Recently I picked up Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia (1977), which I kept hearing about but had never actually read.  I had had the impression it was a portal fantasy about a couple of children, but that isn’t correct:  it’s about a couple of children with vivid imaginations who play at fantasy.

The edition I read had an introduction that tipped me off that something terrible was going to happen in the story.  (Since this book is almost fifty years old, I’m going to forgo a spoiler alert.)  So I was prepared when a tragedy did occur.  But I found the ending uplifting nonetheless, because of how the author describes the change this tragedy works in the main character, Jess.  Which may be the point of tragedy, on the whole.

The denouement did get me thinking about something I’d never quite been able to articulate, having to do with the Narnia stories.  Narnia keeps coming up in Bridge to Terabithia; it largely inspires the characters’ imagined world.  So the connection was out in the open.  It isn’t mentioned specifically in the Terabithia quote that sparked my reflection:

It was Leslie who had taken him from the cow pasture into Terabithia and turned him into a king.  He had thought that was it.  Wasn’t king the best you could be?  Now it occurred to him that perhaps Terabithia was like a castle where you came to be knighted.  After you stayed for a while and grew strong you had to move on.  For hadn’t Leslie, even in Terabithia, tried to push back the walls of his mind and make him see beyond to the shining world—huge and terrible and beautiful and very fragile?  (Handle with care—everything—even the predators.)

Now it was time for him to move out.  She wasn’t there, so he must go for both of them.  It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.  (ch. 13, p. 161)

The aphorism that kept coming to mind was “Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen in Narnia” (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, ch. 17).  But that’s not quite it.  That line is about continuing to be a king or queen.  But what I kept thinking about was becoming a king or queen in the first place.

See, the Pevensie children, who become kings and queens in Narnia, don’t start out as heroes of mythic stature.  They’re a pretty normal bunch of kids.  There’s no suggestion that they are of extraordinary strength, courage, intelligence, or virtue. They certainly rise to the occasion:  we see them becoming heroes as the story develops.  But their only qualification for royalty, in the first book, seems to be simply the fact that they are “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve”—that is, human beings. (ch. 2 and 8)

The notion that a human being as such has a royal destiny isn’t far from Jess’s thought in the Terabithia quote above.  The other world is where you’re knighted, where your true self is recognized; but you’ve already got the potential.  The other world simply calls you to realize it and carry it out (“pay back to the world in beauty and caring”).

The underlying thought that my reading of Terabithia teased out is that simply being a human being (or, more broadly, a person), a child of God, is enough to qualify one for the kind of dignity and respect that we associate with royalty.  And that’s something worth remembering.

Here’s the appropriate song—unrelated to either book, but matching very closely in theme:  “Kings and Queens” by Audio Adrenaline (lyrics).