Mice Gnaw the Ropes

In the darkest hours after Aslan's execution, when the White Witch and her followers had departed to crush the remaining resistance, Susan and Lucy Pevensie kept vigil over the Lion's bound corpse. The night was bitterly cold, the moon low, and the two girls had wept until they could weep no more. In the dead calm that followed, Lucy noticed a tiny movement in the grass at her feet—something grey and small, which she at first dismissed as unimportant. But the movement continued, spreading up the upright stones of the Stone Table and then onto Aslan's body itself. Susan, seeing the creatures from the other side, cried out in revulsion, calling them "horrid little mice" and raising her hand to frighten them away. Lucy, looking more closely, realized what the mice were doing: they were nibbling away at the cords that held Aslan. Susan, astonished, agreed: "They're nibbling away at the cords!" Lucy interpreted the mice's actions as a kind of innocent, futile kindness—"Poor little things—they don't realise he's dead. They think it'll do some good untying him." But the mice were not mistaken. Dozens, then hundreds, of small field mice swarmed over the Lion's body, gnawing through rope after rope until, one by one, all the bonds were severed. As dawn broke and the sky in the East whitened, the mice crept away, their work complete. The girls cleared away the gnawed remains, and Aslan's face, freed from the muzzle the girls had earlier removed, looked nobler in the growing light. The mice's quiet, persistent labor—an act of small creatures against the tyranny of the Witch's cords—prepared the way for the deeper magic that would soon crack the Stone Table and restore Aslan to life.