C.S. Lewis had a deep fondness for horses. I imagine he would have enjoyed a recent report from the historic village of Kilmallock, Ireland. It appears that some stray horses have been attempting to upstage the local ducks.

According to the Independent, one of the horses even proudly trotted into a local gymnasium. The mare (or stallion) appears to be more brazen than last year’s crisis which caused one councillor to call “on gardaí [police] in the Co Limerick town to rein in children as young as six riding sulkies in the town which he claimed was turning into the ‘Wild West.’” Yes, you most certainly need to beware of those rowdy six year old cowboys and cowgirls!

Dog owners have begun raising questions about why they must clean after their animal companions while the horses treat the parks like, shall we say, regular pastures. The city’s senior executive engineer attributes the problem to the fact the equines are just so sneaky. “Any time it is reported we go down but the minute our back is turned they are put back. We can’t be there 24/7.”

The most humorous element of the effort to ban the horses, in my mind, is because they have interrupted the entertainment of local ducks.* Not one, but “two duck races on the river have been affected.”

Lewis’ Thoughts about Horses

One of Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia presents a pair of horses as two of its major protagonists. The Horse and His Boy features Bree and Hwin, Talking Horses captured from Narnia by the Calormenes. A wonderful passage that illustrates the book’s ethos comes when the two horses and their respective riders decide to journey north together.

Aravis is a Calormene princess fleeing her land’s tyranny. Her mount, Hwin, is a young mare who was stolen as a colt and raised in the south. Bree was a stallion, also captured as a colt, and raised to be a warhorse.

“All right then,” said Aravis. “You’ve guessed it. Hwin and I are running away. We are trying to get to Narnia. And now, what about it?”

“Why, in that case, what is to prevent us all going together?” said Bree. “I trust, Madam Hwin, you will accept such assistance and protection as I may be able to give you on the journey?”

“Why do you keep talking to my horse instead of to me?” asked the girl.

“Excuse me, Tarkheena,” said Bree (with just the slightest backward tilt of his ears), “but that’s Calormene talk. We’re free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you’re running away to Narnia, you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn’t your horse any longer. One might just as well say you’re her human.”

While technically their own genus, centaurs might be considered “part horse.” Thus the entertaining description from The Silver Chair. The children are surprised that the centaurs are still about their breakfasts, two hours after rising before dawn.

“Why, Son of Adam, don’t you understand? A Centaur has a man-stomach and a horse-stomach. And of course both want breakfast. So first of all he has porridge and pavenders [small fish] and kidneys and bacon and omelette and cold ham and toast and marmalade and coffee and beer.

And after that he attends to the horse part of himself by grazing for an hour or so and finishing up with a hot mash, some oats, and a bag of sugar. That’s why it’s such a serious thing to ask a Centaur to stay for the weekend. A very serious thing indeed.”

In Mere Christianity, Lewis uses the transformation of a horse to a new creation as an analogy for what happens to people when they surrender their lives to God’s mercy and seek to follow him.

“Niceness”—wholesome, integrated personality—is an excellent thing. We must try by every medical, educational, economic, and political means in our power, to produce a world where as many people as possible grow up “nice;” just as we must try to produce a world where all have plenty to eat.

But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world—and might even be more difficult to save.

For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.

Of course, once it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which could never have been jumped and thus beat the natural horse at its own game. But there may be a period, while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it cannot do so: and at that stage the lumps on the shoulders—no one could tell by looking at them that they are going to be wings—may even give it an awkward appearance.

For a more in-depth discussion of this subject, I commend to you Leslie Baynes’ column, “The Heavenly Horses of C.S. Lewis,” which you can read at A Pilgrim in Narnia.

A final comment from Lewis’ youth worth noting. When writing to his friend Arthur Greeves in 1914, he refers to his scribblings and attempts (quite likely involving the Boxen era) when he attempted to sketch horses.

I sympathize with your difficulty in drawing a horse, as I have often made the attempt in the days when I fancied myself in that line. But of course that counts for nothing: as the easiest of your sketches would be impossible for me. But there are heaps of pictures in which you need not introduce the animal.

It was this passage that inspired the graphic created for the top of this post.

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* I wish the Irish were cultured enough to allow actual ducks to enjoy the adrenaline rush of a race, rather than using those little rubber ducklings that belong in children’s baths. If it’s the latter, which I fear it could be, I vote to let the horses run free. After all, some of those rubber ducks wash out to sea and become part of the international litter problem. For example, the piece of rubbish pictured on this link presumably polluted the Irish Sea for a full decade before it washed up on a distant shore.