounded within that shared truth. He is not correcting Genesis but helping us hear it again: to a reader who has grown used to “and God said,” a world sung into being restores the wonder that familiarity may have worn smooth. Song does what the oldest readers of Genesis already knew the account to mean—that creation is not a cold exercise of power but an outpouring, ordered and generous and beautiful, like a great work of art made for love of the making. What Lewis gives us is not a freer creation than Genesis, but the same creation felt afresh.

It is worth noticing how unusual this is. Most ancient accounts of the world’s beginning are stories of struggle or accident: in Hesiod the world emerges out of Chaos, and in the Babylonian account it is built from the body of a defeated goddess. A world called into being by someone who then looks at it and calls it good is the rarer thing—and it is the note both Genesis and Narnia sound.

It’s worth slowing down with a class over one detail in particular. When the first stars appear, they do not merely light up: they join in. The empty sky answers the Lion’s voice with voices of its own, and for a moment the darkness is full of singers. Everything that is called seems glad to have been called, and answers in kind. That is a remarkable thing to notice, because it tells us what sort of world this is going to be—one where the proper response to being made is to sing back. And it quietly prepares everything that follows: the creature who can still hear the song will flourish in Narnia, and the one who has stopped his ears will not.

My students often respond strongly to this moment, and begin asking questions that reach past the plot:

I have learned to leave a long pause after that first question. The answers, when they come, are rarely tidy—one class told me that a song “sounds like someone is happy about what they’re doing,” which is about as good a gloss on Genesis 1 as I have heard from anyone. (If you’d like to explore this scene more closely, I’ve written about the creation of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew on its own.)

The parallel deepens in what happens after the world is made. In Genesis, the newly created earth is not simply admired—it is entrusted. God gives the first human beings a task: to name the animals, to keep and to tend the garden. Naming, in this story, is not a matter of ownership: the man is not being handed property but brought into relationship with the creatures, and given responsibility for them.

Narnia sounds the same note. When the world is barely an hour old, Aslan turns to the creatures he has woken into speech and gives them everything at once—themselves, the land, the woods and rivers and stars, and finally himself. Nothing here is taken; everything is handed over. And then he calls out the world’s first stewards, raising up a King and Queen and telling them what the office will require: they are to rule and name the creatures, to do justice among them, and to protect them from their enemies when enemies arise. Naming is only the first of four verbs, and the other three make plain what kind of naming it is. This is not ownership. It is care with responsibility attached.

And the ones he chooses are telling. Narnia’s first king is not a warrior or a lord but the Cabby, an ordinary working man who happened to be in the field when the singing began. Why him? Because he is already the kind of person the task requires. He met the singing world the way Polly and Digory did—with wonder rather than calculation—and he is used to honest work and the daily care of another living creature, his horse. He is chosen not for the power he could seize but for the care he can be trusted to give. (This contrast between receiving the world and seizing it runs through the whole novel, and I follow it from beginning to end in the pillar article on the themes of The Magician’s Nephew.) The world, in both Genesis and Narnia, is handed to those who will hold it as something entrusted rather than owned—and in both, that trust is the first and highest form of human dignity.

This is the hardest of the three parallels to teach, and the one most worth teaching, because it runs against a great deal of what adolescents have absorbed about what makes a person important—that authority is simply the right to command, and that the strong are the ones who should lead. When I ask a class who should have been made king, the first answers are the obvious ones: Digory, because he is the hero; Aslan himself, because he is the strongest. The Cabby comes last, if at all, and someone almost always says that he is only a cab driver, as though that settled it. Which is exactly the assumption Lewis is dismantling: the novel has chosen, quite deliberately, the person the students themselves would have overlooked.

Lewis is not alone in that instinct. His friend Tolkien built two entire books on it—handing the fate of Middle-earth first to Bilbo and then to Frodo, hobbits who are, by every measure their world recognizes, the least likely candidates imaginable. Both writers keep reaching past the obvious hero for someone smaller and closer to the ground. If your class has also read The Hobbit, the comparison is worth drawing out; it’s the thread I follow in the educational value of The Hobbit for middle school, where the least promising creature in the world turns out to have been carrying what the moment required all along.

The third parallel is the most searching. Later in the story Digory comes to a walled garden high in the western mountains, and the connection with Genesis grows unmistakable. In Eden, the first human beings live amid beauty and are given one command, and their story turns on what they do with it. In the garden of Narnia, Digory too faces a single, defining choice.

He has been sent to fetch an apple for Aslan; but the Witch, already there before him, urges him to take one for himself instead—to carry its fruit home and heal his dying mother. She has eaten it herself, and says so: she has tasted the apple of youth, she tells him, and knows now that she will never grow old or die. Eat it, she urges, and the two of them will live forever and rule the world together, leaving Polly and the Lion behind.

And here the parallel with Genesis becomes precise. The temptation is not a crude pull toward something evil. As in Eden, it comes disguised as a good, and dressed in a reasonable-sounding voice: surely this cannot be wrong, surely the rule does not apply here, surely you may simply reach out and take. What is offered is a real good—his mother’s life—but seized rather than received, taken by his own hand against the trust Aslan placed in him.

What raises the scene above its ancient pattern is Digory’s struggle, and the fact that Lewis lets us feel every ounce of it. The Witch plays the serpent’s part here—the voice that makes taking sound reasonable (I look more closely at her hunger for control in an analysis of the White Witch and tyranny in Narnia)—but the scene belongs to the boy in front of her. Digory hesitates, aches, and finally keeps faith, choosing to trust rather than to grasp. Where Adam and Eve reached out and took, Digory holds his hand open and waits. The garden becomes, for a middle school reader, less a faraway myth than a mirror:

I have stopped treating that question as rhetorical. When I ask it plainly, my classes divide—some sure they would have obeyed, others admitting, with a kind of relief, that they would have taken the apple and worried about it later. I have come to want both answers in the room. The ones who would have taken it are not being callous; they have felt the pull of the temptation, and the scene does not work on a reader who hasn’t. Only once you have wanted the fruit yourself can you feel what it costs Digory to leave it hanging.

Read side by side, these two stories do something for students that neither does alone. Setting Narnia against Genesis teaches intertextual reading from the inside—not as a term to memorize, but as the live experience of hearing one text answer another. It pushes interpretation past the level of spot the similarity toward the better questions: what has changed between the two tellings, and why does the change matter? And it lets students discover that a fantasy they already love is taking part in a far older conversation about creation, freedom, and responsibility—that the book in their hands has roots reaching back to the very first pages of Western literature.

If you’d like a ready-made way to bring this comparison into the classroom, I’ve built a full resource for it on Teachers Pay Teachers. It carries students through these parallels and several more—including the pairing of the animals and the flood, and Aslan as both a God-like and a Christ-like figure—with an interactive presentation, print-and-go worksheets, and answer keys, all designed for middle school.

In practice it’s an hour or two of close, guided comparison: passages set side by side, questions that give students somewhere to put their thinking, and a summary exercise that draws the threads together at the end. It works best once you’ve finished the novel, when the whole story is behind them and the parallels can land with full force.

You can explore it here: Intertextual Analysis: Comparing The Magician’s Nephew and the Bible.

Happy teaching — and happy reading!

Chiara