Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Enoch Arden"

This post contains spoilers.

Last week I finished reading Tennyson's "Enoch Arden."  I noticed an extremely small thing about a line in this part:

But Enoch yearn'd to see her [Annie's] face again:
"If I might look on her sweet face again,
And know that she is happy."  So the thought
Haunted and harass'd him, and drove him forth,
At evening when the dull November day
Was growing duller twilight, to the hill.  (lines 713-718)

What I noticed is the alliteration in line 716:  "Haunted and harass'd him."  The alliteration between the two verbs further emphasizes their meaning.  The beginning H is present in both just like the thought that haunts and harasses Enoch is constantly before him.

But that H sound is also present in "him."  The haunting and harassing thought has infected him, and this thought gives Enoch life.  When he does see Annie (who's now married to Philip) and his children, their happiness moves him to keep his distance.  He thinks that his return will be "a blast of doom" that "would shatter all the happiness of the hearth" (lines 765, 766).  He prays to God, "Help me not to break in upon her peace" (line 783).  He works for himself, "Yet since he did but labor for himself, / Work without hope, there was not life in it [and]... a languor came / Upon him, gentle sickness, gradually / Weakening the man, till he could do no more" (lines 815-816, 819-821).  The thought of seeing Annie again keeps him alive throughout his years at sea and his being shipwrecked, but once he resolves himself against seeing her so that he can preserve her happiness, he has nothing left to live for and slowly fades into death.

All of this is illustrated in the infecting alliteration in those few words:  "the thought / Haunted and harass'd him."

Extra-Textual Stories: The Odyssey

A couple times in the past year or two, I remembered my Extra-Textual Stories project, for which I've done only one book so far (F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby).  The idea behind the project is to appreciate the story of a book as a physical object, aside from the story contained in the text on the pages.  Since 10 March is to-morrow, I felt I should restart this project with The Odyssey (for reasons that will become clear later on).

I'm pretty sure I got my copy of The Odyssey (or, I should say, my first copy of The Odyssey) at a Half Price Books in southern Iowa sometime in the early 2000s (I think 2002 or 2003).  I'd heard of The Odyssey, but I didn't really know anything about it, so essentially I got it because I felt I should have been familiar with it but wasn't (although it would still be something like ten years before I actually read it).

I don't remember how much it cost, but I do remember that it was in the Penguin Classics section, which was incentive enough to get it because the Penguin Classics always lookt really impressive lined up on a shelf.

I first read this in college (during the spring 2013 semester, I believe), but I didn't really read it for college.  I was taking a class on James Joyce's Ulysses, in which there are references to The Odyssey, but since I hadn't read The Odyssey, I didn't understand a lot of them.  So I read the book in order to understand the allusions to it.

By this time, I'd also acquired a second copy of The Odyssey (Chapman's verse translation, which I decided to get completely based on Keats' recommendation of it in his "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer").  I decided to read this Penguins Classics edition because it was a prose translation (by E.V. Rieu), which I felt would be easier to understand than a verse translation.

Apparently, I have the 1978 printing.

When I started reading it, I noticed an inscription in the front cover:

March 10th, 1979
Happy Birthday, Ken!
Love, Cynthia + Scott

I'd been oblivious to this for as long as I'd owned the book.  The prices on the back cover (with the odd exception of the cost in the U.K.) had been scratched out (after an apparently unsuccessful attempt to obscure them with blue pen), which should have been some indication that this was a gift.

So now when it's 10 March, I sometimes think of the Ken to whom my copy of The Odyssey is inscribed and wonder whatever happened to him (and what sort of person he was to sell a book that was given to him as a birthday present with a lovely inscription in the front cover).

Paulette Giles' "Paper Matches"

About two weeks ago, I read Paulette Giles' "Paper Matches" in The Norton Introduction to Literature, 5th edition (which I'm still reading as part of my Anthology Odyssey project).  I don't know if I'd read it before, but it seemed sort of familiar.  Anyway, I noticed something about the metaphor Giles uses.

The narrator makes a distinction between the aunts washing dishes inside and the uncles who are goofing around outside.  Then she says that "Written on me was a message, / 'At Your Service' like a book of / paper matches" (lines 9-11).  Later lines are sort of ambiguous in that they could have a meaning within that metaphor or apart from it.

Immediately after that metaphor about matches is introduced, the narrator says, "One by one we were / taken out and struck." (lines 11-12).  Within the matches metaphor, it means that the women are used up individually, just as singular matches are "taken out" of a pack of matches and "struck" for their illumination.  However, since the inside/outside distinction between the women and men has already been established, there can also be a literal interpretation of those lines - that the women are "taken out" from the kitchen where they're washing dishes to the yard and "struck" in the sense of physically assaulted.

Next, there's "We come bearing supper. / our heads on fire." (lines 13-14).  Within the metaphor of matches, the women are again being used.  Like matches, they've been "struck," and now they're providing a service ("bearing supper") in the same way that matches bear light.  The "heads of fire" indicates that service within the match metaphor, but it also recalls "the rages that small animals have" from line 7.  "our heads on fire" indicates the anger and fury that the women have because of how they're being used.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Final Battle

When I started writing about The Chronicles of Narnia after re-reading it, I hadn't really intended it to turn into a series of posts, but nevertheless it has.  Here's the last one, on The Final Battle.

In the first chapter, an ape and a donkey find a lion's skin.  The ape, Shift, creates a coat for the donkey, Puzzle, out of the skin, and then Shift has the idea to tell people that Puzzle is Aslan.  There's a similar premise in one of Aesop's Fables, "The Ass in the Lion's Skin":

An ass found a lion's skin, and dressed himself up in it.  Then he went about frightening everyone he met, for they all took him to be a lion, men and beasts alike, and took to their heels when they saw him coming.  Elated by the success of his trick, he loudly brayed in triumph.  The fox heard him, and recognized him at once for the ass he was, and said to him, "Oho, my friend, it's you, is it?  I, too, should have been afraid if I hadn't heard your voice."

There's a difference in motivation (in The Final Battle, the donkey is coaxed into the lion's skin where the donkey in Aesop's fable does it of his own volition), but the two are similar.  Lewis seems to have used fairy tales in The Chronicles (I wrote about a Grimm fairy tale he seems to use in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader a few weeks ago), so it's likely that he knew and used this element from Aesop too.

In Chapter Seven, Tirian frees a company of dwarfs from some Calormene soldiers.  However, they don't join his side and don't even thank him for their freedom.  Tirian and his friends walk away, but then one dwarf - Poggin - comes back to join them.  "Everyone crowded round him and welcomed him and praised him and slapped him on the back.  Of course one single Dwarf could not make a very great difference, but it was somehow very cheering to have even one.  The whole party brightened up."  I think there are two Biblical references here.  The first is Jesus' healing of ten lepers.  "When he saw them he said to them, 'Go and show yourselves to the priests.'  And as they went they were cleansed.  Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice..." (Luke 17:14-15).  Jesus heals all ten lepers, but only one returns to thank Him; Tirian frees the whole company of dwarfs, but only one returns to join him.  Both also have their faith in common.  To the one leper who returned, Jesus says, "Your faith has made you well" (verse 19), and Poggin the Dwarf tells Tirian, "I'm on your side, Sire; and on Aslan's."  Since Aslan is the Christ-like figure in The Chronicles of Narnia, the faith of both the one returning leper and the one returning dwarf is the same.

The second Biblical story I think this event references is The Parable of the Lost Sheep.  Jesus tells a group of people about a man who has one hundred sheep, and after he loses one, he leaves the ninety-nine to look for the one.  "And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing.  And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.'  Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance" (Luke 15:5-7).  The like one sheep that was found, there's Poggin, the one dwarf to return.  Similar to the "rejoicing" and "joy" in the parable, Poggin's return is "very cheering" and the party "brighten[s] up."

The rest of the things I noticed are all Biblical references and are all in Chapter Fourteen (Night Falls on Narnia).  First, Father Time rises up and blows a horn, ushering in the end of Narnia.  In Revelation chapters 8 and 9, the end of the world is also ushered in with trumpets.

Next, the Narnian creatures come up to Aslan and turn either to his left (those who look at him with "fear and hatred") or his right (those who "looked in the face of Aslan and loved him").  There's the same left-or-right separation - the same final judgement - in Matthew 25:  "And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left" (Matthew 25:33).  One of those who go to Aslan's right is "one of those very Dwarfs who had helped to shoot the Horses."  Earlier, Eustace was indignant about this, but now "he had not time to wonder about that sort of thing... for a great joy put everything else out of his head."  This, even more so than the return of Poggin the Dwarf, is the "joy in heaven over one sinner who repents."

Finally, there's the comparison between blood and the sun and the moon:

[The sun] was three times - twenty times - as big as it out to be, and very dark red.  ...  in the reflection of that sun the whole waste of shoreless waters looked like blood.
     Then the Moon came up, quite in her wrong position, very close to the sun, and she also looked red.

Similar descriptions are in Revelation 6, at the end of the world:  "the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale" (Revelation 6:12).  After Father Time blows his horn in Narnia, there's a shower of falling stars:  "these were dozens, and then scores, and then hundreds, till it was like silver rain: and it went on and on."

Clearly, the end of Narnia was inspired by the end of the world as described in the Bible.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair

This post contains spoilers.

In re-reading The Silver Chair I found only a few things to write about (I did find an-other, but I have to do some more research on that, so I'll come back to it later).

First, there's Prince Rilian's fight with the Lady of the Green Kirtle in Underland in Chapter Twelve.  She turns herself into a serpent and wraps herself around his legs, but "the Prince caught the creature's neck in his left hand, trying to squeeze it till it choked."  With his other hand, he strikes the serpent with his sword, and with some help from Puddleglum and Eustace, "they hacked off its head."  The narrator then mentions that "the floor, as you may imagine, was a nasty mess."

Although it's been years since I've read it, I recognized the similarities between this event and Redcrosse Knight's battle with Error in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.  Redcrosse Knight descends into a hole and "he saw the ugly monster plaine, / Half like a serpent horribly displaide, / But th'other half did womans shape retaine" (canto 1, stanza 14)  Like Spenser's Error, Lewis' Lady of the Green Kirtle is half woman and half serpent (although she's either/or rather than a mix).  Redcrosse Knight attempts to strike her with his sword, but he misses his mark.  She then "lept fierce upon his shield, and her huge traine / All suddenly about his body wound" (canto 1, stanza 18), just like the Lady does to Prince Rilian.  Next, "Knitting all his force, [he] got one hand free, / Wherewith he grypt her gorge with so great paine, / That soone to loose her wicked bands did her constraine" (canto 1, stanza 19).  Redcrosse Knight is able to free himself merely by choking Error where Prince Rilian still has to use his sword before he's freed, but the situation is still quite similar.  In the end, just as Rilian beheads his serpent, Redcrosse Knight "strooke at her with more than manly force, / That from her body full of filthie sin / He raft her hatefull head without remorse" (canto 1, stanza 24).  Finally, Error's "scattred brood... flockéd all about her bleeding wound, / And suckéd up their dying mothers blood" (canto 1, stanza 25).  Spenser's description is more graphic than Lewis', but the large amount of blood is common to both.

Second, there's the temptation with which the Lady of the Green Kirtle seduced Rilian.  At the end of Chapter Fifteen, Rilian recounts "the whole adventure with the older and wiser Beasts and Dwarfs" of Narnia, and "they saw how she had dug right under Narnia and was going to break out and rule it through Rilian; and how he had never dreamed that the country of which she would make him king (king in name, but really her slave) was his own country."  The situation is different, but there's some resemblance between this and the devil's temptation of Jesus in Luke 4.  "And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, 'To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will.  If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours'" (Luke 4:5-7).  The devil tries to tempt Jesus with power over the world, but Jesus already had that power, just like Rilian already had (or would have) power over Narnia.

There's also the comparison between the Lady of the Green Kirtle and the White Witch from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  Rilian and "the older and wiser Beasts and Dwarfs... all saw what it meant; how a wicked Witch (doubtless the same kind as that White Witch who had brought the Great Winter on Narnia long ago) had contrived the whole thing."  In The Magician's Nephew, when the White Witch is still known as Jadis, she tries to tempt Digory with the fruit of the tree, just as the serpent tempts Eve in the Garden of Eden.  So the comparison that Rilian and the Narnians make is more than just a comparison of devious plots; both the Lady of the Green Kirtle (literally) and the White Witch (allusively) have the guise of a serpent.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

This post contains spoilers.

When I re-read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader recently, one of the things I noticed is the magician's table in Chapter Eleven.  The narrator says that "The table was bare when they entered, but it was of course a magic table, and at a word from the old man the tablecloth, silver, plates, glasses and food appeared."  It reminded me of a similar table in "The Table, the Ass, and the Stick" in the Grimm Brothers' fairy tales.  The eldest of three sons, after he becomes an apprentice to a joiner, received a table

which had certainly a very ordinary appearance, and was made of common wood; but it had one excellent quality: - If its owner placed it before him, and said, "Table, cover thyself," the good table was at once covered with a fine cloth, and plates, and knives and forks, and dishes of roast and baked meat took their places on it, and a great glass filled with red wine, which gladdened one's heart.

I'm not sure if the table in the Grimms' fairy tale inspired Lewis' table, but I think there's pretty strong evidence for it.  There's a famous Lewis quote advocating the reading of fairy tales (of which the Grimms' are among the most well-known), and the descriptions of the two tables are quite similar.  It's not specifically given, but the "word from the old man" might very well be "Table, cover thyself," and the specific items that are spread on each table are the same (table cloth, cutlery, plates, food, and glasses) and are listed in a very similar order.

Next, I noticed the birds in Chapter Fourteen (The Beginning of the End of the World).  An old man comes out to meet the travellers, and a flock of birds flies to him.  Lucy sees "one bird fly to the Old Man with something in its beak that looked like a little fruit, unless it was a little live coal, which it might have been, for it was too bright to look at.  And the bird laid it in the Old Man's mouth."  Shortly there-after, the old man introduces himself as Ramandu and explains that "every morning a bird brings me a fire-berry from the valleys in the sun, and each fire-berry takes away a little of my age.  And when I have become as young as the child that was born yesterday, then I shall take my rising again" as a star.

The "live coal" to the man's mouth is the same description that's given in Isaiah 6:  "Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar.  And he touched my mouth and said: 'Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for'" (Isaiah 6:6-7).  While the "live coal" in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader isn't actually a coal and doesn't serve the same function as the coal in Isaiah, its description as such seems to indicate the source of Lewis' image.

The other two things I noticed are in the last chapter and are also Biblical images.  First, there's the lamb that Edmund, Lucy, and Eustace meet.  After they have breakfast, the lamb's "snowy white flushed into a tawny gold and his size changed and he was Aslan himself, towering above them and scattering light from his mane."  Throughout the series, there's an overtone of Aslan as Christ, and this is an-other example of that.  In John 1, John the Baptist calls Jesus "the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29).  In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Aslan (as a Christ-like figure) is now literally a lamb.  His "scattering light from his mane" might also be a subtle reference to the Transfiguration, when Christ "was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light" - Matthew 17:2.  There's a similar description of Aslan in The Horse and His Boy.

Second, as the children are transported back to their own world, there's "a rending of the blue wall (like a curtain being torn)."  I don't think a deeper similarity is intended, but just as a description, this also seems to be Biblical.  After Jesus is crucified, "the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom" (Matthew 27:51).  There's a literal curtain tearing and a simile involving one, and both circumstances involve a sort of transition.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

Originally, I wasn't going to write about Prince Caspian because I didn't find a whole lot to write about in it, but then I finished The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (about which I did find a fair amount to write), and I figured I had to continue in the order I started.  So, while I didn't find much, here's what I found in Prince Caspian.

In Chapter Fourteen (How All Were Very Busy), Bacchus drops a pitcher into an old woman's well, and when he draws it out, "it now was not water but the richest wine, red as redcurrant jelly, smooth as oil, strong as beef, warming as tea, cool as dew."  The water-to-wine part of this was easy enough to place: Jesus does the same thing at the wedding at Cana (John 2:1-12).  What I couldn't figure out at first was: if Aslan is the Christ-like figure, why is Bacchus the one changing water into wine?  (My confusion over this is an-other reason why I initially wasn't going to write about Prince Caspian.)

Eventually, though, I think I figured it out.  First, this isn't Bacchus acting by himself.  Before Bacchus draws the water from the well, Aslan heals the old woman.  "As he [Aslan] spoke, like the flush creeping along the underside of a cloud at sunrise, the colour came back to her white face and her eyes grew bright and she sat up and said, 'Why, I do declare I feel that better.'"  The healing of the old woman is itself the miracle.  Aslan effects that, and Bacchus' changing the water into wine, which - as the old woman notes - "makes a nice change," is only an-other aspect of that healing.  Bacchus is acting under Aslan's power.  As Susan notes in Chapter Eleven, "'I wouldn't have felt safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we'd met them without Aslan.'"

Second, Bacchus' working under Aslan is an example of how Lewis combined various elements to create his own world.  Primarily, there are the Christian elements, but here he also includes mythology.  In other places, there are elements from fairy tales and animal stories.  Having Bacchus work under Aslan provides a hierarchy into which the disparate elements are organized.

The other thing I found is a phrase in Chapter Eleven (The Lion Roars).  At first, I recognized just that the phrase "she [Lucy] fixed her eyes on Aslan" is similar to a Biblical verse, but once I looked up that verse, I found a deeper connection.  The surrounding situation is significant.  Lucy is the only one who can see Aslan, and he's told her to wake up the rest of the party and follow him.  The others are annoyed at being woken up, especially because they can't see Aslan for themselves.  "Susan was the worst," so when Lucy eventually starts leading them through the woods, she's "biting her lip and trying not to say all the things she thought of saying to Susan.  But she forgot them when she fixed her eyes on Aslan."

It's a similar situation in Hebrews 12:1-2:  "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God."  Some translations (and I believe also some liturgies) have it as "let us fix our eyes on Jesus" - the same phrase that's in Prince Caspian.  Once Lucy "fix[es]" her eyes on Aslan, she forgets the not-very-nice things she was going to say to Susan, similar to how the "sin which clings so closely" is "[laid] aside" when "looking to Jesus."

Keats' "When I Have Fears"

Last month I read John Keats' "When I Have Fears" in one of my literary anthologies.  Apparently I'd noticed the structure of the poem before (in the anthology in which I read it during college, I drew lines to separate the sections), but reading it recently, I noticed that Keats doesn't strictly follow the common sonnet structure.

He uses the structure of a Shakespearean sonnet (with the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg), and he also starts each quatrain with "when" (or "and when" for the third), which enforces that division (I've added line breaks to further emphasize it):

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact'ry
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain;

When I behold, upon the night's starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the fairy power
Of unreflecting love! - then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

[In referencing this sonnet in two different anthologies, I've discovered that the punctuation doesn't match, so your experience may vary.]

Between the rhyme scheme and that leading "when" (plus the semi-colons), Keats makes that structure fairly obvious, but then he doesn't follow through with it.  There's a break in the twelfth line:  "Of unreflecting love! - then on the shore."  In a way, that third quatrain has a premature end, and the last couplet begins early.  In college, I even made a note of this:  the "then" completes the idea that's started with the various "when"s.  When [this], [this], and [this], then [this].

But the thing that I realized when I read the poem recently is that not holding to the structure there mirrors what the speaker is saying.  There's the interruption in life that the speaker mentioned (that is, death), and that "then" coming in half a line too soon is an interruption in the sonnet structure.

Names in Library of Souls

Last month, I read Ransom Rigg's Library of Souls, and I started to think about some of the characters' names.  The main character is named Jacob, and in the first book of the series - Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - he learns that he has the same peculiar power that his grandfather Abraham had.  In Library of Souls, as he becomes more familiar and more adept with his power, there are a few instances where he's compared to his grandfather and his peculiar power.

With the frequent mentions of "Abraham" and "Jacob," I remembered the Biblical "Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" - a phrase that shows up a lot in the Old Testament.  The characters in the Miss Peregrine books are like those Biblical figures in that they're successive generations.  The Biblical Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac was the father of Jacob.  This line of names is the same in the Miss Peregrine books, except for the middle one.  In the books, Abraham was the father of Frank, who is the father of Jacob.  Frank, unlike Abraham and Jacob, doesn't have peculiar powers, and he doesn't fit into that progression of Biblical names.

About three weeks after I first thought about those names, I happened to read something about how the Biblical Abraham and Jacob both had two names.  Abraham was first named Abram, and Jacob is also called Israel.  I don't think it's exactly the same situation for both figures (Abraham replaced Abram while Jacob and Israel are both used), but they do each have two names that they're known by, which got me thinking about duality.  This brought me back to the Abraham and Jacob in the Miss Peregrine books.  They too have a duality of sorts because they're part of the peculiar world and part of the normal world.

The cover of the book also has the signatures of the peculiar children (and a few other characters):

I noticed that Hugh's last name is Apiston:

It's an appropriate name because Hugh's peculiar power is the ability to control bees, and Apiston seems to come from apis, the Latin word for bee.  It's still visible in the English word apiary.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Horse and His Boy

About two weeks ago, I finished re-reading The Chronicles of Narnia: The Horse and His Boy.  As I've been re-reading The Chronicles of Narnia books this time, I've been looking for more instances of Aslan-as-Christ, which I've talked about in some other posts.  I found two in The Horse and His Boy, one of which I felt absolutely foolish for not having noticed the last time I read it.

The first (and the one I felt foolish for not having noticed before) is near the end of Chapter Eleven (The Unwelcome Fellow Traveller).  As Shasta is travelling through the woods, he becomes aware that "someone or somebody was walking beside him" and that "he had really no idea how long it had been there."  At first, Shasta can't see who it is because it's so dark, but eventually, it's revealed that the "someone or somebody" is Aslan.  After Shasta talks with him for awhile, "the pale brightness of the mist and the fiery brightness of the Lion rolled themselves together into a swirling glory and gathered themselves up and disappeared."

There are more than a few similarities between Shasta's encounter with Aslan and the two disciples going to Emmaus in Luke 24.  While the disciples are travelling they meet someone they don't know at first ("But their eyes were kept from recognizing him." - Luke 24:16).  They talk with him for awhile, but it isn't until he takes bread, blesses it, and gives it to them that they recognize him as Jesus, at which point He vanishes.

Within Shasta's conversation with Aslan, there are a few other elements that hint at Aslan-as-Christ.  When Shasta asks the lion who he is, he replies:  "'Myself,' said the voice, very deep and low so that the earth shook: and again, 'Myself', loud and clear and gay: and then the third time 'Myself', whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all round you as if the leaves rustled with it."  First, there's the Trinity in the three "Myself"s, and second, "Myself" seems to have some relation with God's "I AM WHO I AM" in Exodus 3.

There's also the light.  "Now, the whiteness around him [Shasta] became a shining whiteness; his eyes began to blink.  ...  He could see the mane and ears and head of his horse quite easily now.  A golden light fell on them from the left.  He thought it was the sun.  ...  It was from the Lion that the light came."  There's a similarity between this and Christ's Transfiguration:  "And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light" - Matthew 17:2.  Both descriptions involve the same elements:  the sun, whiteness, and a shining light.

The narrator then describes Aslan as - among other things - "the High King above all kings in Narnia," which seems to be a reference to Revelation 19:16: "On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords."  Both are kings, but each is a higher king than all other kings.

The second instance of Aslan-as-Christ (which I actually found last time I read the book) is in Chapter Fourteen (How Bree Became a Wiser Horse).  Aslan jumps over the wall into the Hermit's courtyard and then talks with Aravis, Bree, and Hwin.  Aslan says to Bree, "You poor, proud frightened Horse, draw near.  Nearer still, my son.  Do not dare not to dare.  Touch me.  Smell me.  Here are my paws, here is my tail, these are my whiskers.  I am a true Beast."  It's a similar situation to Christ's appearing to His disciples after the resurrection.  "And he said to them, 'Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?  See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself.  Touch me, and see.  For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.'" - Luke 24:38.  "Then he said to Thomas, 'Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side.  Do not disbelieve, but believe.'" - John 20:27.  Where Christ offered His hands and feet and the scars in His hands and side, Aslan offers his paws, tail, and whiskers.  While it's not as close a resemblance, there's also a similarity between Aslan's jumping over the wall and Christ's appearing "although the doors were locked" (John 20:26).  Both arrive despite that which is meant to keep people out.