Dwarfs

Dwarfs are figures from fairy tales that became intensely real to Lewis during a period of solitude at home. His recollection gives them a distinctive appearance and an unusual effect: their imagined presence brought him close to hallucination, yet the fear they stirred was one he could face.

Appearance and Literary Imagination

Lewis recalls the Dwarfs of the fairy tales he read at home as old, bright-hooded, and snowy-bearded. He distinguishes these figures from later illustrations and adaptations, locating their appeal in the imaginative world of his own childhood reading rather than in a visual version supplied by others. The image is sharply particular: the hoods shine, the beards are white, and the figures seem to belong to an older Faerie.

The Home Solitude

The Dwarfs became central to Lewis’s reading during six weeks at home after illness interrupted his first and only term at Campbell. His brother was away, and the relationship with his father was, for that interval, unusually affectionate and untroubled. When his father was out, the empty, silent rooms offered a welcome contrast to the crowded noise of school; Lewis could read, write, and draw to his heart’s content. He remembers this period, rather than his earlier childhood, as the time when fairy tales most delighted him.

Imaginative Presence and Fear

His absorption in the Dwarfs was powerful enough to approach hallucination. Once, while walking in the garden, he was for a second unsure whether a little man had run past him into the shrubbery. The moment alarmed him faintly, but he distinguishes this apprehension from his night fears: fear on the road to Faerie was something he could bear. The recollection makes imagination more than passive entertainment; it briefly unsettles the border between a story’s world and the visible garden, while leaving Lewis able to meet the resulting fear.

Narrative Significance

The Dwarfs belong to a wider pattern in Lewis’s memoir in which places and sensations divide experience into sharply contrasting worlds. School is remembered through crowded noise, while the empty house offers restorative quiet; elsewhere, sea, landscape, and remembered scenes acquire similarly powerful emotional force. The Dwarfs make that inward imaginative life concrete: for a moment, an imagined inhabitant seems capable of entering the shrubbery, and the child’s response shows that wonder and fear can coexist without becoming the same thing.