Giant Lizards

Giant Lizards are among the creatures left in Narnia after the stars answer Aslan’s call and the final judgment separates those who enter through the Door from those who do not. Their decisive appearance comes in the world’s destruction: alongside the Dragons, they tear up the trees until the forests vanish, the grass dies, and the land is reduced to bare rock and earth. They belong to the catastrophic last phase of Narnia, not to the company that passes into the country beyond the Door.

Place in the Final Judgment

Aslan calls the stars home, and their departure leaves the sky progressively empty. When the creatures run toward the Door, each looks into Aslan’s face: some recoil into his shadow, while others enter on his right. The narrative then turns back to the world being left behind. The Giant Lizards and Dragons have Narnia to themselves, a stark contrast with the living community gathering around Aslan and the returned friends.

Destruction of the Land

The Giant Lizards and Dragons go to and fro, tearing trees up by their roots and crunching them as if they were sticks of rhubarb. The destruction is swift and comprehensive: minute by minute the forests disappear, the grass dies, and the shape of the country emerges in its little humps and hollows. Tirian watches the transformation until Narnia is a waste of bare rock and earth, difficult to imagine as a place where anything had ever lived.

The monsters do not endure the world they have stripped. They grow old, lie down, and die; their flesh shrivels until only enormous skeletons remain on the dead rock. Their devastation is therefore not a new order of life but a terminal interval in which the land is emptied and its destroyers perish with it.

The World’s End

After a long stillness, the sea rises from the eastern end of the world. Rivers widen, lakes merge, valleys become lakes, and hills disappear beneath the mounting water, which reaches the Doorway but does not cross its threshold. The chapter’s sequence places the Giant Lizards’ destruction of the forests before this inundation: first the land is made bare, then water covers it.

The Time-giant throws his horn into the sea and, at Aslan’s command to make an end, reaches across the sky and squeezes the sun until darkness falls. The Giant Lizards’ role is part of this larger unmaking of the old world. They neither cross the Door nor share the final beginning announced for those within: after the railway accident is revealed as real and the children learn that they are dead, their Narnian adventures are described as the title page of the Great Story, which continues beyond the ending of this world.