The Last Battle

Summary

The Last Battle tells of the end of Narnia, some two hundred years after the reign of Caspian X. Beside Caldron Pool, under the great waterfall in the far west, lives Shift, a clever, ugly old Ape, with his simple friend Puzzle the Donkey, whom he bullies. When a lion's skin washes down the falls, Shift sews it into a coat for Puzzle and, showing him by firelight in a stable on a hill, announces to the Narnians that Aslan has returned. Speaking for this false Aslan, Shift orders the Talking Beasts to labor for the Calormenes, sells Narnia's trees and creatures to the southern empire, and, with the Calormene captain Rishda Tarkaan and the clever cat Ginger, teaches that Aslan and the Calormene god Tash are the same, Tashlan. King Tirian, the last king of Narnia, hears from the Dryad of a felled beech that the Talking Trees of Lantern Waste are being cut down. With his friend Jewel the Unicorn he rushes off, finds Calormenes whipping a Talking Horse, kills two of them in a rage, and then gives himself up as a murderer. Shift has him tied to a tree. In the night Tirian calls on Aslan and sees, as in a dream, seven people from our world at supper, the Friends of Narnia. Soon Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole appear and free him. Disguised as Calormenes, they rescue Puzzle from the stable and set free a band of Dwarfs, but the Dwarfs, sick of being fooled, will believe in no Aslan at all, and only Poggin joins the king. The Eagle Farsight brings news that Cair Paravel has fallen and Roonwit the Centaur is dead. At a night meeting on Stable Hill, Ginger enters the stable expecting nothing and runs out terrified and unable to speak. The young Calormene officer Emeth insists on going in to meet Tash and does not come out. In the final battle the Dwarfs shoot both sides, Shift is thrown into the stable and devoured by Tash, and Tirian drags Rishda through the door. Inside he finds not a stable but a sunlit country, where the High King Peter dismisses Tash, and Aslan's feast seems only stable food to the Dwarfs, who will not be taken in. Aslan calls Father Time; the stars fall, every creature passes either into Aslan's shadow or through the door, the sun is put out, and Peter shuts the door on Narnia. Emeth tells how Aslan received him, and the company runs further up and further in, into a real Narnia of which the old was only a copy. Susan is absent, having stopped believing. Aslan tells the others that the railway accident in England has killed them and that their true story is just beginning. The Bodley Head published the book in London on 4 September 1956, illustrated by Pauline Baynes, and it won the Carnegie Medal.

Top Lessons

• A lie dressed in a lion's skin

  Shift does not deny Aslan; he uses Aslan's name to command what Aslan would never command. Because the Narnians have been told that Aslan is not a tame lion, they find it hard to say that these orders are wrong. The book teaches that a true thing can be bent into a lie, and that real faith must know the character of the one it trusts.

• The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs

  After being fooled once, the Dwarfs decide to trust no one, and at the end they sit in a bright country believing they are shut in a dark stable. Lewis shows that refusing to be taken in can become its own prison, and that even Aslan's feast cannot reach those who will not receive it.

• Rash anger and honest surrender

  Tirian kills two Calormenes in a fury before he has thought, and then, ashamed, gives himself up to be judged. His hasty act begins the story's troubles, but his honesty and his willingness to fight on with only a few friends make him a true king.

• The end that is a beginning

  Narnia does not simply fade; Aslan ends it, and those who love him pass through the door into a country more real than the one they lost. Lewis offers children a picture of death and the end of the world in which the deepest longing of the heart is answered and the story goes on.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The book is unusual among children's novels in making death, and the death of the main characters, its subject. Aslan tells the Friends of Narnia that they have been killed in a railway accident, and the narrative treats this not as tragedy but as homecoming; for readers who work with grief or with children facing death, this is the book's chief medical interest, though its view of death is theological rather than clinical. Two smaller episodes touch the mind. Ginger, who goes into the stable as a scoffer, runs out in terror and has lost the power of speech, becoming a mere animal again, a sudden loss of language that the book treats as a judgment rather than an illness. And the Dwarfs in Chapter 13 perceive a sunlit meadow as a dark, smelly stable and taste Aslan's feast as hay and old turnips, an image of perception governed by refusal that readers sometimes compare to delusion; Lewis means it as a spiritual condition.

• Chapter 9: The Great Meeting on Stable Hill

  Ginger swaggers into the stable and bolts out terrified, unable to speak; the Talking Beasts watch him become a dumb animal.

• Chapter 13: How the Dwarfs Refused to Be Taken In

  The Dwarfs sit in the open country convinced they are in a dark stable, and Aslan's feast tastes to them like stable fodder.

• Chapter 14: Night Falls on Narnia

  Tirian and the children watch the death of the Narnian world and grieve for it before Peter shuts the door.

• Chapter 16: Farewell to Shadowlands

  Aslan reveals that the children and their parents were killed in a railway accident and that they will stay in his country.