What does Aslan represent in C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia?

Aslan represents Jesus Christ in C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia.

Aslan is the great lion who creates Narnia, rules it with moral authority and serves as its central spiritual figure. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he willingly allows himself to be killed in Edmund’s place and then returns to life. That plot closely parallels Christian ideas of sacrificial death, redemption and resurrection.

Lewis resisted treating the books as a simple one-to-one code in which every character had only one fixed counterpart. He described the stories as imagining how Christ might appear in another world, where the incarnation and redemption could take a different form. Aslan is therefore both a character in Narnia and a deliberate expression of Christian theology.

The name Aslan comes from the Turkish word for “lion.” His title, “son of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea,” reinforces the series’ religious symbolism without making him a human figure transplanted into the story.