The last fight

This article covers the part of the Narnia series The Final Fight , written by CS Lewis . For the thematically different, eponymous feature film by Luc Besson see The Last Fight (film) , for the film in the crime series A strong team see A strong team: The last fight .

The last fight or The fight for Narnia or The door on the meadow. A story from the Wonderland Narnia (English. The Last Battle ) is the last, seventh volume of the book series The Chronicles of Narnia written by CS Lewis . It was written in 1956 and published in the same year.

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The monkey cunning persuades the donkey Wirrkopf to disguise itself with an old lion skin . Then Listig claims to the other Narnians that Aslan has returned and lets the donkey appear as a lion. With this deception, Cunning intends to win the trust of the Narnians so that they will submit to him. When he succeeds in this, Listig surrenders the land of Narnia and the animals to the foreign calorms. The animals are enslaved and tortured, they have to work for the strangers in Narnia.

King Tirian, who is in the monkey's forest at this time, learns about it and attacks the workers with his unicorn gem. However, they are captured and separated. When Tirian wakes up in the middle of the night, he sees some kind of vision of a group of people and asks them for help. Shortly afterwards, two teenagers appear out of nowhere; they free Tirian and his unicorn from bondage and even the donkey is taken away out of pity. The young people identify themselves as Jill and Eustachius. Together they flee from the calorms to a nearby watchtower, where they equip themselves with armor, weapons and food. A centaur tells them that Tirian's Cair Paravel Castle has been attacked and destroyed by the Kalorms. Thereupon they attack the enemy's camp again and fight with dwarves and talking animals against a multitude of enemies.

You will eventually be surrounded and overwhelmed. Then you force them, one by one, into a stable. In this, the calormenic god Tash is supposed to wait for them to destroy them.

But when they enter the stable, they do not find themselves in a dark, old stable, but in a sun-drenched green land full of forests, where they meet again all the friends they once met in Narnia. Only Susan stayed because she had now assumed that she would stay on earth. The land is revealed as Aslan's Land, and there they meet all of the old friends they met on their travels. Aslan then explains to them that this is the real Narnia and that they can now stay here forever. In their original world, the earthly world, they died in a train accident and thus left earthly life behind them.

Christian interpretation

Lewis gives his view of Christian eschatology in this last part of the Narnia Chronicle . Both the end of the Narnia world and the new world are detailed.

In his theology, Lewis starts from a personified evil. For this reason, it takes on the literary figure of the "idol god Tash", the evil god of the Kalormen, who when summoned to the horror of his summoner really appears. While Tash personifies evil, Aslan stands for good. Aslan explains to a noble Kalormenen who was an admirer of Tash that he did all good that he did in his name, and that all evil that happened in Aslan's name belongs to Tash. So it doesn't matter who or in whose name you do the good (or the bad), the act itself is decisive.

Lewis describes the afterlife with God as freedom and adventure, as never-ending happiness. He explains this idea in his novel: But for them (ie all creatures who now live in the “real Narnia”) it was only the beginning of the true story. All her life in this earthly world and all her adventures in Narnia had been but the cover and the title page. Only now did they begin the first chapter of the great story that no one on earth has yet read, the story that goes on forever and in which every chapter is better than the previous one.

This life bears the characteristics of eternity in the non-metric sense, bliss and closeness to God. In the book this is expressed as follows: When Aslan explains to the children that they died in their world and that they came to Narnia for this reason, he emphasizes that they no longer have to leave this country - they should stay forever. Yet their story will continue and they will continue to gain experience and adventure. The happiness that all beings feel in the new land is expressed by the feeling they get when they see the "real London" or the "real Narnia". These images bear parallels to the heavenly Jerusalem of the Bible. The closeness to God is explained by the fact that they have now arrived in the land of Aslan's father (= God the Father, i.e. in heaven or the new heaven and the new earth (cf. Revelation chap. 21)), i.e. across the seas. The reference that Aslan “no longer looks like a lion” indicates what was already indicated at the end of the journey to the dawn , namely that Aslan and Jesus Christ are identical with one another.

The motif of the "realm of shadows", a recurring motif in CS Lewis, which can be found both in the Bible (e.g. in the letter to the Hebrews ) and in Plato ( allegory of the cave ), according to which the earthly - be it the earth or the "worldly" Narnia, which both have a beginning and an end - only an image or shadow of heavenly things (in the Bible this is explained using the Old Testament tabernacle , the true version of which is in heaven), also comes to light here, as Lewis Aslan says lets that they are dead by “shadow kingdom” standards; that the dream was over and the morning had begun.

Reviews

• Review of SF (science & fiction) radio
• Summary of the plot
• www.fantasyguide.de Review of all Narnia books
• Readers' review of the Adeba online book trade

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Graz City Library : http://stadtbibliothek.graz.at/index.asp?MEDIENNR=0017523
2. ↑ ^{a b} Karlsruhe City Library: http://opac.karlsruhe.de/opac/g_ftitle.S?151027=YES&LANG=de&FUNC=full
3. ↑ ^{a b} Narnia Translations: Archived copy ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ cf. Mt 25,31-46  EU : ⁴⁰ The king will answer them: Amen, I say to you, what you did for one of the least of my brothers, you did it to me.

Sources / literature

• The Chronicles of Narnia Volume 7 - The Last Battle ISBN 978-3-8000-5380-3
• The Chronicles of Narnia (hardcover) ISBN 3-8000-5186-9