Burying the magic Rings

Burying the magic Rings is the children’s final deliberate act to prevent Uncle Andrew’s dangerous experiment from being repeated. Ordered by Aslan to take the Rings and bury them, Digory and Polly place every Ring in a circle around the young tree grown from the Apple of Life’s core, joining the instruments of world-crossing to a living remnant of Narnia. The scene closes the Rings’ immediate use while preserving a quieter, transformed legacy of magic in the tree and, later, in the wardrobe made from its wood.

From experiment to warning

The Rings began as objects whose operation Uncle Andrew claimed to understand. He explained that a Yellow Ring had to touch the skin to make its wearer vanish from this world, while a Green Ring should bring someone back from the Other Place. His explanation was partly conjecture: he admitted that the Green Ring’s effect had not yet been tested. Gloves, he said, allowed him to handle the Rings without activating them, and he put two Green Rings into Digory’s right-hand pocket, teaching the children the mnemonic “G.R.” for Green and right.

The journeys soon exposed the limits of that theory. Uncle Andrew had misunderstood the Rings’ relation to the Wood between the Worlds: the Yellow Rings drew people into the Wood, while the Green Rings carried them out of it into a world. Their material came from the Wood itself, but the two colors worked in opposite directions according to the properties of that material. The children’s later command to bury the Rings therefore answers not only the danger of Andrew’s irresponsibility, but also the danger of treating an unfamiliar power as a tool whose consequences are already known.

Aslan’s command

After the children return to London, Aslan explains that the world they had visited through a pool is gone, destroyed by the Deplorable Word, and warns that their own world is not beyond a similar evil. He cautions that tyrants may rule great nations before Digory and Polly grow old, with as little regard for joy, justice, and mercy as Jadis. The warning gives the Rings’ disposal a significance beyond ending one private experiment: the means of reaching other worlds should not remain available for anyone to misuse.

Aslan makes the instruction direct and practical: the children must take the magic Rings from their uncle and bury them so no one can use them again. Digory responds to the command after the party has returned to the Ketterley house. He asks Polly to retrieve the Rings because he wants to go to his mother; Polly agrees to collect them. The two tasks proceed side by side, but Digory first takes the Apple of Life to his mother, leaving Polly to go up to the attic for the Rings.

The burial around the young tree

When Polly rejoins Digory, she has all the Rings and wears gloves, following the principle Andrew had described for handling them without touching them directly. Digory has marked the spot where he buried the Apple’s core the previous day. They go there together, but discover that the young tree has already risen well above the ground, so the marker is no longer necessary to find it. With a trowel, they bury all the Rings in a circle around the growing plant.

The arrangement links two very different kinds of inheritance. The Rings had served as devices for passage between worlds; buried, they can no longer be used for that purpose. The tree, by contrast, continues to grow. It comes from the core of the Apple that Digory carried from Narnia, and its place in the garden is the result of the children’s earlier actions. Rather than merely discard the Rings, Digory and Polly surround the living growth with the tools whose use had brought them into contact with Narnia and its dangers.

Consequences and material legacy

The burial does not erase every consequence of the Apple or the journey. In the human world, the tree grows into a fine tree, but it does not bear fruit able to revive a dying woman as the Narnian fruit did. Its apples are exceptionally beautiful and good for people, though not fully magical. The tree nevertheless retains a connection to its Narnian counterpart: its wood holds magic, and the English tree sometimes moves without wind, as though echoing the movement of the Narnian tree in a gale.

When Digory is middle-aged and owns the old Ketterley house, a great storm blows the tree down. He cannot bear to have its timber simply chopped up for firewood, so he has part of it made into a wardrobe for his country house. He does not discover the wardrobe’s magical properties, but someone else does, beginning the later comings and goings between Narnia and the human world. The buried Rings are thus removed from use, while the tree that rose from the Apple’s core carries magic forward in a changed form: not as an instrument Digory and Polly can wield, but as wood that becomes the material origin of another passage between worlds.

Meaning of the act

The burial is a resolution shaped by restraint. Andrew had treated knowledge of magic as a privilege that placed him above ordinary obligations, and his mistaken account of the Rings helped make the children’s travels possible without making him a reliable guide to their risks. Aslan’s instruction reverses that presumption: the children are responsible for closing off the means of travel, and they carry out the work together with gloves and a trowel rather than with Andrew’s speculative handling of power.

The ending also distinguishes between destroying a danger and controlling what can be inherited from it. The Rings are put beyond use; the Apple’s tree is allowed to grow. That difference is consequential. The tree bears no fully restorative apples in England, yet its surviving magic passes into its timber and, eventually, into the wardrobe. The children’s burial therefore ends one chapter of the Rings’ use without sealing the boundary between worlds forever. It makes their intervention an act of protection, while the tree preserves a connection whose later effects neither child could fully foresee.