But reading Narnia as a kid, I was still with the 'home for teatime' thing. Didn't really see much diff between them in Narnia and the Anthea-tachi visiting Egypt through the amulet. So while adult readers now go on (and on, and on) about the horrible tragedy of having been a grown-up and a king or queen in Narnia and then oh the trauma having to come BACK and be YUCK a KID again, that never occurred to ten year old me at all. Of course you come back; holidays don't last forever. If there'd been a book where the kids didn't come back (*and* left their parents behind in the Shadow Lands) that would have traumatized me completely.

So to me all the Narnia adventures were of the same ilk as The Ship That Flew guys saving Pharaoh's army: an adventure in the Other World/ Other Time. With the same guarantee that nothing could go really wrong because here Aslan's on your side, so even when someone dies it turns out to be OK. The trappings may have been Arthurian/ Malory (rather too much for my later tastes) but there's none of the 'serious quest for serious and potentially world-ending stakes' that underlies adult high fantasy, and which is what makes it high fantasy.

This is all quite apart from the complications that ensue when you're really in a Christian universe, where true tragedy is essentially impossible. (Aslan again.) Tragedy from a Christian perspective-- cf the dwarfs in the shed-- but not from a Greek or even Shakespearian one.