The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe popular English folklore. There are several parallels between the White Witch and the immortal white queen, Ayesha, of H. Rider Haggard's "She", a novel greatly admired by C. S. Lewis. "The Story of the Amulet" written by Edith Nesbit also contains scenes that can be considered precursors to sequences presenting Jadis, particularly in "The Magician's Nephew". Nesbit's short story "The Aunt and Amabel" includes the motif of a girl entering a wardrobe to gain access to a magical place. The freeing of Aslan's body from the stone table by field mice is reminiscent of Aesop's fable of "The Lion and
The Man and the Lion that honesty outweighs boasting. In other versions, the lion asks who made the statue and refuses to take it as evidence on learning that it was a man. In the late Latin version of Ademar of Chabannes the lion takes the man to an amphitheatre to demonstrate what happens in reality, while William Caxton has the lion pounce on the man to make its point. But Jefferys Taylor argues facetiously, at the end of his "Aesop in Rhyme" (1828), that it is the fact that lions cannot sculpt which is the true proof of their inferiority. During the Middle Ages