Aslan

Also Known As: from Turkish aslan, “lion”; also called the Great Lion, the King of Beasts, the son of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea; appears once as a Lamb
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Literary Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: A talking lion whose song calls a world into being and whose breath turns stone statues back into living creatures.
Role in Mythos: He is the creator, judge and returning king of Narnia, the son of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea, who dies on the Stone Table in a traitor’s place and rises again.
Relation to Humans: He draws children out of England into Narnia, sets them hard tasks, and tells each of them only their own story, never anyone else’s. The characters who meet him insist he is good but not safe, and most of them are comforted and frightened in the same moment.

The first sound Narnia ever heard was singing. In a dark with no sun and no stars, a deep voice began a tune without words, and then the stars came out and sang with it, so that it seemed the voice had made them simply in order to have company. The singer was a lion. His name is Aslan, and he exists because the Oxford literary scholar C. S. Lewis wrote him into the seven children’s novels known as The Chronicles of Narnia, published one a year from 1950 to 1956. No older folk tradition stands behind him. Every Aslan in circulation, on stage, on screen or in the pulpit, goes back to those seven books and to a handful of letters in which Lewis explained what he had been doing.

The name came from Turkish, where aslan is simply the word for lion. Lewis said as much in a letter of January 1952, adding that of course it meant the Lion of Judah, and the Lewis scholar Michael Ward suggests he picked up his scraps of Turkish from the notes to Edward Lane’s translation of The Arabian Nights. The creature itself arrived less tidily. Lewis remembered that the first book began with a picture he had carried since he was about sixteen, a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels through a snowy wood. When he finally tried to turn that picture into a story, at around forty, the lion turned up uninvited. “I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time,” he wrote. “Apart from that, I don’t know where the lion came from or why He came.”

He knew perfectly well what the lion meant, though. Lewis refused the word allegory. In a letter of December 1958 he called Aslan “an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia'” and chose to be incarnate, die and rise again there. In a 1961 letter he gave three reasons for the shape: the lion is king of beasts, Christ is called the Lion of Judah in the Bible, and he had been having strange dreams about lions when he started writing. Aslan is Christ with a mane. Lewis never pretended otherwise.

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe he is a rumour long before he is a lion. Narnia is locked in a winter that never reaches Christmas, and a beaver leans close to four children from London and whispers that Aslan is on the move. The children have never heard the name, yet each of them feels something jump inside at the sound of it. Mr Beaver recites an old rhyme: “Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight, / At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more.” Susan, who had imagined a man, asks whether he is quite safe. “‘Course he isn’t safe,” says Mr Beaver. “But he’s good.” When the children finally reach him, standing among centaurs and leopards, they manage one glimpse of the golden mane and the great, royal, overwhelming eyes, and then find they cannot look at him at all.

The book turns on a bargain. Edmund, the youngest boy, has betrayed his brother and sisters to the White Witch, and the Witch comes under safe conduct to claim him. She cites the Deep Magic that the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea set into Narnia at its beginning, written on the Table of Stone: every traitor is her lawful prey. Aslan talks with her alone, and she leaves satisfied. That night Susan and Lucy follow him to the Stone Table and watch from the bushes as he lets himself be bound. An ogre with shears crops his mane, and the crowd jeers at the shorn face, calling “Puss, Puss! Poor Pussy,” before the Witch kills him on the Table. Afterwards the girls kneel in the wet grass and kiss his cold face, and in the grey before dawn hundreds of field mice creep over the body and gnaw through the cords. Then the Table cracks with a deafening noise, and the Lion is standing there in the sunrise, larger than they had ever seen him. The Witch had read the Deep Magic, but not the Deeper Magic from before the dawn of time: when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s place, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.

The Magician’s Nephew, written later but set first, shows the work he does when nobody is betraying anybody. On an empty land under a newly lit sky, the Lion paces to and fro and sings a softer, rippling song, and grass spreads out from his feet like a pool and runs up the hills like a wave. Jadis, who will one day be the White Witch, flings an iron bar straight at his head from twelve yards. It strikes him between the eyes, glances off and thuds into the grass, and he walks on at exactly the same pace. When the animals are made he picks some out, stares at them, and breathes a long warm breath over them, and then the deepest, wildest voice the children have ever heard speaks the words that start the country: “Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.”

The later books show him in disguise and at an angle. In The Horse and His Boy a voice in the dark tells the boy Shasta that he was the lion who drove him together with Aravis, the cat who comforted him among the tombs, the lion who chased off the jackals, and the lion who pushed the drifting boat ashore when Shasta was a baby. Asked about someone else, he answers that he tells no one any story but their own. Later he invites the proud warhorse Bree to come close: “Touch me. Smell me. Here are my paws, here is my tail, these are my whiskers. I am a true Beast.” At the far eastern edge of the world in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a white Lamb cooks fish over a fire on the grass and invites the children to breakfast, and as it speaks its whiteness flushes into tawny gold. He tells them he is in their world too, where he has another name. In The Silver Chair a girl dying of thirst asks whether he eats girls. “I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,” he says, without boasting and without apology, and then adds that there is no other stream.

The last book turns his name against him. In The Last Battle an ape called Shift sews a donkey into a lion’s skin and passes it off as Aslan, then blends him with the Calormene god Tash into a single “Tashlan.” Even an old saying about him, that he is not a tame lion, becomes a jeer in the mouths of his enemies. At the end of the world every creature runs up to a doorway and looks into his face. Those who look with fear and hatred swerve to his left and vanish into his huge black shadow; those who love him come in on his right. A young Calormene named Emeth, who served Tash all his life, is welcomed anyway: whoever keeps an oath sworn by Tash for the oath’s sake, the Lion tells him, has truly sworn by Aslan. The children learn there has been a real railway accident. “The term is over: the holidays have begun,” he tells them, and he no longer looks to them like a lion.

His powers are the powers of the author of a world. He sings stars and grass into being, breathes stone back into flesh, ends the Witch’s endless winter simply by arriving, and turns up as a cat, a lamb or a voice in the dark. His limits are the ones he keeps. He will not break the Deep Magic, even to save himself; he pays it instead. He cannot be summoned; as Mr Tumnus puts it, he doesn’t like being tied down. And he will not answer questions about other people’s fates. When Lucy asks whether Eustace will ever come back, he replies, “Child, do you really need to know that?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Who created Aslan?

Aslan was created by C. S. Lewis, the Oxford literary scholar who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, seven novels published from 1950 to 1956. He is a literary figure, not a character from older folklore. Lewis said he did not know where the lion came from, except that he had been dreaming of lions while he wrote.

What does the name Aslan mean?

Aslan is the Turkish word for lion. Lewis explained this in a letter of January 1952 and added that the name meant the Lion of Judah. The scholar Michael Ward suggests Lewis learned the word from Edward Lane’s translation of The Arabian Nights.

Is Aslan meant to be Jesus?

Yes, though C. S. Lewis rejected calling Aslan an allegory. In a 1958 letter he described Aslan as an imaginary answer to what Christ might become like if He were incarnate, died and rose again in a world like Narnia. Lewis chose a lion because the lion is king of beasts and Christ is called the Lion of Judah.

How does Aslan come back to life in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?

Aslan comes back through the Deeper Magic from before the dawn of time. The White Witch claimed the traitor Edmund under the Deep Magic, and Aslan was killed on the Stone Table in his place. Because a willing victim who had committed no treachery died in a traitor’s stead, the Table cracked and Death started working backwards.

What does “not a tame lion” mean in Narnia?

The phrase means Aslan cannot be controlled or summoned at will. Mr Tumnus says it at the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, explaining that Aslan comes and goes and does not like being tied down. In The Last Battle his enemies turn the same saying into a mocking chant.