Jadis’s Attack on Aslan

Jadis’s Attack on Aslan is a failed act of violence during the creation of Narnia. As Aslan approaches, still singing, Jadis throws an iron bar at his head; it strikes him and falls harmlessly away. The bar’s later growth into a lamp-post makes the attack’s consequence a striking reversal: the weapon cannot stop creation and instead becomes part of the world being made.

The attack

Jadis steps boldly toward Aslan while he advances with a slow, heavy pace, singing. When he is only twelve yards away, she raises her arm and hurls the iron bar straight at his head. The scene sets her deliberate aggression against the steady continuation of Aslan’s creative act.

The bar hits Aslan between the eyes, but glances off and lands in the grass with a thud. Though the blow is direct and delivered at close range, Aslan’s pace neither slows nor quickens; nothing indicates that he has even noticed being struck. His immense weight remains palpable in the shaking earth beneath his soft, noiseless paws, while the attack leaves the course of his song and walk unchanged.

Immediate aftermath

Jadis shrieks and runs, disappearing among the trees. The violence that had seemed bold ends in flight, while Aslan continues to pass through the newly forming world. He pays no attention to the children nearby and moves on eastward, singing rather than snarling. The contrast is not between two blows, but between the Witch’s failed attempt to command events and the uninterrupted forward movement of creation.

Uncle Andrew also tries to flee, but trips over a root and falls face-first into a small brook running down toward the river. The children remain still, frightened and uncertain whether they want Aslan to look at them as he passes. These reactions give the attack a human aftermath without making the children its target: the Lion goes by so close that they could touch his mane, yet takes no notice of them.

The bar becomes a lamp-post

The weapon’s fate extends the meaning of the failed blow. A little later, Digory finds a miniature lamp-post a few yards away. It is about three feet high and continues to lengthen and thicken as they watch, growing in the same manner as the trees. Its lamp is already alight, though the sunlight makes the small flame difficult to see unless a shadow falls across it.

Digory recognizes the object as the iron bar Jadis had torn from a lamp-post at home and thrown at Aslan. It sank into the ground where it fell and is now rising as a young lamp-post. The attack therefore leaves a material trace, but not a wound or a victory: the discarded bar is absorbed into the growth of the world it could not interrupt. Its transformation links the violence in the creation scene to a familiar feature of the landscape that is taking shape.

Significance

The episode turns an attempted act of destruction into an image of creative continuity. Jadis’s weapon strikes Aslan, but cannot alter his pace; after falling into the grass, it becomes the seed of another lamp-post. The sequence makes the attack’s defeat visible not only in Jadis’s retreat but in the altered use of the object she threw. What was meant to obstruct or injure is taken up into Narnia’s living growth.

Uncle Andrew’s response sharpens the contrast. Seeing the lamp-post grow, he imagines that anything buried in this world might return as valuable new machinery, and begins calculating its commercial possibilities. Digory, by contrast, identifies the bar’s origin and understands the growth as a consequence of what happened. The scene thus carries the attack beyond its immediate failure: its aftermath reveals a world in which even a cast-off weapon can become part of a new creation, though those who witness that transformation do not all understand it in the same way.