I give you the woods, the fruits, the rivers.
“Creatures,” says Aslan, “I give you yourselves. Speak.” To the Talking Beasts the Lion entrusts the whole of what is made. As Digory, Polly, and the others look on, Aslan wakes the higher creatures of his new world. Lewis’ account of creation in The Magician’s Nephew anticipates this end. He tells us as much with the names of his main characters, names that together suggest distortion of meaning and confusion: Shift and Puzzle. And it is this abuse that Lewis has in mind to name as the cause of the world’s end. Such a thing may not sound uniquely horrible-couldn’t we name a host of more horrendous crimes?-but it is the distortion of language, and so of truth itself, that lays at the root of all destruction. Shift, to be certain, is a peculiar kind of miscreant, but his sin is the foundational sin of all intellectual creatures, of any “Talking Beast”-namely, an abuse of words. And I think that he couldn’t truthfully do otherwise. Even so, Lewis shows here in the Western Wilds of Narnia that very same rot that took hold in Eden.
Narnia does not mean to be a simple parallel to this world of ours there is no neat correspondence between one side of the wardrobe and the other. With an allusion to the story of Eden, Lewis begins The Last Battle by presenting us with the cleverest of creatures in the fork of a tree (cf. What culminates in the dramatic sounding of time’s giant horn begins much earlier with the slow unraveling of what was given at the dawn of creation-both in our world and in that one.
So begins the end of all things in Narnia. He had a little house, built of wood and thatched with leaves, up in the fork of a great tree, and his name was Shift. He was so old that no one could remember when he had first come to live in those parts, and he was the cleverest, ugliest, most wrinkled Ape you can imagine. In the last days of Narnia, far up to the west beyond Lantern Waste and close beside the great waterfall, there lived an Ape.
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