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You’ve probably read C.S. Lewis’s classic, The Chronicles of Narnia. Maybe you read it for school or maybe your parents forced you to read it or, Heaven forbid, you actually haven’t read the series (*dramatic faint*). Me? I was the second. I was six years old, and as is custom for six-year-olds, I hated anything that remotely resembled work. Reading resembled work. Therefore, I hated reading. So when my mom dropped seven then-humongous books (”Two-hundred pages in one book?! That’ll take me years to finish!”) into my lap and made me read them, I prepared myself for a long and boring trek into a useless pile of words.

Good God, was I wrong. I began with The Magician’s Nephew. (Don’t blame me; I was six! I didn’t know anything about the written order nor did I know of the holy commandment: thou shalt not acknowledge any order of Narnia other than the written. So I began with the book that had the number 1 on the spine.)

I finished the seven-book series in a week.

These books did what I considered impossible: they entertained me. But they did more than entertain: I was utterly spellbound by the magical world of Narnia and the children that go there. To this day I have read Narnia more times than I can count, and I still am spellbound by these marvelous books.

Narnia was written between 1949 and 1954. Not a lot of people know this because most editions of the books are chronologically numbered today, but the series did not begin with The Magician’s Nephew; in fact, TMN was the sixth book written in the series. The first book that Lewis wrote is the chronological second: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. After the seven books were published, they were ordered by chronology of the events in Narnia; TMN was the prequel to the series, so it was ordered as the first, and so on and so forth. Narnia was in fact written in this order:

1. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Book 2 in the chronological order)

2. Prince Caspian (Book 4 in the chronological order)

3. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Book 5 in the chronological order)

4. The Silver Chair (book 6 in the chronological order)

5. The Horse and His Boy (Book 3 in the chronological order)

6. The Magician’s Nephew (Book 1 in the chronological order)

7. The Last Battle (Book 7 in the chronological order)

In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the four Pevensie children, Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter, hide in a wardrobe in the mansion of a mysterious professor. The wardrobe leads them into Narnia, a world covered in ice and snow, where the White Witch rules as usurper Queen and binds Narnia in a perpetual winter, where animals talk, and where a faun serves Lucy tea. When the children learn that they were prophesied to defeat the Witch and become kings and queens of Narnia, they join the lion Aslan in his war against the Witch.

In Prince Caspian, the Pevensie children are a year older and just starting to adjust to life away from Narnia when they get pulled back in again, this time through the cry for help from Caspian, the prince of Narnia, who is on the run from his evil uncle, Miraz. It has been many centuries in Narnia, and the world is vastly different from what the Pevensies remember. Aslan, the lord of Narnia and the childrens’ only hope of defeating Miraz, is nowhere to be found.

In Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lucy and Edmund return to Narnia with their obnoxious cousin, Eustace Scrubb, to join Caspian on his ship, the Dawn Treader. Caspian is sailing to the edge of the world, and he’ll have to get past the dangerous Lone Islands while dealing with troubles caused by Eustace (the opening line to VDT is “There was a boy called  Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”).

In The Silver Chair, Eustace returns to Narnia with his classmate, Jill Pole. Caspian is old and near death now, and his only son, Rilian, is long-since missing. Eustace and Jill embark on a journey to find Rilian–a journey that takes them from the kitchen tables of giants to the deep underground world where Time himself rests.

In The Horse and His Boy, Lewis changes things around a little. Instead of a child from our world entering Narnia, the story begins with a child from Narnia that discovers a talking horse, named Bree. He saves Bree from his cruel master and they embark on a quest to save Narnia from an invasion. This book is set during the Golden age of the two kings and queens of Narnia.

In The Magician’s Nephew, Digory’s best friend, Polly, is tricked by Digory’s uncle to put on a ring that transports her to a strange wood between all the worlds. As they explore certain worlds, Digory and Polly awake an ancient evil and witness the death of an entire world–as well as the creation of one: a strange world where animals talk and a lion named Aslan rules.

In The Last Battle, all the children from our world (with one unfortunate exception) gather together in Narnia one last time to save it from a terrible deception and a supernatural war that threatens to destroy the world.

Today, it is Holy Creed amongst Narnia fanatics to read the books in the written order, even though Lewis once hinted in a letter to an American fan that he preferred the chronological order (no other evidence exists, however, that the chronological order was Lewis’s preferred reading order, so who knows?).

Seeing as Lewis was an adult convert from atheism to Christianity (he converted at about the age of thirty, according to the Omniscient Wikipedia), the books naturally carry heavy doses of religious influence. Narnia is called a religious allegory, but this isn’t correct. Lewis himself denied that the books were allegories; rather, he asked himself, “What would happen if God created another world with talking animals and mythical creatures?” Narnia is the answer to that question, at least as far as Lewis could come up with. An example of one of his allegories would be The Great Divorce, another classic for another day.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was adapted into a (wonderful) movie by Walt Disney and Walden Media in 2005; its (equally wonderful) sequel, Prince Caspian, came out in 2008. The movies were then dropped by Disney (*Dramatic faint*), but later picked up and distributed by 20th Century Fox (huzzah?). I’m supposed to say that I hope the next movie (Voyage of the Dawn Treader) will still be good, but seeing how biased I am, I’ll like it even if they have Will Smith voice Aslan.

The Chronicles of Narnia remain my favorite books, not just for the magic they contain but also for getting me into reading in the first place. I’m now a massive bibliophile and a wanna-be novelist, and all because I got pulled into a magical world beyond a wardrobe.