“Merely a trifle! Merely a trifle! And it isn’t really finished!” says CS Lewis’s Mr Beaver when Susan, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, compliments his dam. In icy Narnia, the Beavers come to the children’s rescue after their friend Mr Tumnus is captured. They are ingenious, energetic, helpful to humans – in other words, not entirely dissimilar from how conservationists might describe them (with the exception of Lewis’s thoroughly old-fashioned view of gender roles: while Mr Beaver is the couple’s builder, Mrs Beaver is a seamstress).
Beavers were hunted to extinction across much of Europe hundreds of years ago. When The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published in 1950 they were, although not mythical creatures, partly imaginary ones in the sense that vanishingly few Britons had ever seen one. It is no wonder, given how warmly their memory lived on in books such as Lewis’s, that their successful reintroduction to England and Scotland is widely if not universally regarded as good news.
