Ah, it's a while since I've read it. Must have conflated the two incidents.
Not sure how Father Christmas fits in with Greekism or Christianity -- or the White Witch and her wolves, which seem straight out of Andersen. Not to mention the talking beavers, which I can only relate to Native American mythos...
Isn't St Nic sort of Greek? roughly Oh all right, it's a hotch-potch, but there's an MA waiting to be written about how all the disparate pagan elements could be reconciled and/or why he wanted to include them in Narnia under a banner of Christianity.
He was from Myra, in modern Turkey, although presumably of Greek colonial extraction... The identification of him with Father Christmas is modern, though, and limited to Northern Europe / the US.
I suspect Lewis's reasons for flinging in all this stuff could be boiled down to a shrugged "to better efect my secret agenda", which I'm not sure would make it a very edifying subject for detailed study...
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Ah, it's a while since I've read it. Must have conflated the two incidents.
Not sure how Father Christmas fits in with Greekism or Christianity -- or the White Witch and her wolves, which seem straight out of Andersen. Not to mention the talking beavers, which I can only relate to Native American mythos...
Reply
Oh all right, it's a hotch-potch, but there's an MA waiting to be written about how all the disparate pagan elements could be reconciled and/or why he wanted to include them in Narnia under a banner of Christianity.
Reply
I suspect Lewis's reasons for flinging in all this stuff could be boiled down to a shrugged "to better efect my secret agenda", which I'm not sure would make it a very edifying subject for detailed study...
Reply
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