Prince Caspian Study Guide

C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast, and he spent his childhood in Ireland. From a young age, he loved to read; he and his older brother also invented a world full of anthropomorphized animals which they called Boxen. After his mother’s death when he was eight years old, Lewis’ father sent him to boarding school in England, where he became an atheist. Lewis enrolled in college at Oxford, but his time there was quickly interrupted by World War I, where he fought in the trenches in France until he was wounded and decommissioned. Following this stint in the army, he returned to school. When he completed his studies, he became a professor, first at University College, then at Magdalene College, Oxford University. In his 20s, he met and befriended fellow Oxford professor and writer J. R. R. Tolkien. Under the influence of Tolkien and others, he returned to Christianity, though not without struggle and enduring doubts. During World War II, he and his brother sheltered children who had been evacuated from London during the Blitz. In his 50s, Lewis met Joy Davidson Gresham, an American intellectual who converted to Christianity from Judaism. They married, first in a civil ceremony in 1956 and later in a religious one the following year, following her diagnosis of bone cancer. Following her death in 1960, he continued to raise her two sons from a previous marriage. Lewis himself died three years later of kidney failure. During his life he made important contributions to the scholarly field of medieval studies, penned science fiction and fantasy novels for children and adults, and wrote many autobiographical and theological works. His Christian faith, enduring love of the natural world, and deep fascination with Greek and Scandinavian mythology are evident in most of his fiction works.

Like its predecessor novel, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian is set against the backdrop of World War II, which was fought in Europe and Asia from 1939 to 1945. However, the description of the Telmarine conquest of Narnia and the eventual merging of the human and Narnian populations into one vibrant country borrow more from the Norman Conquest of England almost a thousand years earlier. In 1066, William Duke of Normandy invaded England and eventually overpowered the warring Saxon factions to install himself on the throne. Over subsequent generations, the invading Norman ruling class and native Saxon populations merged, creating the foundation of the modern English identity. Finally, Prince Caspian harks briefly back to the so-called Golden Age of Piracy (c. 1650-1730) when maritime piracy was endemic in both the Atlantic and Indian oceans: the Telmarines descend from a crew of shipwrecked pirates.

Prince Caspian is one of seven books in the Chronicles of Narnia series, which C. S. Lewis wrote during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is set hundreds of Narnian years (and about one Earth year) after the events of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—the book which introduces Aslan, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy—and Prince Caspian refers to events in that book, including the hundred-year winter of the White Witch and Aslan’s death and resurrection. The next two books in the series, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair, pick up three and dozens of years after Prince Caspian, respectively. C. S. Lewis was deeply influenced by the earlier fantasy books of Scottish minister and writer George MacDonald, including The Princess and the Goblin. And Lewis’s work in turn laid the foundation for subsequent fantasy series for young readers, including Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea and the rest of the Earthsea Cycle, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and Tony DiTerlizzi’s Spiderwick Chronicles.