Article published November 19, 2005
BGSU professor in demand for Lewis expertise
By DAVID YONKE
BLADE RELIGION EDITOR
BOWLING GREEN — The Rev. Bruce Edwards may be feeling as if he walked through the wardrobe and into Narnia along with Lucy and Peter.
The English professor at Bowling Green State University and noted C.S. Lewis authority has recently given talks in California, Florida, Texas, and Ohio as part of "Narnia on Tour," a traveling lecture series of leading Lewis scholars.
Timed to tie in with the Dec. 9 premiere of Disney’s $200 million movie, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, Mr. Edwards spent the last year and a half writing two books: Further Up and Further In: Understanding C.S. Lewis’ ‘The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe’ (Broadman & Holman, $12.99) and Not a Tame Lion: Unveiling Narnia through the Eyes of Lucy, Peter, and Other Characters Created by C.S. Lewis (Tyndale, $12.99).
The first book, Further Up and Further In, is a companion guide to the movie that will lead the average viewer through the story, Mr. Edwards said in a recent interview. Not a Tame Lion, on the other hand, is geared for the more-serious Lewis devotees who want to better understand the origins of the book’s hero, Aslan the lion.
Mr. Lewis, who was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Nov. 29, 1898, and died in 1963, wrote seven books in The Chronicles of Narnia series, which have sold 85 million copies since their publication in the 1950s.
Even without the new wave of attention spurred by the film, about 3 million Lewis books sell every year and his works have been published in 23 languages, Mr. Edwards said.
Mr. Lewis was a devout Anglican who wrote numerous essays and books about Christianity, but The Chronicles of Narnia series was not explicitly a Christian allegory, he said.
"Lewis wanted to write books that anyone can enjoy. It’s not just a Christian story, and, in fact, there is a lot of mythology in the books, from Greek and Roman to Indian," Mr. Edwards said. "But clearly, for Christian readers or reviewers, the parallels will stand out."
In teaching hundreds of college students, both at BGSU and around the world through online courses, Mr. Edwards said he found that the spiritual allegory is not always obvious to readers. "There were many who said it never crossed their mind that Narnia
was based on Lewis’ Christian worldview," he said.
There have been two previous video versions of Mr. Lewis’ children’s books, a cartoon version that was released in 1979 and a low-budget, live-action drama by the British Broadcasting Corp. that was first televised in 1988.
Since then, Mr. Lewis’ estate, controlled most notably by his son, author Douglas Gresham, rejected other requests to make films or shows based on Narnia until Disney made its proposal, Mr. Edwards said.
Based on previews, before seeing the entire Disney movie, the BGSU professor said the film appears to stay faithful to the books.
The best thing that the new movie could do is not just sell tickets and create a Hollywood franchise, Mr. Edwards said, but inspire audiences to pick up copies of Mr. Lewis’ books.
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