[William Cloud Hicklin]

Just have to ask this question here: what is the point/purpose in the narrative of having one of the children fall away from Narnia? And in the particular manner of the falling away? If Lewis thought he was preparing minds to accept a greater story later when they came to it in adolescence, what was he doing in having one of the girls 'stray'? Why were the falling aways of the boys earlier forgiveable but not Susan's?

Given that the Last Battle is of course an allegory or at least an analogy of the Christian Judgment Day, it would have been, well, dishonest for Lewis not to cover the Goats as wll as the Sheep. More specifically Lewis, who was always interested in individual faith and action as they relate to salvation (see Screwtape) was making a point which is key in Lewisian theology: that indifference is often more fatal than defiant Miltonesque sin. Satan is no atheist! Edmund certainly committed a very bad act: but it was forgivable because *everything* is forgivable- provided one wants to be forgiven. Susan had simply ceased to care.

Why Susan? Well, it had to be somebody, and Susan was really the extra one. Peter (name no accident) was the High King/Viceroy/Vicar/ Pope of Aslanism. Lucy was always the Good One, the one whose belief was purest. Edmund- well, it would have blown the point of Vol 1 if he's condemned anyway in the end. That leaves Susan, the least interesting Pevensey anyway.

Is he preparing for readers to believe all the historically received notions of Eve being the greater sinner, and of women being morally inferior and culpable for the fall, being the more deceived? Really, was he preconditioning girls to believing that they must cover their heads in church out of their responsibility for Eve's sin? And submit to the "churching" ceremony to cleanse themselves after childbirth before they can return to public church services?

Is this a deliberate strawman? Are you accusing Lewis of believing or advocating such snakehandler nonsense?

Precisely. And its view of an idyllic social organization without any strife, where there is clearly private ownership of property rather than communal ownership, provides the kind of silence which speaks volumes.

I'd like to think you're not trolling here, but I equally wouldn't want to think you're serious.

In the first place, the Shire is intended to be Home: comfortable, familiar, a little childish, even if JRRT can't help a few puckish jabs at bourgeois mentality. (Strife, if without bloodshed, clearly does take place, from Frodo's mushroom-raids to the the Bilbo/S-B feud to the very existence of lawyers.) A great statewide commune would have been as alien as Carter's Mars, and required a great deal of explanation and delving into political economy that Tolkien plainly had no interest in doing. No 'Warwickshire village about the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee' was remotely Communard!

In the second place, the notion that 'strife' is an inevitable result of private property and can be avoided only by communal ownership is a Marxist notion which not only would have been rejected by Tolkien, but also by the overwhelming majority of rational human beings. Why should he bother to be anything but silent about a fringe theory held only by a handful of people on the looney Left? The rest of us live in a world of property ownership. Again, as I posted monts ago: Tolkien wasn't writing a political novel.