Abstract
The stable in The Last Battle is rather mysterious. It seems a random bit of architecture plopped in Narnia, whose primary structures are cozy caves or castles by the sea. Of course, the stable is an important Christian symbol, the humble birthplace of Christ himself. Nevertheless, Lewis’s stable does not function in any straightforward way as the Narnian version of “Away in a Manger.” Rather, it is a place of deception and violence, housing the false Aslan and serving as the focal point of an apocalyptic battle that ends with the destruction of all Narnia. There is medieval precedent for Lewis’s joining of agrarian architecture and apocalypse. William Langland’s Piers Plowman ends with the construction, violent assault on, and subsequent abandonment of the Barn of Unity. It is fitting then that Lewis would turn to Langland in the most apocalyptic book of the Narniad. In Langland, Lewis found a model for satirical allegory. Both the stable and the barn are images of the church, satirizing its temporal corruption and perversion. But Langland modeled more than satire. In The Allegory of Love, C.S. Lewis declared that Langland’s “comedy, however good, is not what is most characteristic about him. Sublimity—so rare in Gower, and rarer still in Chaucer—is frequent in Piers Plowman.” Lewis’s stable is not simply satirical; it is also sublime. Indeed, The Last Battle, while frequently satirical is more fundamentally sublime; earthly Narnia is sublimely destroyed, only to be replaced by the heavenly Narnia, where the children encounter the sublime Aslan in his true form. The stable door, a cause for confusion and terror throughout the story, finally becomes the doorway into sublimity itself.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
