Though by now I should have learned to start ignoring some comments, it bothers me that many still can't understand - and don't bother to do a little research before they talk - that Aslan is a suppositional incarnation of Christ. 'If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity, 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.' (C. S. Lewis) 'Since Narnia is a world of Talking Beasts, I thought He [Christ] would become a Talking Beast there, as He became a man here. I pictured Him becoming a lion there because (a) the lion is supposed to be the king of beasts; (b) Christ is called "The Lion of Judah" in the Bible; (c) I'd been having strange dreams about lions when I began writing the work.' (C. S. Lewis) That The Chronicles of Narnia are Christian stories is beyond doubt. But what's often misunderstood as well is the role other mythologies play there, since Lewis surely did draw from them. Lewis and Tolkien viewed myths outside the Christian tradition as the truth of God reflected through splintered fragments, i.e. revealed only partially. I particularly like Jem Bloomfield's analysis of this topic in Paths in the Snow, when he considers Mr Tumnus, claiming he echoes and evokes Kenneth Grahame's Piper at the Gates of Dawn - in his considerably pantheistic Wind in the Willows - but to a wholly different purpose. Of course, with Tumnus Lewis doesn't reject or deride other mythologies, but he does displace those mythologies to 'the edge of Narnia' (Bloomfield). Like pagan Virgil in The Divine Comedy leads Catholic Dante upwards, Tumnus is, in a way, Lucy's first guide ('Lucy,' whose origins can be traced to Latin: 'lux' - 'light'). Unlike what happens in Wind in the Willows with the Piper/Pan, Tumnus doesn't occupy a central, mystical role in Narnia, he 'is not the end of the quest, but merely the beginning of it.' 'We can read Tumnus as a figure who emphasises the attractions and the possibilities of the woods and the fields, but who suggests that they are not an end in themselves. He is not the divinity himself, but rather the piper at the gates of Narnia' (Bloomfield), while Aslan is neither defined nor contained by his physical surroundings, which he, with his Father, created.