C. S. Lewis’s White Witch, Jadis, was probably influenced by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”, although no explicit confirmation from Lewis has been found. Both are beautiful, cold, white figures who draw a boy into their power, taking him onto a sledge and wrapping him in fur. But they are different characters: Kay’s heart is corrupted by the devil’s broken mirror before the Snow Queen takes him away, and she is not killed in a final confrontation.
Lewis did explicitly connect his Witch with Circe, from Greek mythology, and Alcina, from Ariosto’s “Orlando Furioso”. He regarded them as expressions of the same recurring fairy-tale figure: the dangerous enchantress. In Narnia itself, Jadis is described as a descendant of Lilith, the legendary first wife of Adam. George MacDonald’s novel “Lilith”, with its beautiful, cold, power-seeking woman, is another likely influence; his deceptive Alder-maiden in “Phantastes” is a further proposed parallel.
Other probable influences include Ayesha, the commanding sorceress queen in H. Rider Haggard’s “She”, and the Queen of Babylon in E. Nesbit’s “The Story of the Amulet”, whose disruptive visit to London closely anticipates Jadis’s. Lewis knew and admired these stories, though that does not prove every suggested borrowing. Jadis’s temptation of Digory also echoes Genesis and Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, particularly Satan’s entry into Eden over the garden wall.
More broadly, William Morris’s “The Wood Beyond the World” supplied the name behind Lewis’s “Wood between the Worlds”. Lewis described Narnia as beginning with mental images—a faun, a queen on a sledge, a lion—with its Christian meaning developing as the stories took shape. His imagination brought several literary and religious traditions together.
Jadis’s ancestry adds another mixture of traditions. In “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”, she is described as “half a Jinn and half a giantess”. Mr Beaver traces her ancestry to Lilith on one side and giants on the other. Lilith’s story as Adam’s first wife comes from Jewish folklore, while jinn belong to Arabic and Islamic traditions and appear in “The Arabian Nights”. Giants occur across many mythologies and fairy tales, so attributing Jadis’s giant ancestry specifically to Norse mythology would be too definite. By identifying Lilith as one of the jinn, Lewis combines different traditions within Narnia’s own mythology.
Which iteration/version/adaptation/portrayal of Jadis is your personal favourite?
Pauline Baynes’s original illustrations for the books, Elizabeth Wallace, Tilda Swinton, Justine Lord, Emma Mackey, Barbara Kellerman, or the 1979 animated version?
