Where can we find the most impactful genesis narratives?

[Thorondor_]

I was most impressed by the Ainulindale [actually, I believe it to be the most powerful piece of writing by Tolkien, equalled in beauty and message only by the story of Beren Luthien].

I propose that in this thread we present different geneses, as they appear in various sources, such as folklore, myths (esspecially Norse and Greek) but also in contemporary fantasy literature.

To begin with, I will present a greek myth and a fantasy one:

The Pelasgian Creation
"In the beginning, Eurynome, the goddess of all things, rose naked from chaos. She found nothing upon which to rest her feet, and thus, she divided the sea from the sky. She danced lonely upon the waves of the sea, she danced towards the south, and the wind set in motion behind her seemed something new and strange with which to begin a work of creation. Wheeling about, she caught hold of this north wind, rubbed it between her hands, and behold! The great serpent Ophion. Eurynome danced to warm herself, wildly and more wildly, until Ophion, enchanted, coiled about her divine limbs becoming one with her. As she lay with the Ophion, Eurynome was got with child. Eurynome assumed the form of a dove, brooding upon the waves and with time, she laid the universal egg. At her bidding, Ophion coiled seven times about this egg, until it hatched and split into two. Out tumbled all things that exist, her children: sun, moon, planets, stars, earth with her mountains rivers, trees, herbs, and all living creatures. Eurynome and ophion made their home upon mount Olympus where he vexed her by claiming to be the author of the universe. Forthwith, she bruised his head with her heel, kicked out his teeth, and banished him to the dark caves below the earth. Eurynome opened her gaze and her arms to her children, giving each its name which she read off its own singular power and being. She named the sun, moon, planets, stars and the earth with her mountains and rivers, trees, herbs and living creatures. She took joy in her creation, but soon found herself alone desiring the face, voice, ear and warmth of another of her own. Eurynome stood up and once again began to dance alone upon the waves"

Source:The Greek Myths, Robert Graves

"The mythology of ancient Medyo"

"Now before the beginning, there was no Time, and all was Chaos and Darkness. But Deiwos, the Sky God, awoke, and with his awakening, Time itself began. And Deiwos looked out upon the Chaos and the Darkness, and a great yearning filled his heart. And he rose up to make all that is made, and his making brought encroaching Light into the emptiness of his kinsman, the Demon Daeva. But in time Deiwos wearied of his labors, and sought him a place to rest. And with a single thought made he a high keep at that edge which divides the Light from the Darkness and the realm of Time from that place where there is no Time. And Deiwos marked that awful edge with fire to warn all men back from Daeva's abyss, and then he rested there in his keep and communed with his Book while Time continued her stately march.

Now the demon Daeva was made sore wroth by the encroachment upon his dark domain by his kinsman Deiwos, and eternal enmity was born in his soul, for the Light caused him pain, and the orderly progression of Time herself was an agony unto him. And then retreated he to his cold throne in the echoless darkness of the void. And there he contemplated vengeance against the Light, and against his kinsman, and against Time herself

And their sister watched, but said nothing"

Source: The redemption of Althalus, by David and Leigh Eddings

 

[Walter]

I think this thread is a great idea, I wonder why nobody responded to it yet...

It should be noted that the first example above, the Pelasgian creation myth, is a "real" - meaning a tradited - myth, whereas the second is a work of fiction, like Tolkien's "Music of the Ainur".

Robert Graves' comments are - IMO - at least as interesting as the myth itself, is there any chance that you could add them to your post, Thorondor (as I only have the German edition of that book and would like to spare me the translation)?

 

[Thorondor_]

Only tantalizing fragments of this pre-Hellenic myth survive in Greek literotic, the largest being Apotlonius: Rhodis’s nautka and Tzetzes: On Lacoehron; but it is implicit in the Orphic Mysteries, and can be restored, as above, from the Berossian Fragment and the Phoenician cosmogonies quoted by: Philo Byblius and Damascius; from the Canaanitish elements in the Hebrew Creation story; from Hyginus.

In this archaic religious system there were, as yet, neither gods nor priests, but only a universal goddess and her priestesses, woman being the dominant sex and man her frightened victim. Fatherhood was not honoured, conception being attributed to the wind, the eating of beans, or the accidental swallowing of an insect; inheritance was matrilineal and snakes were regarded as incarnations of the dead. Eurynome (‘wide wandering’) was the goddess’s title as the visible moon; her Sumerian name was Iahu (‘exalted dove’), a title which later passed to Jehovah as the Creator. It was as a dove that Marduk symbolically sliced her in two at the Babylonian Spring Festival, when he inaugurated the new world order.

Ophion, or Boreas, is the serpent demiurge of Hebrew and Egyptian myth—in early Mediterranean art, the Goddess is constantly shown in his company. The earth-born Pelasgiaus, whose claim seems to have been that they sprang from Ophion’s teeth, were originally perhaps the neolithic ‘Painted Ware’ people; they reached the ma’mland of Greece from Palestine about 3500 B.C., and the early Hellads—immigrants from Asia Minor by way of the Cyclades—found them in occupation of the Peloponnese seven hundred years later. But ‘Pelasgians’ became loosely applied to all pre-Hellenic inhabitants of Greece. Thus Euripides (quoted by Strabo) records that the Pelasgians adopted the name’ Danaans’ on the coming to Argos of Danaus and his fifty daughters. Strictures on their licentious conduct refer probably to the pre-Hellenic custom of erotic orgies. Strabo says in the same passage that those who lived near Athens were known as Pelargi (‘storks‘); perhaps this was their totem bird.

The Titans (‘lords ‘) and Titanesses had their counterparts in early Babylonian and Palestinian astrology, where they were deities ruling the seven days of the sacred planetary week; and may have been introduced by the Canaanite, or Hittite, colony which settled the Isthmus of Corinth early in the second millennium B.c., or even by the Early Hellads. But when the Titan cult was abolished in Greece, and the sevenday week ceased to figure in the official calendar, their number was quoted as twelve by some authors, probably to make them correspond with the signs of the Zodiac. Hesiod, Apollodorus, Stephanus of Byzantium, Pausanias, and others give inconsistent lists of their names. In Babylonian myth the planetary rulers of the week, namely Samas, Sin, Nergal, Bel, Beltis, and Ninib, were all male, except Beltis, the Lovegoddess; but in the Germanic week, which the Celts had borrowed from the Eastern Mediterranean, Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday were ruled by Titanesses, as opposed to Titans. To judge from the divine status of Aeolus’s paired-offdaughters and sons, and the myth of Niobe, it was decided, when the system first reached pre-Hellenic Greece from Palestine, to pair a Titaness with each Titan, as a means of safeguarding the goddess’s interests. But before long the fourteen were reduced to a mixed company of seven. The planetary powers were as follows: Sun for illumination; Moon for enchantment; Mars for growth; Mercury for wisdom; Jupiter for law; Venus for love; Saturn for peace. Classical Greek astrologers conformed with the Babylorfians, and awarded the planets to Helius, Selene, Ares, Hermes (or Apollo), Zeus, Aphrodite, Cronus—whose Latin equivalents, given above, still name the French, Italian, and Spanish weeks.

In the end, mythically speaking, Zeus swallowed the Titans, including his earlier self—since the Jews of Jernsalem worshipped a transcendent God, composed of all the planetary powers of the week: a theory symbolized in the seven-branched candlestick, and in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The seven planetary pillars set up near the Horse’s Tomb at Sparta were said by Pausanias to be adorned in ancient fashion, and may have been connected with the Egyptian rites introduced by the Pelasgians. Whether the Jews borrowed the theory from the Egyptians, or contrariwise, is uncertain; but the so-called Heliopolitan Zeus, whom A. B. Cook discusses in his .Zeus, was Egyptian in character, and bore busts of the seven planetary powers as frontal ornaments on his body sheath; usually, also, busts of the remaining Olympians as rear ornaments. One bronze statuette of this god was found at Tortosa in Spain, another at Byblos in Phoenicia; and a marble stele from Marseilles displays six planetary busts and one full-length figure of Hermes—who is also given greatest prominence in the statues — presumably as the inventor of astronomy. At Rome, Jupiter was fimilarly claimed to be a transcendent god by Quintus Valetins Soranus, though the week was not observed there, as it was at Marseilles, Byblos and (probably Tortosa). But planetary powers were never allowed to influence the official Olympian cult, being regarded as un-Greek, and therefore unpatriotic: Aristophanes makes Trygaius say that the Moon and ‘that old villain the Sun’ are hatching a plot to herray Greece into the hands of the Persian barbarians.

Pausanias’s statement that Pelasgus was the first of men records the continuance of a paeolithic culture in Arcadia until Classical times.

 

[Walter]

Thanks for adding the comments, Thorondor.

Here is a link to the Babylonian Creation myth, called Enuma Elish: http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/enuma.htm

 

[Walter]

Here is the creation-myth of the Finnish Kalevala, anotherone of the Epi which seems to have inspired Tolkien greatly:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/kveng/kvrune01.htm

Here as well as in the Enuma Elish or the Pelasgian creation-myth above a goddess gives birth to the world. Such myths, where the world is born of a female divinity, are quite typical for Neolithic agricultural societies of Europe, the Levante or the Near East which appear also to have been matriarchal, matrilinear and matrilocal societies.

 

[Thorondor_]

A chinese creation myth:

At the beginning of time there was an egg of inconceivable size filled with darkness and chaos. Inside the egg, P'an Ku, the ancestor of all humans, was conceived from chaos. Fed by the darkness, he slowly grew amid the formless mass and for eighteen thousand years he was unaware of any life outside his black cocoon

One day a sudden movement jolted him awake, but it was too dark to see anything and his initial fear was soon replaced by anger at being trapped. He raced through the chaos lashing out with his fists and eventually smashed the hard black shell surrounding him. Immediately the clarity and light that had been obscured for so long poured out of the egg and rose to the sky and everything that was muddy and dark fell to the earth. From that time the heavens and the earth were clearly divided. But P'an Ku could not be sure that the light and the dark would not collapse into the chaos from whence they originally came, and so he supported the heavens with his head and held the earth firmly in place with his feet.

As each year passed the heavens and the earth grew farther apart and P'an Ku's body stretched to accommodate them. At the end of eighteen thousand years the top of the heavens and the bottom of the earth could no longer be seen, but P'an Ku tirelessly held them apart in case chaos should ever return. Thousands of years passed and everything that was clear and light became firmly established in the sky and all things muddy and dark settled in the earth.

Secure in the knowledge that the world was safe, P'an Ku collapsed from exhaustion and began to die. His final breath became the wind and the clouds, his voice turned into thunder, his left eye flew to the heavens to become the sun and his right eye swiftly followed to become the moon. P'an Ku's lifeless torso and limbs became flat plains and rocky mountains, his blood flowed swiftly as streams and rivers, his tendons turned into roads and paths and his muscles changed into soil. His thick grey hair and long beard became the stars, his skin and fine body hair fell to earth and took root as grass, trees and flowers, and his teeth, bones and marrow changed into minerals, rubies and jade. Even the sweat on his body fell as rain and dew. He offered his body to the world and when he died he also gave birth to all life.

Source: "Chinese myths and legends", by Joanne O'Brien.


Let us not forget modern "myths" :

From "Creation" - chapter 16 of "A darkness at Sethanon", by Raymond E. Feist, the Rift Saga.

- What is this? asked Tomas, pointing to the impossible black orb against the grey.

- The sum of the universes, Tomas, answered the sorcerer. The primal stuff everything else stems from. It is everything - except this little jot of land we stand on and the City itself. There is so much there that size and distance have no meaning. We are millions of times more distant from the surface of that matter than Midkemia is from its sun, but look how large it looms before us, blotting out more than half the sky. It's staggering to contemplate. Even light cannot escape it, for light has not been created. We are back before time. before the beginning. We are witnesses to the start of all things.

He turned to regard the utter darkness. For several minutes nothing occurred. As if no air moved in the Garden, there was a profound silence. The observers were accutely aware of their own being, feeling each sensation down to the rhythm of the blood coursing through their bodies. But no sound save their own breathing could they apprehend. Then came the note. Each was transported, though they moved not a step. A filling joy, a profound sense of perfect rightness, washed over them, beauty too terrible to comprehend. It was as if music, a single flawless note, sounded and was felt rather than heard. Colours more vivid than any pigment were seen, yet only the dark void hung before their eyes. They felt crushed under the weight of indescribable wonder and terror. They were rendered so insignificant in an instant that each of them despaired and felt alone, yet in that crystalline instant each experienced exaltation, touched by something so wonderful it brought tears of joy flowing without stint. It was impossible to comprehend. There was only a flickering, as if a million lines of force sprang across the surface of the void, but they were gone so quickly the watchers could not apprehend their passage. One instant all was black and formless, then a latticework of countless glowing lines spread across the magnificent void, and light filled the skies, staggering in its purity and strength. All were forced to avert their eyes from that blinding display for a moment. A blaze of stunning energies poured forth, as seen before, but now flowing outward. A strange emotion swept through Pug and his companions, one of completeness, as if what they had experienced was now at an end. All continued to weep in joy at the perfect beauty of the display.

- Macros, what was that? asked Tomas softly, in awe ...

- The Hand of God, he whispered, his eyes wide withwonder. The Prime Urge. The First Cause. The Ultimate. I don't know what to call it. I know only this: one moment, there was nothing, the next, all existed. It is the First Mystery, and even now that I've seen it, I do not pretend to understand it.

The sorcerer laughed, a loud joyous sound, and did a little dance. Pug and Tomas exchanged questioning looks, and Macros saw he was the object of their scrutiny. With an expression of genuine mirth, he said:

- It just occurred to me that there's more than one reason we're here.

When their expressions betrayed incomprehension, he said:

- I cannot imagine even a god to be without vanity, and were I the Ultimate, I'd want an audience for a show like that.

 

[Thorondor_]

- Let me start with the Creation. And let me tell you right now that I know nothing of where God came from, or why, or how. No one knows this. The mystic writers, the prophets of Earth, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Hebrew, Egyptian—all recognized the impossibility of understanding the origin of God. That's not really the question for me and never has been, though I suspect that at the end of Time we will know.

- You mean God hasn't promised that we will know where He came from.

- You know what? he said, smiling. I don't think God knows. I think that's the whole purpose of the physical universe. He thinks through watching the universe evolve, He's going to find out. What He has set in motion, you see, is a giant Savage Garden, a giant experiment, to see if the end result produces beings like Himself. We are made in His image, all of us—He is anthropomorphic, without question, but again He is not material.

- And when the light came, when you covered your eyes in Heaven, that was God.

- He nodded. God, the Father, God, the Essence, Brahma, the Aten, the Good God, En Sof, Yahweh, God!

- Then how can He be anthropomorphic?

- His essence has a shape, just as does mine. We, His first creations, were made in His image. He told us so. He has two legs, two arms, a head. He made us invisible images of the same. And then set the universe into motion to explore the development of that shape through matter, do you see?

- Not quite.

- I believe God worked backwards from the blueprint of Himself. He created a physical universe whose laws would result in the evolution of creatures who resembled Him. They would be made of matter. Except for one striking and important difference. Oh, but then there were so many surprises. You know my opinion already. Your friend David hit upon it when he was a man. I think God's plan went horribly wrong.

- Yes, David did say that, that he thought angels felt God's plan for Creation was all wrong.

- Yes. I think He did it originally to find out what it would have been like had He been Matter. And I think He was looking for a clue as to how He got where He is. And why He is shaped like He is, which is shaped like me or you. In watching man evolve, He hopes to understand His own evolution, if such a thing in fact occurred. And whether this has worked or not to His satisfaction, well, only you can judge that for yourself.

- Wait a minute, I said. But if He is spiritual and made of light, or made of nothing—then what gave Him the idea for matter in the first place?

- Ah, now that is the cosmic mystery. In my opinion, His imagination created Matter, or foresaw it, or longed for it. And I think the longing for it was a most important aspect of His mind. You see, Lestat, if He Himself did originate in Matter ...then all this is an experiment to see when Matter can evolve into God again.

- If He didn't originate Matter, if He proceeded and it is something He imagined and desired and longed for, well, the effects upon Him are basically the same. He wanted Matter. He wasn't satisfied without it. Or He wouldn't have made it. It was no accident, I can assure it.

- But let me caution you, not all the angels agree on this interpretation, some feel the need for no interpretation, and some have completely different theories. This is my theory, and since I am the Devil, and have been for centuries, since I am the Adversary, the Prince of Darkness, the Ruler of the World of Men and of Hell, I think my opinion is worth stating. I think it's worth believing in. So you have my article of faith.

- The design of the universe is immense, to use a feeble word, but the whole process of evolution was His calculated experiment, and we, the angels, were created long before it began.

- What was it like before Matter began?

- I can't tell you. I know, but I don't, strictly speaking, remember. The reason for this is simple: When Matter was created, so was Time. All angels began to exist not only in heavenly perfection with God but to witness and be drawn into Time.

- Now we can step out of it, and I can to some extent recall when there was no lure of Matter or Time; but I can't really tell you what that early stage was like anymore. Matter and Time changed everything totally. They obliterated not only the pure state that preceded them, they upstaged it; they overshadowed it; they, how shall I say... ?

- Eclipsed it.

- Exactly. Matter and Time eclipsed the Time before Time.

- But can you remember being happy?

- Interesting question. Dare I say this? he asked himself as he continued to speculate. Dare I say, I remember the longing, the incompleteness, more than I remember complete happiness? Dare I say there was less to understand?

- You cannot underestimate the effect upon us of the creation of the physical universe. Think for one moment, if you can, what Time means, and how miserable you might be without it. No, that's not right. What I mean is, without Time you could not be conscious of yourself, either in terms of failure or achievement, or in terms of any motion backwards or forwards, or any effect.

- I see it. Rather like the old people who've lost so much intelligence that they have no memory moment to moment. They're vegetative, wide-eyed, but they are no longer human with the rest of the race because they have no sense of anything ...themselves or anyone else.

- A perfect analogy. Though let me assure you such aged and wounded individuals still have souls, which will at some point cease to be dependent upon their crippled brains.

- Souls! I said.

- We walked slowly but steadily, and I tried not to be distracted by the greenery, and the flowers; but I have always been seduced by flowers; and here I saw flowers of a size which our world would surely find impractical and impossible to support. Yet these were species of trees I knew. This was the world as it had once been.

- Yes, you're correct on that. Can you feel the warmth around you? This is a time of lovely evolutionary development on the planet. When men speak of Eden or Paradise, they 'remember' this time.

- The Ice Age is yet to come.

- The second Ice Age is coming. Definitely. And then the world will renew itself, and Eden will come again. All through the Ice Age, men and women will develop. But realize of course that even by this point, life as we know it had existed for millions of years!

- I stopped. I put my hands to my face. I tried to think it through again. (If you want to do this, just reread the last two pages.)

- But He knew what Matter was! I said.

- No, I'm not sure He did, said Memnoch. He took that seed, that egg, that essence and He cast it in a form which became Matter!

- But I don't know how truly He foresaw what that would mean. You see, that's our big dispute. I don't think He sees the consequences of His actions! I don't think He pays attention! That's what the big fight is about!

- So He created Matter perhaps by discovering what it was as He did it.

- Yes, Matter and energy, which are interchangeable as you know, yes, He created them, and I suspect that the key to Him lies within the word 'energy,' that if human anatomy ever reaches the point where angels and God can be satisfactorily explained in human language, energy will be the key.

- So He was energy, I said, and in making the universe, He caused some of that energy to be changed into Matter.

- Yes, and to create a circular interchange independent of himself. But of course nobody said all this to us at the beginning. He didn't say it. I don't think He knew it. We certainly didn't know it. All we knew was that we were dazzled by His creations. We were absolutely astonished by the feel and taste and heat and solidity and gravitational pull of Matter in its battle with energy. We knew only what we saw.

- Ah, and you saw the universe unfolding. You saw the Big Bang.

- Use that term with skepticism. Yes, we saw the universe come into existence; we saw everything set into motion, as it were. And we were overawed! That's why almost every early religion on earth celebrates the majesty, the grandeur, the greatness and genius of the Creator; why the earliest anthems ever put into words on Earth sing the glories of God. We were impressed, just as humans later would come to be impressed, and in our angelic minds, God was Almighty and Wondrous and Beyond Comprehension before man came into being.

- But let me remind you, especially as we walk through this magnificent garden, that we witnessed millions of explosions and chemical transformations, upheavals, all of which involved nonorganic molecules before 'life' as we call it ever came to exist.

Source: chapter 11 from "Memnoch the devil", by Anne Rice

 

[Thorondor_]

In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it. The horse seemed to like it too; he gave the sort of whinney a horse would give if, after years of being a cab-horse, it found itself back in the old field where it had played as a foal, and saw someone whom it remembered and loved coming across the field to bring it a lump of sugar.

- God! said the Cabby. Ain't it lovely?

Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn't come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out - single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it, as Digory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing.

- Glory be! said the Cabby. I'd ha' been a better man all my life if I'd known there were things like this.

The Voice on the earth was now louder and more triumphant; but the voices in the sky, after singing loudly with it for a time, began to get fainter. And now something else was happening.

Far away, and down near the horizon, the sky began to turn grey. A light wind, very fresh, began to stir. The sky, in that one place, grew slowly and steadily paler. You could see shapes of hills standing up dark against it. All the time the Voice went on singing.

There was soon light enough for them to see one another's faces. The Cabby and the two children had open mouths and shining eyes; they were drinking in the sound, and they looked as if it reminded them of something. Uncle Andrew's mouth was open too, but not open with joy. He looked more as if his chin had simply dropped away from the rest of his face. His shoulders were stopped and his knees shook. He was not liking the Voice. If he could have got away from it by creeping into a rat's hole, he would have done so. But the Witch looked as if, in a way, she understood the music better than any of them. Her mouth was shut, her lips were pressed together, and her fists were clenched. Ever since the song began she had felt that this whole world was filled with a Magic different from hers and stronger. She hated it. She would have smashed that whole world, or all worlds, to pieces, if it would only stop the singing. The horse stood with its ears well forward, and twitching. Every now and then it snorted and stamped the ground. It no longer looked like a tired old cab-horse; you could now well believe that its father had been in battles.

The eastern sky changed from white to pink and from pink to gold. The Voice rose and rose, till all the air was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had yet produced, the sun arose.

Digory had never seen such a sun. The sun above the ruins of Charn had looked older than ours: this looked younger. You could imagine that it laughed for joy as it came up. And as its beams shot across the land the travellers could see for the first time what sort of place they were in. It was a valley through which a broad, swift river wound its way, flowing eastward towards the sun. Southward there were mountains, northward there were lower hills. But it was a valley of mere earth, rock and water; there was not a tree, not a bush, not a blade of grass to be seen. The earth was of many colours: they were fresh, hot and vivid. They made you feel excited; until you saw the Singer himself, and then you forgot everything else.

It was a Lion. Huge, shaggy, and bright, it stood facing the risen sun. Its mouth was wide open in song and it was about three hundred yards away.

...the song had now changed.

That Lion was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song. It was softer and more lilting than the song by which he had called up the stars and the sun; a gentle, rippling music. And as he walked and sang the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the Lion like a pool. It ran up the sides of the little hills like a wave. In a few minutes it was creeping up the lower slopes of the distant mountains, making that young world every moment softer. The light wind could now be heard ruffling the grass. Soon there were other things besides grass. The higher slopes grew dark with heather. Patches of rougher and more bristling green appeared in the valley. Digory did not know what they were until one began coming up quite close to him. It was a little, spiky thing that threw out dozens of arms and covered these arms with green and grew larger at the rate of about an inch every two seconds. There were dozens of these things all round him now. When they were nearly as tall as himself he saw what they were.

- Trees! he exclaimed.

Source: chapters "The fight at the lamp-post" and "The founding of Narnia" of "The Magician's nephew", by C.S. Lewis