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.
