The White Stag was represented by a trio of dancers in this stage version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, their cervine nature only hinted at by black noses and white plumes that represent antlers.

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this topic I looked at the folklore and symbolism behind the White Stag, then at how that folklore and symbolism was both right, and wrong, for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the world of Narnia itself.  I’ll continue in that vein and also take a look at how that element of the book has affected readers.

This is the second half of the conversation grown Lucy, Peter, Edmund, and Susan have after they see the lamp post that “worketh strangely” upon them.

“And more,” said Queen Lucy, “for it will not go out of my mind that if we pass this post and lantern, either we shall find strange adventures or else some great change of our fortunes.” “Madam,” said King Edmund, “the like foreboding stirreth in my heart also.” “And in mine, fair brother,” said King Peter. “And in mine too,” said Queen Susan. “Wherefore by my council we shall lightly return to our horses and follow this White Stag no further.”

What’s interesting here is that it’s Queen Susan who warns the others against the stag and the lantern! It’s as if she has some inkling they will lose their adult selves and become schoolchildren again. Remember, from the previous excerpt quoted in Part 2, she’s the one who first saw the lamp post and called the others’ attention to it. Without her being the dog in the manger, they might have gone right on by. And as it turns out in the infamous last chapter of the infamous last book, Susan is the missing one, the one who’s dismissed their whole Narnian experience as a childhood game, which is weirdly prescient given the other books weren’t written yet.

Things get worse for Susan. Her warning is overridden by the others.

“Madam,” said King Peter, “therein I pray thee to have me excused. For never since we four were Kings and Queens in Narnia have we set our hands to any high matter, as battles, quests, feats of arms, acts of justice, and the like, and then given over; but always what we have taken in hand, the same we have achieved.” “Sister,” said Queen Lucy, “my royal brother speaks rightly. And it seems to me we should be shamed if for any fearing or foreboding we turned back from following so noble a beast as now we have in chase.” “And so say I,” said King Edmund. “And I have such desire to find the signification of this thing that I would not by my good will turn back for the richest jewel in all Narnia and all the islands.” “Then in the name of Aslan,” said Queen Susan, “if ye will all have it so, let us go on and take the adventure that shall fall to us.”

This is the first time in a long while I’ve read this whole section and the first time I’ve analyzed it so carefully, and it really does seem to paint Susan in a bad light. The others, in their High Medieval speech, imply she’s something of a killjoy, not brave or adventurous enough. In a way this echoes the bickering of the kids all throughout the book over what to do and how to do it, as siblings do bicker. Here they’re only doing it more politely, and more archaically, and as an adult, I do get a chuckle out of that. Lewis took care to show how their basic personalities are still intact: Susan is annoyingly practical; Lucy headstrong and adventurous, but naive; Peter is concerned with keeping face; and Edmund, on exploring this psychological change in himself.  It’s a masterful turn, and I doubt child readers appreciated it, or even many adult readers, for that matter.

And yet, given the life-changing nature of the choice that lies before them, and the fear it inspires, Susan is the only one who clearly says no. And, even as she acquiesces at the end, she is the only one who clearly says yes, as if she’s been the gatekeeper for all of them. So twice she is damned, once for being a killjoy, the second for being the sealer of their doom. It’s very intriguing that Lewis assigned her that role.

Of course, a reader’s interpretation of all this depends on whether he or she is rooting for them to stay kings and queens, so the adventure continues, or to return to England where their parents are presumably worried about them. But going by all the delights they find in Narnia, the deck is pretty stacked.

The whole plot twist recalls fairy tales like Rip Wan Winkle and the Japanese fable of The Fisher Lad (Urashima Taro) where the protagonist makes some innocuous mistake that causes them to travel into, or be cast out of, another world, and find on their return time has gone on without them and all they’ve known and loved has gone, even their own youth. Of course, the Pevensies return only seconds after they had left, making this blow a softened one, but still they’ve lost the fantasy world they fought for, by a choice they didn’t realize the full consequences of. How could they, when their memories of England had been lost?

I’m also reminded of the Greek legend of Persephone, who was forced to remain in Hades because she ate a few pomegranate seeds. Of course she was hungry; of course the seeds were small and inconsequential. But she broke the rule and had to pay the price. So did the Pevensies; they ignored Susan’s warning, and their own conflicted feelings, and so lost what they held most dear.

The Stag, by Deborah J. J. Lee

Lewis doesn’t go on to say if all they’ve lived and experienced in Narnia has turned into a shadow once they’re back home, as their memories of England had turned into a shadow while they were in Narnia.  He wrote LWW thinking it would be only one book. In Prince Caspian, however, Lewis makes it clear: they’ve forgotten much of their Narnian  experiences by being back in England, and only when they return there do their memories come back. This is used by Lewis as a means to play up the mysteriousness of the initial chapters of the book and mirrors the loss experienced by the Narnian creatures themselves, but it’s still more melancholy than a jolly good detective story.

What this all means symbolically, in the context of Narnia’s Christian underpinnings, is up for grabs. A case of  “For you the door into Aslan’s country is from your own world” again? In that scenario, it’s clear the kids must leave, put aside Narnia and all its adventures as a thing of childhood, which doesn’t make sense as Susan did that very thing in the last book and Lewis mocked her for it. (She also didn’t die horribly in a train crash.) It’s important, too, to remember that the kids themselves were the cause of departure, even if they weren’t properly in their own minds. If they had remembered fully, their choice to remain kings and queens, or return to their parents in 1940s England, might have been more poignant. But Lewis’s handling of the incident deprived them of agency and made them look thick, unfortunately. He got his metaphors a bit muddled.

I’ll also say this memory loss of the Pevensies is not consistent. It changes according to the needs of the later books. In The Horse and His Boy, the older Queen Lucy has no problem relating the story of how she came into England through the wardrobe. And in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, she accesses those memories immediately after Caspian’s crew fishes her and Edmund out of the water. I have to wonder if Lewis intended to rewrite that part of LWW, to retcon to fit with the later books.

Here’s two ways the incident has been depicted.

The illustration at top is from the first edition of LWW, by Pauline Baynes (she had colored it here for a later edition.) Note the nip-waisted doublets and thigh-high kinky boots on the men, a fashion choice that makes me wonder if my dislike of the adult Pevensies was due to their dress and not their speech. I wasn’t fond of the floppy plumed hats either, which look foppish and effete. As for Lucy and Susan, it’s hard to tell what they’re wearing, aside from a short cape and the same floppy hat.

Oh, and Peter and Edmund are wearing pointy spurs on their boots, which, even if these are non-talking horses, seems cruel.

The 2005 Disney movie improves on the costuming by making it more generically Medieval. The girls wear  pre-Raphaelite gowns and the boys capes, tunics, and leggings, with lots of velvet and satin. Not exactly riding clothes, and I don’t think they would have worn gold crowns while hunting, but it looks better.

In my next post I’ll review some fanfic that features the stag.

[The] two Kings and two Queens with the principal members of their court, rode a-hunting with horns and hounds in the Western Woods to follow the White Stag. — from the The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

In Part 1 of this essay I explored the myth and folklore of the White Stag, and how, on the surface, it seems like such a perfect way to bring LWW to a close. Seems, I want to emphasize. I’ve no way of knowing what was in the mind of the author, whether he was drawing on its general mythic background and sampling the soup, or deliberately using its Catholic symbology the same way he used that of the lion.

I’ve also come across a few more connections between the White Stag, Narnia, and Lewis himself.

For one thing, of the two saints who experienced a conversion at the hands of… er, antlers of… the White Stag, one of them was St. Eustace. Yes, the whining wormboy who cops a trip on The Dawn Treader, gets turned into a dragon, and becomes a better human being.

The other is a speech given by Robert Baden-Powell, the British founder of the Scout Movement which later became the worldwide youth organization known as the Boy Scouts (and Girl Scouts — his sister created it.)

The White Stag has a message for you. Hunters of old pursued the miraculous stag, not because they expected to kill it, but because it led them in the joy of the chase to new and fresh adventures, and so to capture happiness. You may look on the White Stag as the true spirit of Scouting, springing forward and upward, ever leading you onward to leap over difficulties, to face new adventures in your active pursuit of the higher aims of Scouting.

Baden-Powell gave this speech in 1933 to the World Jamboree of Boy Scouts in Hungary. It references the Hungarian legend of a White Stag leading the ancestors of the Hun and Magyar peoples into Scythia, but at the same time, it echoes Arthurian ideals of adventure and personal fulfillment.  The second sentence in particular is similar to what the older Pevensies spout when they dither on and on about pursuing the stag past their safety limits. (More about that.)

Internet sleuthing hasn’t unearthed a C. S. Lewis – Scout Movement connection, but in the books, especially Prince Caspian where he goes into the Pevensie’s interminably long trek through a hostile forest, he’s shown he’s done his research on wilderness survival. Of course, that may also be due to his military service in WWI. Yet, a genuine love for the wilderness exploration shines through, and several times he, as the narrator, goes on about how good it is for the kids, making them stronger, more disciplined, more content. Sounds like the benefits of scouting to me! At any rate, perhaps he and Baden-Powell both were drinking from the same fountain.

Now let’s talk about the Royal Hunt itself. In Medieval England, which Lewis idolized, hunting was the domain of the noble class, not mere peasants who were considered poachers. For nobles it was not about survival but leisure, socializing, and conspicuous consumption, not too different, in fact, from the fox-hunting parties as existed in Lewis’s time, with their trained hounds and horses, red uniforms, and after-hunt picnics with champagne.

A 15th century fresco depicting a Medieval hunt in the Italian palace of Manta with dogs, a pack mule, and falcons. Some of the ladies ride their own horses; one has a child with her, and two others ride behind their lovers.

Which brings me to the moral quandary that is not addressed in the books. Narnia is a land of Talking Beasts. Though not explicitly stated, Talking Beasts do not prey on each other. A Talking Leopard does not catch a Talking Mouse for lunch. The mythical Narnians likewise leave the Beasts  alone. No Talking Pigs made their way into Dwarven sausages, or Talking Goats to Giants’ spits. Yet, at the end of LWW, the Pevensies happily ride off with a pack of hounds to hunt a Magic Talking Stag, presumably without asking his permission first. And no, the hounds were not called out as Talking Hounds, which brings up other issues. But I’m not going to go into them here.

Nothing about this makes sense no matter how you look at it. In no other book in the Chronicles is a Narnian creature treated as prey by the Narnians themselves.

Did the White Stag enjoy being hunted? Did he see it as a sort of game with his pursuers… or would he rather have been left alone? Did he give the wishes as the prize, or were they to save his life? Lewis doesn’t say. Neither scenario “fits” into the Narnia that’s been created over all seven books.

So what gives, Lewis?

Likely just first-book syndrome and a lack of having the whole picture yet. Lewis was not a planner like Tolkien, building his world in advance of the story. Lewis crafted the story, and then built the world around it, adding those things that sounded “right.” The result was delightful, but contradictions aren’t too hard to find. According to some biographers Lewis was thinking about revising the Chronicles shortly before his death, and perhaps it would have cleared up the most glaring inconsistencies.

Even given the sketchy morality, the hunt was an elegant solution to a glaring problem — that of returning the kids. I suppose they could have fallen asleep in their Narnian beds one night, and waken up in their English ones; but that’s not Lewis. The hunt is a fairy tale solution to a fairy tale problem. It fits, even without the burden of the White Stag’s symbolism. The kids come back through the wardrobe door, none the worse for wear (and dressed in the clothing they disappeared in) to the gentle consternation of Professor Kirke, and the story’s over.

But, then there’s the lamppost, which adds yet another level of complexity.

Artwork by Dave Quizzle. I love the old-fashioned, 1950s lithograph look of it.

As the White Stag bookends the book’s start and finish, so does the lamppost, and it’s arguably even more of a element, almost a sentient character. Its mysterious location is never explained in the book, or why it is always lit, or even why it exists. If I wanted to, I could posit that it, too, represents God/Christ, lighting the way to the path the kids need to deepen their faith. But that doesn’t sound like Lewis either. It was an element of the original drawing he saw that inspired the book in the first place.

The hunt would have worked just fine without the lamppost, and it fact, I think that’s how many who have read the book as a child remember it. The kids chase the stag, which goes further and further into the brush, and as the kids push the branches and bracken aside they suddenly fall out of the wardrobe with their English minds and bodies back.  But, the Pevensies see the lantern as they chase the stag, and it sparks something long-buried in them.

And as soon as they had entered [the thicket] Queen Susan said, “Fair friends, here is a great marvel, for I seem to see a tree of iron.” “Madam,” said King Edmund, “if you look well upon it you shall see it is a pillar of iron with a lantern set on the top thereof.” “Marry, a strange device,” said King Peter, “to set a lantern here where the trees cluster so thick about it and so high above it that if it were lit it should give light to no man!” “Sir,” said Queen Lucy. “By likelihood when this post and this lamp were set here there were smaller trees in the place, or fewer, or none. For this is a young wood and the iron post is old.” And they stood looking upon it. Then said King Edmund, “I know not how it is, but this lamp on the post worketh upon me strangely. It runs in my mind that I have seen the like before; as it were in a dream, or in the dream of a dream.” “Sir,” answered they all, “it is even so with us also.”

Reality intrudes with a wake-up call.

Though Lewis did not intend for the Pevensie’s stag-aided return to be downbeat — the book ends not in tragedy but on a  jolly note  (“Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?”) with hints of adventures to come — many adult readers have thought it so, for good reason. For example, there’s the flowery Medieval dialogue above, which seems lifted from another book, and is hard for an adult to follow, let alone a child. I know that the first time I read the chapter (at age 11)  I whizzed through it as  blah blah blah oh, lampost! let’s follow blah blah no  let’s not, resenting the intrusion of these rather thick, funny-talking Renaissance Fair people who had suddenly taken the place of my four beloved protagonists. Maybe that’s the effect that Lewis wanted; to make the child reader would root for the Pevensies to return to their old selves, not linger in Narnia as effete dandies like the fellow at the start of this post. If this was the case, surely the dialogue was meant for laughs, not to be taken seriously. Lewis was indulging in a bit of fun by writing a pastiche, the same way he skewered Romance tropes later in later in The Silver Chair. I admit I like this idea.

It would have been great if the dialogue had ended there, and they walked past the lamp after the stag until they popped back through the wardrobe.

But wait! There’s more, and it’s a bit tragic.

Friend or foe?

It’s getting close to the end of the 2022 Summer of Narnia. Though I got to explore some topics I wouldn’t have ordinarily written about (depictions of Aslan in theatrical productions, AI used to generate images of Jadis, my own Narnia fanfic) I’ve been remiss in exploring the ones I set out to do at the summer’s beginning. One of which was this one.

For those who need a refresher, the White Stag is a singular magic creature of Narnia that appears only in the first volume of the Chronicles, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. There he comes into the story twice. Once at the beginning, in an offhand remark to Lucy from Tumnus (“He told about . . . long hunting parties after the milk-white Stag who could give you wishes if you caught him”) and again at the end, when the Pevensies, now adult kings and queens, choose to follow him into Lantern Waste and so re-enter the wardrobe, becoming children again as if only a few seconds had passed and not many years.

For child reader me,  the stag came across as just another magical element of the story, and I accepted it. Both mentions work elegantly like a pair of bookends. But adult me wonders wonders which came first, stag as local color, or stag as plot device.  In other words, if Lewis intended the creature to be a one-off mention, then decided at the end to use that one-off as a McGuffin to get the kids back; or, if he came up with the McGuffin at the end, and inserted a mention of the stag at the beginning. As a writer I would work in the former way; but whatever the case, I don’t think Lewis put a lot of thought into it. LWW was conceived as a stand-alone book and the White Stag was just one more ingredient in the mix, returning the kids in a fairy-tale fashion that matches the fairy-tale nature of the book, which I’ll go into later.

So, the first question of the day is, what’s a magical White Stag doing in Narnia anyway?

The answer is, he belongs there. Lewis based his creation on an idealized Medieval England and White Stags do figure in its myths. Herne the Hunter, a ghostly being from English folklore, sometimes took the form of a white stag who stalked the woods.  Going back further, the Celtic god Cernunnos had the horns of a stag and was associated with deer; both he and Herne are depicted in various legends as the leaders of The Wild Hunt, a folkloric trope common across European mythology. Specific details vary, but the Hunt is supernatural in origin, with supernatural creatures as the hunters and sometimes the hunted, and to see it brings strife or ill luck. If any of these names sound familiar to you, they’ve been repurposed by many contemporary fantasy writers and artists who’ve added their own twists on them.  Which is nothing new; romances of the late Medieval period did the same thing, incorporating elements like the Welsh Mabinogian, King Arthur, and the world of the Fae into their own versions of the Wild Hunt. All this is interesting, but let’s get back to the White Stag himself.

Non-magical white deer occur in nature all the time: they are albinos, animals born with a lack of melatonin, which gives them pigmentation. To ancient human hunters they  must have been awe-inspiring sights, marked as special or sacred prizes. Perhaps they weren’t killed for food but captured, or allowed to roam freely as envoys of the gods. From there it would be a short step for people of the tribe to believe such a creature might grant wishes. Folk tales all over the world are full of magic wish-granting animals, which they usually used to make humans let them go.

Oh, and a stag would not necessarily have to be albino to be white. Leucism is a condition that also lightens an animal’s pigmentation, but while albinos have a complete lack of melatonin, leucistic animals retain small amounts so they often appear as just very pale versions of their normal selves. They also don’t have the eye problems of albinos and a greater protection from the sun’s UV rays.

“I’m leucistic, and I love it!”

The pic above is some of the rare white deer that roam the Seneca Army Depot in upstate New York. The herd has been protected since 2016. When visiting family members there it was always a delight for me to  look for them as we drove by this place. In the wild, the survival of such light-colored animals would be uncertain, as they would be more visible to predators. But in a protected place, like within the fencing of a military base, they thrive and are able to reproduce.

All these influences, albino deer, sacred animals,  forest gods with antlers, and supernatural hunting parties can be thought of as swirling around in the background as nebulous archetypes that readers would already be familiar with.

In the end, though, Lewis take the majority of his White Stag character from the Arthurian legends with which he was most familiar. There, the hunt for the elusive creature serves as a metaphor, like the Holy Grail, for mankind’s spiritual quest, considered not idle pleasure but a noble pursuit. When the stag was sighted, it was signal to the knights to begin a new quest. In France, writer Chrétien de Troyes plays with the same idea, but in a more prosaic way. In one of his romances King Arthur and his knights go hunt the stag for an Easter feast, and whoever catches it wins the right to kiss any noblewoman of the court.  There’s also an echo of the White Stag in the tales of Sir Pellinore and the Questing Beast, which had the head of a snake, the body of a leopard, and the feet of a stag, and like many Medieval beasties, was notoriously difficult to capture. Again, that also went hand-in-hand for the search for spiritual perfection, and how hard it was to achieve.

St. Hubertus and the White Stag

Later yet, the White Stag became conflated with Christ himself, promoting visions leading to the conversions of several saints, as well as symbolizing, with his pure white coat and victim status, Christ’s suffering. A similar  miracle happened to King David of Scotland on seeing a pure white stag with a cross between its antlers, inspiring him to found Holyrood Abbey on the spot.

If something seems familiar about the image of a stag with a crucifix hanging between its antlers, it’s because you’ve likely seen it before, in a bottle of Jägermeister.

Now here’s an interesting story. Jägermeister meants “Master Hunter” in German, which is where the liquor, an herbal apéritif typically served before a formal meal, originated. Its creator Curt Mast was an avid hunter and named it such in the early days of Nazi Germany, where Nazis lapped it up, tickled by the name’s referenced to their own newly elected Reichsjägermeister (Reich Hunting Master) Hermann Göring.  Göring had just taken on that title, which refers not the Wild Hunt but the more prosaic duties of forestry and game warding. When it came time to design a label, Mast or someone in his employ came up with the cross-bearing stag, symbol of Saints Hubertus and Eustace… who were the patron saints of hunting!

And why did these saints see a stag? A line in the Old Testament, from the Book of Psalms, declares “As the hart pants after the fountains of water; so my soul pants after thee, O God” leading, at some point, the stag to symbolize the soul’s longing for purification through the sacraments of the Church.

 I never believed I’d draw a line connecting The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to Celtic mythology, Catholic symbolism, hunting saints, Nazi Germany, and a hard liquor currently popular in America, but that that’s what happened, honestly.

Since Lewis was also a very visual writer — remember that story of how a picture of a faun with an umbrella and packages inspired the start of the Chronicles? — he may have also been inspired by pictures like these, from children’s storybooks of the early 20th century.

Later, when the Art Deco period began in the 1920s, the design world was full of sleek does and stags symbolizing speed.

Lewis might also have been visually influenced by British heraldry. Shields, coats of arms, and family crests are displayed everywhere in England, from tins of fish to church hangings, and many of them featured white stags, like this one.

Coat of arms for the London borough of Lewisham

The crown, or coronet, on the stag’s neck is a symbol of royalty. King Richard the II adopted a similar white stag with a collar-crown as his emblem. His stag wore it connected to a chain as if the creature was on a leash, symbolizing the burden of his kingship as being both a ruler and a slave.

White stag from the Wilton Diptych, 1395–1399, painted for Richard II of England. You can just barely see the antlers.

English heraldry is chock-full of lions, unicorns, dragons, mermaids and other mythological creatures as well, some of them Grecian or Roman. It doesn’t take much imagination to posit a whole Neverland of these fantastic creatures just by idly glancing around the local castle.

Going by all this, having the Pevensies in their pseudo-Arthurian Court gallop to hunt a fair yet elusive White Stag who may grant their heart’s desires seems, as a plot device, very elegant indeed. Especially since their heart’s desires are, unknown to them (and unexpressed by Lewis-the-narrator) is the yearning for God, which can only be brought into full bloom back in England, and as adults. As Aslan says in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,  “For you the door into Aslan’s country is from your own world.”

Did Lewis really plan it that way? It’s doubtful.