It’s the birthday of the man whose most beloved book opens, “Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.” Thus begins The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), the first book in C.S. Lewis’ children’s fantasy series, the Chronicles of Narnia.

Lewis (1898-1963) was born in Belfast, [Northern] Ireland, to highly educated parents and was reading by the age of three, writing stories by five. His mother died when he was about ten, and the next month he was sent to—wait for it—a British boarding school where the headmaster was not only brutal but “drifting into insanity” (britannica.com). (Kind of a nice twist on the usual merely brutal boarding school. They probably charged extra.) Lewis and his brother transferred the next year to Cherboug House near Malvern College (Belfast), and Lewis ditched his Christian faith. Lewis went to University College, Oxford, but took time off to serve in WWI, losing one of his closest friends in battle. After his discharge from the army, he lived with this friend’s mother, Janie Moore, garnering a great deal of later speculation from Lewis’ biographers about whether they were lovers in spite of a 27 year age difference. (Probably they were but I don’t have time to go to England today and nose around.) Lewis, Moore, her daughter, and Lewis’ brother eventually bought “The Kilns” together in 1930, and later, when Moore was suffering from dementia in a nursing home, Lewis visited her every day.

Lewis was smashingly successful in his studies at Oxford, taking first-class honors in several fields. He then became a fellow and tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1954, at which point he became a professor at the University of Cambridge until 1963. Meanwhile, in 1930 he ditched his atheism for theism, and in 1931 converted to Christianity, helped in part by his great friend J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a devout Catholic. In 1938, he published his first novel, Out of the Silent Planet, which began a highly-regarded science fiction trilogy about the struggle between good and evil. He published many books of theology and scholarship as well (Mere Christianity, 1952); his influence in Christian apologetics was huge, and Time magazine once named him the “hottest theologian” of the year some 40 years after his death. The Chronicles of Narnia were written in the 50s, as well as his final (and his own favorite) novel, Till We Have Faces (1956), which retells the myth of Cupid and Psyche. (It’s a beautiful novel. Go read it.) Fun fact: Tolkien hated Lewis’ Narnia stories. He felt they were too much of a mishmash of characters from different traditions, and he thought them too allegorical, though Lewis claimed they were not allegory but analogy. (Don’t you hate it when you’re having lunch with a friend, and they say allegory and you say analogy and next thing you know you’re throwing a drink in their face?)

Lewis’ character Mr. Beaver says, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: “Safe?…Who said anything about safe? ‘Course [Aslan the Lion] isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

Have a snowy, winter-in-Narnia kind of Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.