Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “How C.S. Lewis Created Narnia,” with Harry Lee Poe, emeritus professor of faith and culture at Union University and author of the acclaimed three-volume biography The Making of C. S. Lewis: From Atheist to Apologist. [Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7.] At the seventy-fifth anniversary of its 1950 publication, C.S. Lewis’s fantasy novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe remains in print and more popular than ever. It has been dramatized for radio, television, and movies, with its latest adaptation currently in production for Netflix. How did Lewis, an academic literary critic and amateur Christian apologist who had never written for children, create such a classic children’s story at the age of fifty? Join Lewis scholar Harry Lee “Hal” Poe for an exploration of the many strands that came together in Lewis’s imagination to create The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and, eventually, the entire book series The Chronicles of Narnia. You’ll learn how Lewis based The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on an image that had lingered in his mind since he was sixteen, when he conceived of a faun walking through snow and carrying an umbrella and packages. He initially set out to write only one children’s book, but then he had the idea for a second one—and so on and so on—until he had written seven stories. The way the ideas came to him helps explain why he did not write the stories in chronological order. Lewis had not been a professional children’s author but, rather, a college professor and scholar of medieval and renaissance English literature. Almost all of his popular writing emerged from the overflow of his academic work, with The Chronicles of Narnia being set in the same atmosphere as the medieval literature he taught. His first great academic work, “The Allegory of Love,” published in 1936, explained the medieval themes that would appear in the Narnia stories. Even though most of Lewis’s friends did not like the Narnia stories, the public adored them. They were released each year for the Christmas trade and soon went into second printings. Since then, they have gone through many editions and have never been out of print. You might just want to give them another reading after this talk. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.) Image of wardrobe by Canva. Photo of snowy forest by Falk Oberdorf / Wikimedia. Want the Best Price for a Nashville Hotel? GUARANTEED Nashville.com Special Rate! Nashville.com The Visitors Guide to Nashville!
