I. The Magician’s Nephew
The newly created garden in The Magician’s Nephew is an analogue of the biblical garden as a place of the soul’s temptation. In this garden, Miltonian echoes from Paradise Lost, as well as exegetical literature on The Song of Solomon, abound, specifically in Lewis’s use of garden motifs and the staging of an archetypal scene of temptation.
As Amphion, King of Thebes, built the walls of his city by moving stones into place through the music of his lyre and as Orpheus tamed beasts and denizens of Hades through his music, so Aslan creates Narnia through the power of his song in The Magician’s Nephew. In a series of splendid tableaux, as if in a medieval painting, life in its multifarious forms bursts out from darkness: first light, then grass, then trees and animals. Far beyond the edges of this flourishing Narnia, lies the first created garden in the Chronicles. Yet like the biblical Garden of Eden and Milton’s garden in Paradise Lost, it includes the potentiality for evil, for the Witch is already lurking there, just like Satan in Milton’s garden and the dragon in the garden of the Hesperides. Interestingly, not only is the garden in Magician’s Nephew the first fully developed garden in the Chronicles, if read canonically, but it is also the only one that has the elements of evil in it.
Milton’s influence is evident in Lewis’s use of traditional geographical garden motifs, though the two questers in search of the garden, Satan and Digory, have two different motives: Satan to destroy the Garden of Eden and its inhabitants through the fruit; Digory to protect Narnia and cure his mother through the apple. The first is motivated by disobedience to God, the second by obedience to Aslan. However, one of the similar motifs used by both Lewis and Milton is the garden’s remoteness. Like Satan, who has to fly across the vast expanse of the universe to reach Eden, Digory and Polly ride on Fledge, the flying horse, to cross the Western Wild (an evil direction in Narnia compared to the east) to get to the garden of the silver apples. The grim and horrible mountains that they fly over, sometimes symbolic of sin in biblical tradition (Nicholson 43-45), parallel the realm of Chaos in Paradise Lost. Flying to the garden in Magician’s Nephew means going through various boundaries: a waterfall that divides Narnia from the wilderness (later brought up in The Last Battle and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a tall shimmering wave dividing Aslan’s Country from the rest of Narnia) and a lake encircled by mountains of ice. The garden proper, like Milton’s, is an enclosed garden atop a green hill (traditionally a holy spot for prayer) with a “high wall of green turf” (156). In medieval and renaissance Christianity, these walls shielded their enclosures from natural and spiritual onslaughts. They mark the dispensation of grace for those who enter the garden lawfully (Stewart 59). Furthermore, as in Milton’s garden, there are high gates into the garden, facing east (a sacred direction), though in The Magician’s Nephew the gates are gold with an inscription in silver letters:
Come in by the gold gates or not at all,
Take of my fruit for others or forbear,
For those who steal or those who climb my wall
Shall find their heart’s desire and find despair. (187)
The Christian virtue of caritas suggested in this poem (i.e. “Take of my fruit for others or forbear”) and its opposite, the sin of acedia, spiritual despair brought about by the slothful satisfaction of sinful desires (i.e. by “those who steal or those who climb my walls”), will become more apparent in the later temptation scene of Digory by the Witch. Digory, in all naiveté, cannot imagine anyone climbing over the gates (like Satan and the Witch), nor eating of the fruit (as Satan pretends to have done, and which the Witch actually does). The gates, like the garden walls, reaffirm the realm’s exclusiveness, accessible only to those who follow Aslan in Narnia and God in our world. Digory immediately notices this distinctness: “[y]ou never saw a place which was so obviously private. You could see at a glance that it belonged to someone else. Only a fool would dream of going in unless he had been sent there on a very special business” (187).
The doctrine of grace, similarly available specifically to the faithful, who can hear God’s words (or Aslan’s in Narnia), is represented by another common medieval and renaissance garden motif-the fountain at the center of the enclosed garden. An ubiquitous image in medieval paintings as well, it alludes to the “well of living waters” from the Song of Solomon (4:15) and the spring of eternal life in John 4:14. Lewis’s garden also has a sweet odor that harkens back to the garden of Alkinoös in the Odyssey and certainly to Milton’s. The medieval Pearl-poet likewise describes the fruits in his vision as having refreshing scents (Nephew 87-88). Lewis, following these earlier writers, also notes the “heavenly” and “lovely” smells in the garden (185, 188).
However, the central and most powerful garden motif in The Magician’s Nephew is the silver apple tree, situated in the middle of the garden beside the fountain. The silver apples resemble other fruits in earlier garden poetry. Although the fruit of the Tree of Life in Milton’s garden is not silver or gold, it is “of vegetable gold” (4.220), and other trees in the garden have fruit “burnish’t with Golden Rind” (4.249). When Digory enters the garden, he “knew which the right tree was at once, partly because it stood in the very center and partly because the great silver apples with which it was loaded shone so and cast a light of their own down on the shadowy places where the sunlight did not reach” (Nephew 188). This passage seems to be a paraphrase from Psalm 121:5-6: “The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. / The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.”