Alan Jacobs, Professor English at Wheaton College, has posted an excerpt of his contribution (an essay on the Narnia books) to the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis. Jacobs writes:
. . . If we then try to consider the seven Narnia stories as a single story, what is that story about? I contend that the best answer is disputed sovereignty. More than any other single thing, the story of Narnia concerns an unacknowledged but true King and the efforts of his loyalists to reclaim or protect his throne from would-be usurpers.
This theme is announced early in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: when the four Pevensies first enter Narnia as a group, their first action is to visit the house of Mr Tumnus. There they discover the house ransacked and a notice of Tumnus’s arrest that concludes with the words ‘LONG LIVE THE QUEEN!’ – to which Lucy replies, ‘She isn’t a real queen at all.’ . . .
Among the first facts established about Narnia are these: it is a realm in which authority is contested, in which the present and visible Queen of This World ‘isn’t a real queen at all’ but rather a usurper, while the rightful King is frequently absent and invisible – but liable to return and assert his sovereignty. . . .
This theme is repeated in several forms in the later books, and is never wholly absent from them. [Here I give examples from each book in the series.] . . .
In short: there is a King of Kings and Lord of Lords whose Son is the rightful ruler of this world. Indeed, through that Son all things were made, and the world will end when he ‘comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead’, though ‘his kingdom will have no end’, in the words of the Nicene Creed. Meanwhile, in these in-between times, the rulership of Earth is claimed by an Adversary, the Prince of this world. And what is asked of all Lewis’s characters is simply, as the biblical Joshua put it, to ‘choose this day’ whom they will serve.
Me: I'm appreciative of Jacobs' observation. On an unrelated subject, but interesting to me, a commenter suggested that Jacobs should have written "an usurper" to which Jacobs replied:
No, I think "a usurper" is correct (as does Cambridge University Press) — "a" or "an" is determined by initial sound, not initial letter, and "usurper" begins with a consonantal sound. Similarly, we don't refer to "an university."
That's nice to know.