There and Back Again: Dark Journeys and Heroic Quests

Lewis was both a scholar of medieval literature specializing in allegory and a Christian apologist, so it’s no surprise that these elements all found their way into the Chronicles of Narnia, his fantasy series for children. The first book, a story of four children who are transported to a land of talking animals to rid them of an evil witch and rule as kings and queens, is rife with Christian symbolism – which some consider incongruous in a novel populated by witches and sentient animals. Young readers don’t seem to mind.

This Caldecott Award-winning story of a willful boy who travels across the ocean and becomes king of the hard-partying Wild Things, basically to spite his mom, was a milestone in picture book publishing. Nearly 50 years later, Sendak’s stunning illustrations still perfectly capture the delightfully dangerous world of Max’s imagination.

It would be hard to overstate the impact that Carroll’s twin fantasy novels have had on the field of children’s literature, and on the public consciousness in general. Wonderland and its inhabitants have become archetypal symbols for madness and chaos. Alice succeeds in navigating this hallucinatory terrain with a winning combination of childish innocence, logic in the face of nonsense, and defiance of a world that refuses to play by its own rules.

Carroll (a.k.a. Charles Dodgson) was an amateur photographer – a relatively new thing to be in the 1860s – and among his favorite models was a girl named Alice Liddell. He spontaneously invented a nonsense story for Alice and her sisters on a boat trip, and at her request wrote it down for her. He then expanded the story and hired John Tenniel to illustrate it for publication. The thought of a bachelor professor spending so much of his time with little girls, and the… ahem, artistic ways he photographed them, raises a lot of eyebrows now. In the Victorian era, though, nude children were sometimes featured in art as a personification of Eden-like innocence.

Alice’s second journey, this time through a mirror into a backwards looking-glass world, has proven just as popular as the first. Both were revolutionary for being purely fantastical and fun in an era when children’s literature was almost always didactic. Carroll’s clever wordplay and ability to portray dream-logic in writing have kept readers entertained ever since.

Tolkien was a good friend and fellow Oxford professor of C.S. Lewis. His area of expertise was in Anglo-Saxon literature and Norse mythology, which inspired some of the creatures that inhabit his fantasies: dwarves, elves, trolls and dragons. Bilbo, the home-and-hearth loving hobbit, must encounter all of these and more as he makes his way across Middle-Earth, becoming the perfect Campbellian hero along the way.