Narnia and the kiddos

[Midge]

Hey - I didn't see a related thread on the first page, so I'll just start a new one...

My son is now 4 years old. We've been playing a couple of the Narnia books on audio for him when he goes to bed every night. He's probably listened to LWW at least 50 times (it's only 4 hours long). We also have PC, and he doesn't like that one QUITE as much.

It's so cute, hearing him progress - right now, his mental growth is at a staggering rate, of course, and he understands more and more every day, and also he understands more each time he listens to the story.

He can't quite pronounce "Tumnus" - he calls him "Mr. Thomas". But he knows it's wrong and so I have to cajole him into using a name at all. He will call him "the faun". It's fascinating, hearing his thoughts on the story.

Have any of you introduced LWW or Narnia to children at such a young age? What sorts of things did you discover?

[Alcuin]

One of my cousins began reading Narnia to his children when they were young, and read it to my children when the younger was four and the older seven. The seven-year-old had already heard all of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings three years earlier, and he enjoyed Narnia; the four-year-old was rather sensitive and could not make it past the Watcher in the Water, but thoroughly enjoyed Narnia! Both of them subsequently reread both Tolkien and Lewis at older ages, and seem none the worse over twenty years later.

Children are amazingly intelligent. They can certainly follow the story, particularly the action in the tale, and determine from an early age who are the good and evil characters. Whether the excitement is overmuch depends upon the individual child: the confrontation with the Nazgûl on Weathertop was almost too much for my son, but he made it through the Watcher in the Water just fine. The Nazgûl were stressful but exciting for my daughter, but the Watcher in the Water was intolerable for her. My granddaughter never even made it past the Mirkwood spiders: that was just more than she could take, and she has not so far returned to the story herself.

I am not intimately familiar with the Narnia tales because, I must admit, I have never read them: passages, yes, and I know the general outline: but never a reader of the whole tale or even a whole book in the tale. But I think you must take the measure of your child’s interest and watch carefully to see if he can tolerate the excitement and stress.

One word of advice: read the scary parts during the bright daytime, not at night, and particularly not before bed.

[Midge]

That is good advice. Thankfully there aren't many scary parts in the Narnia books.

My husband was recently wondering if our son would be able to handle watching the Hobbit movie (PJ version). I was skeptical, and when we watched it without him, I was SO GLAD. There's a bit I completely forgot about where Azog beheads Thror, and brandishes the decapitated head. I don't think a 4-year-old should have to deal with that...

[Alcuin]

Tolkien’s Hobbit is neither as bloody nor as gruesome as Jackson’s movie version. He could probably handle the old cartoon version from the late 1970s, but you’d still need to be nearby: for a four-year-old, some parts of even that are scary. Remember, Tolkien wrote The Hobbit for his own children, the youngest of whom was about six or seven at the time. The story was written down because Tolkien’s second son, Michael, kept correcting his father’s changes in telling previous tales, and Tolkien decided the best solution was to write down the tale and read it instead.

I’m afraid I don’t know the story behind the development of Narnia, though the old professor in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is Lewis’ portrayal of Tolkien, just as Treebeard is Tolkien’s portrayal of Lewis.

[Midge]

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was written for a little girl (in his dedication he says he forgot that little girls grow faster than books). I wanted to show him the Hobbit cartoon, but we'd have to rent it (for some reason, we have a growing resistance to renting movies, so we didn't the other day...)

I think he'd enjoy the Hobbit book as well.