Snowy scenes in Malvern have again raised the question of whether the town was the inspiration for Narnia.
Visit the Malverns shared a beautiful picture of Priory Park in the snow, taken by Peter Forster, and made the link to CS Lewis’s most famous creation.
“It’s not hard to see where CS Lewis got his inspiration for Narnia from, when Malvern looks like this in the snow,” they said.
Others have taken to Facebook to share pictures of the snowy scene, pointing out that the weather has underlined the similarities between the town and the fictional magical land.
Lewis was certainly a student in the town, enrolling at Malvern College in 1913.
And during the 1940s he was a regular visitor to Malvern, meeting with friends including JRR Tolkien in The Unicorn pub.
A plaque on the front of the inn placed there by Malvern Civic Society says: “At this inn C. S. LEWIS - Scholar and author of THE NARNIA CHRONICLES met frequently with literary and hill-walking friends.”
According to legend, it was on a snowy evening after just such a meeting at The Unicorn that Lewis was inspired by the sight of one of Malvern’s famous gas lamps.
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In The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Lewis describes a gas lamp post standing along amid the gathering snows.
According to another similar story, Lewis’s inspiration was gas lamps on Palace Green in Durham, another place Lewis is known to have visited.
The Malverns certainly inspired Tolkien.
He recorded excerpts from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in Malvern in 1952, at the home of George Sayer.
These were later published as ‘J.R.R Tolkien Reads and Sings his The Hobbit & The Fellowship of the Rings’.
Sayer provided the sleeve notes, and said that the Malvern Hills reminded Tolkien of "The White Mountains of Gondor", from the Lord of the Rings.
According to Visit the Malverns, there are still more than 80 working gas lamps in Malvern.
These can be found on Belle Vue Island in Great Malvern, in the Priory churchyard, along the Wells Road and Hollywell Road in Malvern Wells and in West Malvern.
Going back a hundred years or so, Malvern had more than 1,000 gas lamps, but these started being removed in the 1950s.
They were listed in 1999, protecting the remaining lamps.
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