The Magician's Nephew | Chapter 3: The Wood Between the Worlds

Chapter Summary: 

Chapter 3 of The Magician's Nephew opens with Digory putting on the yellow ring and emerging through darkness and water into a woods filled with puddles (one of which he emerges from, completely dry). Digory enters the strange, quiet place to find Polly half-asleep nearby. 

Upon interacting, Polly and Digory struggle through an enchanted amnesia to remember who they are and what their situation is. Once they have done so, Digory hypothesizes that the woods is really an in-between place, and the puddles throughout the woods are gateways to other worlds.

Before Polly agrees to try to enter another puddle, she insists that she and Digory attempt to return--at least part of the way--to their own world, just to ensure that the green rings work as Uncle Andrew had described. 

Once Polly and Digory prove to themselves that the green rings work, they mark the earth-bound puddle in the woods, and then put on yellow rings and jump into another puddle with no outcome. (The narrator describes that the yellow rings bring beings to the woods, while the green rings take beings out of the woods.) Polly and Digory promptly switch to the green rings, and jump into the puddle again.

Reflection:

Reading Chapter 3 of The Magician's Nephew brings to mind other literary forms of limbo (call it purgatory if you must, but that brings about another set of complexities, so I won't use that word), and it's interesting to think about the similarities and differences. Going through all of the fine points and details is for a lengthy academic essay (which this is not), but I can at least make a few interesting connections in a short span of time.

The wood between the worlds is described in many ways within this chapter, but can be summarized in the following passage: "It was the quietest wood you could possibly imagine. There were no birds, no insects, no animals, and no wind. You could almost feel the trees growing... The wood was very much alive" (p. 19). It is also clearly a magical place, where water is not wet, where memory is hard to come by, and where puddles are (we anticipate) portals into other worlds.

Reading about these woods should bring other places to mind, yes? For those Harry Potter fans out there, don't you think of Harry Potter's conversation with Dumbledore in King's Cross Station (or a version of it) near the end of Deathly Hallows? That place is also a quiet one, if I recall correctly, and is a place where one could travel to different places (in Dumbledore's words, "on"). 

For those Tolkien fans, you no doubt have thought to yourself, "hmmm, magical rings... where have I heard that before..." Of course, if you are a Tolkien fan and are also reading C.S. Lewis, you know that the two writers were (as the kids say) BFFs, and that they traded ideas on a very frequent basis (that's the extremely short version of their lifelong friendship). Therefore you shouldn't be surprised to be thinking of The Lord of the Rings, and how the power of the one ring is not only invisibility, but to transport the wearer to an evil spiritual world, one in which the ring wraiths hold dominion. This is a different form of an alternate universe in a number of ways from the woods between the worlds and King's Cross station, but it is also a parallel world (shrouded in mist, like King's Cross) in which the characters enter, and then have a choice to make upon arrival--leave, stay, or go elsewhere.

And the influences go on and on--outside of literature and into pop culture and television. I immediately think of the TV show Lost, in which the characters in the final episodes are caught in a parallel world, by which they may move "on" by entering the church, or stay if they are, for whatever reason, unable or not ready (i.e. Ben). Many of the characters enter the church (board the train; jump into the puddle)--moving together out of limbo, and moving onward.

Though none of these parallels are perfect, the one constant is choice. In all of these stories--TCON, HP, LOTR, and Lost--the characters who enter these limbo-like lands are given a choice: Jump back into the earth-bound puddle, remain in the woods, or jump into an other-world-bound puddle. Board the train or don't board the train. Keep the ring on or take the ring off. Enter the church, or remain outside. The real-life connection, then, is that life as a whole is about the choices we make, and the impacts that those choices have, for good or for evil.