In preparation for the release of the bigscreen adaptation of C. S. Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I've been reading through the entire series with my children. We've read The Magicians Nephew, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and we're part way through Prince Caspian. Our goal is to be finished with both Caspian and The Voyage before we see the movie as a family. 

At the same time, my wife is excited to see the next Harry Potter installment. She has read all the books and seen all the movies. Gearing up for that event, all the previous movies have been playing on television lately and we recently watched The Goblet of Fire once again. 

Now, I should say, I know next to nothing about JK Rowling, save that she is the author of the Harry Potter books. And since I have not read the books myself, I don't even know how closely the scripts of the movies (which I have seen) stayed to the books. But while watching The Goblet, I noticed a particularly striking allusion to Lewis' Narnia. 

In The Goblet movie, during the scene in which the dark lord Voldemort is recapitulated, he recounts the fateful night that gave birth to Harry's fame and pain--the night he killed Harry's parents and young Harry survived. In his retelling of the story he makes it a point to emphasize the fact that Harry's mother was a "muggle" (meaning a non-magical person). However, he also tells of how she sacrificed herself for him, rendering him powerless to kill Harry. This he referred to as a "very old magic."

Having just finished Lewis' LWW, the Stone Table scene and Aslan's explanation of his resurrection in light of his self-sacrifice is fresh in my mind. He calls it both a "deeper" and "older" magic than that of the White Witch. 

In both stories, self-sacrificial love is the deepest, oldest magic that triumphs over the power of the enemies' magic. This is the thread that ties the two stories to ours. It is as true in our world as it is in theirs that self-sacrificial love is victorious over all forms of evil.