Hill of the Stone Table

The Hill of the Stone Table is the central sacred site in Narnia where Aslan is sacrificed and resurrected, marking the story's pivotal turn from despair to victory.

Location and Description

The Hill of the Stone Table is a green open space on a hilltop, from which one can look down on the forest spreading in every direction except east, where the sea is visible far away. In the very middle of this open hilltop stands the Stone Table itself—a great grim slab of grey stone supported on four upright stones, looking very old and cut all over with strange lines and figures that might be the letters of an unknown language. The hill is also the site where Aslan's pavilion is pitched, a wonderful structure with sides of yellow silk, cords of crimson, tent-pegs of ivory, and a banner bearing a red rampant lion fluttering in the breeze from the far-off sea.

The Sacrifice of Aslan

It is to this hill that Aslan leads Susan and Lucy on the night of his death, walking slowly with his head drooping until his nose nearly touches the grass. He stumbles and gives a low moan, telling the girls he is sad and lonely. At the top, a great crowd of evil creatures—Ogres, wolves, bull-headed men, spirits of evil trees, Cruels, Hags, Incubuses, Wraiths, Horrors, Efreets, Sprites, Orknies, Wooses, and Ettins—are gathered around the Stone Table. The White Witch herself stands by the Table. When Aslan approaches, the creatures bind him, shave his mane, muzzle him, and drag him onto the Stone Table. There, the Witch whets her stone knife and kills him, claiming that by his death the Deep Magic is appeased and she has won Narnia forever.

The Resurrection and the Broken Table

After the Witch and her followers leave, Susan and Lucy spend the night on the hill, mourning Aslan. At dawn, they hear a loud cracking noise and find the Stone Table broken into two pieces by a great crack running from end to end, with no Aslan on it. Aslan himself appears behind them, shining in the sunrise, larger than before, his mane grown again. He explains that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time, there is a Deeper Magic from before the Dawn of Time which she did not know: when a willing victim who had committed no treachery is killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards. The hill thus becomes the site of both the deepest tragedy and the most triumphant reversal in the story.

Narrative Significance

The Hill of the Stone Table functions as the story's threshold of ordeal and resurrection. It is the place where the prophecy of Aslan's coming is fulfilled, where the Witch's claim to Edmund's life is settled, and where the deeper magic that undoes her power is enacted. The hill's transformation from a place of execution to a place of rebirth mirrors the larger movement of the narrative from winter to spring, from bondage to freedom.