Currently, this page says that Lewis didn't intend for Aslan to represent Christ, and that he only realized it after readers pointed it out to him.
I seriously doubt this, and there's no source offered. There are too many resemblances for me to believe it's coincidence, without some kind of quote. (Son of the Emperor, rightful ruler, who dies to save another and rises from the dead, just to start...) And he *did* flatly describe Aslan this way:
If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [a character in The Pilgrim's Progress] represents despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, 'What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?' This is not allegory at all.
I am fairly sure that the person who wrote this is remembering the following comment by Lewis:
Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument, then collected information about child psychology and decided what age group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out 'allegories' to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way. It all began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn't anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord.
But in that quote, he's saying that when he began *writing* he didn't intend to write a Christian work. It's fairly common for a writer to say that the book he sat down to write isn't the one he ended up writing, and it's quite common for the writer to say that the book (or the characters) forced the writer to change. But IMO it's clear that when he finished TLTWATW, he knew just what and who Aslan was.
Currently, this page says that Lewis didn't intend for Aslan to represent Christ, and that he only realized it after readers pointed it out to him.
I seriously doubt this, and there's no source offered. There are too many resemblances for me to believe it's coincidence, without some kind of quote. (Son of the Emperor, rightful ruler, who dies to save another and rises from the dead, just to start...) And he *did* flatly describe Aslan this way:
I am fairly sure that the person who wrote this is remembering the following comment by Lewis:
But in that quote, he's saying that when he began *writing* he didn't intend to write a Christian work. It's fairly common for a writer to say that the book he sat down to write isn't the one he ended up writing, and it's quite common for the writer to say that the book (or the characters) forced the writer to change. But IMO it's clear that when he finished TLTWATW, he knew just what and who Aslan was.