C S Lewis’s love of Co Down was inspiration for Narnia

As a literary scholar and the author of ‘The Allegory of Love’ (1936) and ‘English Literature in the Sixteenth Century’ (1954), he was a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, subsequently professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge.

One pillar of his fame is his popular religious writing, notably ‘The Problem of Pain’ (1940), ‘The Screwtape Letters’ (also 1940) and ‘The Four Loves’ (1960).

He also wrote a science fiction trilogy with a strong Christian flavour.

The seven Narnia books are the second pillar of his enduring fame. Beginning with ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’, published in 1950, Lewis has fired the imagination of generations of children and some adults ever since. They have sold over 100 million copies in 41 languages and have been adapted on multiple occasions for radio, TV, stage and the cinema.

In 1955 he published ‘Surprised by Joy’, his spiritual autobiography which describes his early childhood until his conversion to Christianity.

He was baptised in St Mark’s Dundela by his grandfather but fell away from faith during his adolescence. He returned to faith at the age of 32. The book’s two concluding chapters recount his leap from atheism to theism in 1929 and then his second leap from theism to Christianity in 1931.

Lewis credited his Roman Catholic colleague at Oxford, J R R Tolkien, whom he met in 1926, as being instrumental in his coming to faith in Jesus Christ. Tolkien was disappointed that Lewis did not convert to Roman Catholicism but both Tolkien and the American poet and writer Joy Gresham, whom he married in 1957, attributed his reluctance to embrace Roman Catholicism to his Ulster Protestant heritage.

This is untrue. His reservations were neither cultural nor the product of prejudice as David Soper’s interview with Lewis for ‘Zion’s Herald’ in January 1948 demonstrates. As Soper explains: ‘Lewis’ thought about Rome was comprehensive yet simple. The difficulty with joining the Roman church was that you were, so to speak, “buying a pig in a poke;” you could not possibly know at what hour something new would be added, as essential for salvation, to the worship of Christ as God and Saviour. Rome had an unfortunate tendency to pile Pelion upon Ossa, in every generation to require allegiance to a new set of ideas … but clearly foreign to its letter and alien to its spirit.’

Lewis was born in Dundela Villas, Belfast, the younger son of Albert James Lewis, a solicitor and with aspirations to becoming a unionist MP, and his wife, Florence (Flora) Augusta, daughter of the Rev Thomas Hamilton, the rector of St Mark’s Dundela. Her grandfather was rector of Innishmacsaint and her great grandfather, Hugh, was dean of Armagh and ultimately bishop of Ossory. Genealogical research reveals that Robert the Bruce was one of her more distant ancestors.

Flora was the first female mathematics graduate from QUB.

Lewis compared his father and mother’s families.

‘My father’s people were true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical, easily moved to anger and tenderness; men who laughed and cried a great deal and who had not much of the talent for happiness.’

By contrast the Ulster-Scot Hamiltons were ‘a cooler race. Their minds were critical and ironic and they had a talent for happiness in a high degree’.

Flora Lewis died of cancer in August 1908. Following his mother’s death he was sent off to various boarding schools in England – apart from a brief period at Campbell College (which he enjoyed). Indeed, he spent the greater part of his life in England but he never forgot his homeland, which provided inspiration for his fictional world.

The great affection that Lewis had for many locations in his native Ulster, and Co Down in particular, is neatly captured in a conversation with David Bleakley. Lewis invited Bleakley to define heaven and, on seeing Bleakley struggle with the challenge, he offered his own: ‘Heaven is Oxford lifted and placed in the middle of Co Down.’

He enjoyed visits to Kilkeel and walks in the Mournes with his brother.

‘I have seen landscapes, notably in the Mourne Mountains which under a particular light made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge.’

Narnia is largely a composite of the Mournes and the Craigantlet hills.

When Lewis married Joy Gresham, they honeymooned in the Old Inn Crawfordsburn, Co Down.

Lewis also had fond memories of Ballycastle, Castlerock and Dunluce. The ruins of Dunluce Castle was the inspiration for Cair Paravel, the capital of Narnia.

His death and the death of Aldous Huxley were overshadowed by the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas on the same day.

Peter Kreeft is a professor of philosophy at Boston College and a convert to Roman Catholicism. In 1982 he used this coincidence to imagine a conversation between these three significant 20th-century figures taking place in Purgatory in his book entitled ‘Between Heaven and Hell’.

Kreeft does a first-class job of articulating Lewis’ thought, and it is Lewis’ view that ends up being the most persuasive.

On the 50th anniversary of Lewis’s death in 2013, Lewis was commemorated at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. The address was delivered by Rowan Williams, perhaps the most erudite of recent archbishops of Canterbury. The inscription on the floor stone is a quotation from Lewis: ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.’

To explore the life and legacy of C S Lewis further, Walter Hooper’s ‘C S Lewis: The Companion and Guide’, Sandy Smith, ‘C S Lewis and the Island of His Birth’ and Alister McGrath, ‘C S Lewis: A Life’ offer superb introductions.