Great Snow Dance

The Great Snow Dance is an annual Narnian winter celebration that combines elaborate dancing, live music, and carefully aimed snowballs. Jill first sees it on the night she and her companions emerge from the underground: a festive public ritual becomes the unmistakable sign that they have reached Narnia again.

The annual custom

The dance takes place every year on the first moonlit night when snow lies on the ground. It is both a dance and a game: the Dwarfs send snowballs through the dancers’ patterns, aiming so precisely that nobody is hit if the dancers keep to their places at the right moments. When a dancer slips out of position, a snowball may land, and the company laughs. A skilled group can maintain the pattern for hours without a hit.

Participants and performance

Fauns and Dryads perform the dance, accompanied by four fiddles, three flutes, and a drum. A ring of Dwarfs circles them in fine clothes, mostly scarlet, with fur-lined hoods, golden tassels, and large furry boots. The snowballs are not thrown to disrupt the dancers: their passage through the moving figures is part of the coordinated performance, linking the Dwarfs’ aim to the dancers’ steps and the musicians’ rhythm.

The night in Narnia

On fine nights, the cold, drum-taps, owls’ hooting, and moonlight can carry the woodland gathering on until daybreak. The dance is thus more than a display of skill: its duration and recurring setting make it a shared seasonal celebration, renewing itself whenever snow and moonlight coincide.

Jill’s discovery

Jill watches from a hole in a steep bank as the music and movement resolve into a scene above ground. She recognizes the moonlight, snow, trees, and stars, and understands that the travelers have come out in the heart of Narnia. She turns to tell the others that they are home, but a snowball strikes her mouth before she can finish; after spluttering, she calls to the dancers for help because her companions remain buried in the hill. The encounter makes the dance both a joyful welcome and the practical means by which the people above learn that others are trapped below.