The Magician’s Nephew: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

Uncle Andrew vanishes from Digory’s sight, and for a moment, things are muddled. Then Digory finds himself underwater, in a little pool. He surfaces before he has time to get frightened. When he emerges from the pool, he finds he’s perfectly dry. He is standing in a wood, which is filled with warm, green light. It is very quiet. Digory notices that there are dozens of other small pools. The place feels full of life.

Digory feels as if he’s always been in this place. He doesn’t feel frightened or even curious. Later, he describes it as a place where “the trees go on growing, that’s all.” A little later, Digory notices a girl (Polly) lying at the foot of a nearby tree, looking sleepy. At last she says dreamily, “I think I’ve seen you before.” She, too, feels as if she’s been in the wood forever. After a while, though, the children agree that they remember having adventures together somewhere else.

Suddenly, they notice a fat guinea pig nosing through the grass. A bright yellow ring is tied to it. Digory notices that both he and the girl are wearing yellow rings, too. He and the girl stare at each other. Then, the girl shouts “Mr. Ketterley,” and Digory shouts “Uncle Andrew,” and within a few moments, he and Polly have both remembered who they are and gotten the whole story straight.

The children discuss what to do next. Polly is afraid that if they stay for too long in the dreamy woods, they’ll never want to go back. They agree that the guinea pig should be left here, since it’s happy, and Uncle Andrew will only mistreat it. They make up their minds to jump back into the pool from which they came, but when they join hands and jump, they just find themselves standing in ankle-deep water.

Then Digory remembers about the green rings in his pocket. He and Polly each put one on. But just before they leap back into the pool, Digory stops—he’s had an idea. What if there are different worlds at the bottom of each of the pools? He thinks Uncle Andrew was wrong—there’s not one Other World, but many, perhaps dozens. This wood is “just a sort of in-between place.” It’s rather like the tunnel Polly discovered in her attic, which could be used to access different houses.

Polly refuses to explore other worlds until she is sure she can get back to her own—she is as brave as Digory in many ways, but not as adventurous. (Digory, however, likes to know everything—which is why he becomes the Professor Kirke who appears in other books.) They argue for a bit, finally agreeing that they’ll put on the green rings, travel homeward to ensure it’s possible, then switch to yellow when they seem to be arriving back in their own world.

The children don their green rings, take hands, shout “one, two, three,” and jump once again. Everything happens quickly—they see bright lights like fast-moving stars, then they begin to see roofs, chimneys, and London landmarks. Uncle Andrew begins coming into focus. Before he becomes “quite real,” Polly shouts, “Change,” and they quickly slip on their yellow rings. London rapidly fades away, and they’re back in the “wood between the worlds.” This has all taken place in less than a minute.

Just as they’re about to jump into another pool to explore a different world, Polly suddenly realizes, with horror, that they haven’t marked the pool that will take them back home. If they had proceeded to jump into the unknown pool just now, they might never have been able to find their way home. Digory shakily cuts a strip of reddish-brown turf to mark the homebound pool. They quarrel briefly about which of them has more sense, but before long, they’re jumping into the unknown pool with yellow rings on. However, once again, they merely create a splash.

It turns out that Uncle Andrew had had the wrong idea about the magic rings. He thought the yellow rings were “outward” rings and the green ones “homeward”; it turns out, though, that the dust of which both rings were made came from this very wood, and that the material in the yellow rings is always trying to return to the wood, while the stuff in the green rings is always trying to go from the wood to another world. Uncle Andrew, like most magicians, is working with magics he doesn’t really understand. Digory doesn’t fully understand the nature of the magic, either, but after some discussion, he and Polly decide to try the green rings instead. They join hands and jump one more time.