Prince Caspian Chapter 4: “The Dwarf Tells of Prince Caspian”

Narnia Read-Along Vol. 2, Issue 5

Pauline Baynes illustration

As we discuss Prince Caspian, you’ll find some background information about the book and C.S. Lewis in the Inspiration section available to all subscribers. Paid subscribers have access to the more specific discussion in the Application section.

Inspiration of “The Dwarf Tells of Prince Caspian”

When C.S. Lewis was an atheist, he rejected the existence of God philosophically but could never shake His presence fictionally. All the books that seemed so compelling to him were filled with at least the echoes of the supernatural. Lewis surrounded himself with much that was telling Him there was no God, but the stories said otherwise.

It was the books he read that first began Lewis on his journey back to Christianity. “All the books were turning against me,” he wrote in Surprised by Joy. The authors he most resonated with were the most religious. The ones he agreed with philosophically may have been entertaining but hardly more. “There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple.” While reading George MacDonald’s Phantastes, on the other hand, he had another pang of joy, which he says baptized his imagination, even if the rest of him took a while longer to be submerged.

He describes his situation in Surprised by Joy:

Such, then, was the state of my imaginative life; over against it stood the life of my intellect. The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism.” Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.

Often Christians seemed to be the ones concerned about sheltering their children from reading something that may shake their faith. Lewis saw atheists as the ones who should be concerned. “A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading,” he wrote. “There are traps everywhere. ‘Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,’ as Herbert says. ‘fine nets and stratagems.’ God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”

Notice in Prince Caspian chapter 4 what lays the groundwork for the young prince becoming a good king—stories. Frequently in the Narnia books, you can tell a good person by the type of stories they resonate with or you see good stories communicate truth. Describing Eustace in the opening of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lewis says he liked books but only if they were “books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children during exercises in model schools.” In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Peter trusts the robin outside of Tumnus’ wrecked cave because: “They’re good birds in all the stories I’ve read.”

In Prince Caspian, Caspian is drawn to the stories of old Narnia from his nurse. But Miraz describes them as “nonsense for babies.” He says Caspian is too old for those “silly stories.” By this, we know that Caspian is a good character and Miraz is not.

“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so,” Lewis wrote in “On Three Ways of Writing for Children.” “Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” Despite being the adult, Miraz is the one still trapped in childishness because he has lost his childlike wonder and the ability to appreciate stories.

The usurping king threatens Caspian, demands he rejects those stories, and fires the nurse. But stories are not so easily defeated. You do not snuff out an idea through sheer force. Instead of moving past the nurses’ tales, Caspian “thought about the old stories of Narnia far more than before.”

Stories have a way of working deeper into the core of our being than mere arguments. In Mere Christianity, Lewis said that “reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.” We can accept truth by reason, but we don’t connect with truth unless we can image it, unless we tie it somehow to our imagination.

Notice how often in his non-fiction apologetics, Lewis turns to a word picture to help explain a truth statement. In Mere Christianity, he uses the idea of sharing orange slices to speak about our inherent ideas of fairness or statues coming to life as an image of salvation. In The Weight of Glory, he compares our preference for sins of the world to the glories of heaven to a child who wants to make mud pies in the slums because he has no idea what a vacation at the sea would mean. The Abolition of Man says the modern educator’s primary task is not to “cut down jungles” but to “irrigate deserts.” If you read Lewis, you will be immersed in word pictures.

The Narnia stories work as imaginative pictures of truth. Lewis soundly rejects the idea that the books are straight allegories. Aslan doesn’t represent Jesus, but Aslan does give us a picture of Jesus and some of His characteristics. Narnia is a fictional story, but it does communicate truth.

In “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” Lewis reiterates that he didn’t begin Narnia with the idea of teaching Christianity to children. He began with images like a faun carrying an umbrella but as he began to flesh out the stories he noticed their usefulness. “I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood,” he wrote. Casting the truth in an imaginative world could “steal past those watchful dragons” that prevent people from experiencing the real potency of Christianity.

If we want to understand how Lewis saw story, Prince Caspian is a great place to explore and this chapter might be the heartbeat of his ideas. Writing to a young girl named Sophia Starr, Lewis describes the book as one in which the stories of Aslan are starting to be disbelieved. Specifically in chapter 4, Caspian experiences the power of story, which exists as a story within a story.