Tales Before Narnia: The Roots of Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction
by Douglas A. Anderson (Editor)
This collection of short stories and poems includes works that influenced C.S. Lewis or were direct forerunners of some of his ideas. The list includes G.K.Chesterton, George Macdonald, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, and Edith Nesbit. There are also works from some of Lewis’s fellow Inklings, friends and acquaintances, such as J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, Roger Lancelyn Green, and William Lindsay Gresham.
The stories that I liked best:
“The Magic Mirror” by George MacDonald is about a man who purchases an old mirror where he can see a beautiful woman trapped in the mirror. He gradually becomes obsessed with her, and tries to free her from the spell that keeps her in the mirror. This one has a beautifully tragic ending.
“Undine” by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque is about a knight who is stranded in a fisherman’s hut and meets Undine the fisherman’s adopted daughter. She is very mysterious and wild, but once they are married she reveals that she is actually a water spirit/mermaid. This is another one with a tragic but beautiful ending.
“The Tapestried Chamber” by Sir Walter Scott is about a general who returns from the war and visits an old friend. In the guest room, he sees a horrible ghost of an old lady. Wonderfully chilling!
“The Man Who Lived Backwards” by Charles F. Hall is about a scientist who is trapped in a time stream running backwards. He sees the whole world going backwards in time, but he himself cannot interact with anything around him, since the past is immovable. This was so fascinating and imaginative!
There is a short excerpt from Wind in the Willows, one of my favorite books, but it is the first epistolary manuscript of Toad’s escape from prison told to Kenneth Grahame’s son through letters.
I liked “The Coloured Lands” by G.K. Chesterton, about a boy who travels to lands where everything is one color.
I loved the poem “The Dragon’s Visit” by Tolkien, where a dragon just wants to live peacefully in the neighborhood, but the people try to kill him, so he burns down their whole town.
There is a very interesting fairy tale called “The Child and the Giant” by Owen Barfield, where a little boy is kidnapped by a giant and kept under a spell.
The ones I didn’t like were “The Wish House” by Rudyard Kipling where this woman makes a wish to take on the pain of her beloved, so that he can walk around perfectly healthy and she is always sickly. But he doesn’t love her, so she just loves him from afar. It was creepy.
I also didn’t like “The Dream Dust Factory” by William Lindsay Gresham about a convict who tries to escape prison. He is caught and beaten and thrown into solitary, and he starts to imagine a dream woman who is always with him. Years later, when he is released from prison, he has mostly lost his mind into his dream world, so he commits more crimes and is happy to be put back in prison so that he can spend more time with his dream girl. Very gross and creepy.
Overall, I enjoyed most of the stories though, and I loved learning about how each of these authors had some influence on C.S. Lewis!
This book has been screened on the Screen It First website. https://screenitfirst.com/book/tales-before-narnia-817489
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