The White Stag and the Lamppost, MS Paint art by schmidtyart
Here’s some Narnia fanfic I’ve read over the past year.
Modern Narnia: A History, by Twinklestar
This is one of those fics that applies a pseudo-historical tone — and a meta one — to the Narnia series AND Narnia fanfic. It’s written like a textbook intended for a college literature class. An interesting little snippet.
General
Untold, by cofax
There are many, many fanfics about the Problem of Susan that crops up towards the conclusion of The Last Battle, most reacting with outrage or sympathy for Susan’s apostasy, not the scorn that Jill and Eustace give her. This short fic discusses that even though Susan turned her back on Narnia, she lived a full life as a human being whereas the other children, for all their fantastic adventures, did not. Thoughtful and compelling.
The Last Battle
From Her Hands A Spill of Blood (how many drops to make it flood?) by Kila9Nishika
A bloody and mythic fic, told from the Telmarine point of view, of how Queen Lucy rescues King Edmund, who’s been imprisoned by a Telmarine Duke. What he doesn’t count on is Queen Lucy turning into a raging, murderous, killing machine who plows through an entire army to get her brother back. A true AU because in the books Lucy, even as an adult Queen, is sunny, cheerful, and brave in battle — but sticks to shooting arrows. In this story, she lops heads with a golden sword.
The author plays around with golden imagery in this story, which creates such a terror in the Telmarines that after the slaughter they forever ban the use of gold, even in their coinage. And actually, it is more of a horror story than an adventure one, though I think the author intended it as a revisionist take on Queen Lucy.
It also implies — which I think is interesting — that Telmar and Narnia had connections in the Golden Age. I haven’t read too many stories about that.
The Golden Age
The Lion and the Black Gryphons, by HakisakMatys
Prince Caspian is my least favorite book in the Chronicles (and one I lament ever existed at all) but even I admit this AU fic is a good take on it, book and movie both. It takes place before Caspian’s meeting with Dr. Cornelius, while he is still ignorant of Miraz’s treachery regarding his father. It draws on the scenario presented in the movie where Telmarine society is of Spanish descent, though they also retain some Polynesian traits. But for all intents and purposes, they’re 16th century Spanish.
The author introduces embellishments like the Black Gryphons, a group of elite Telmarine warriors, one of which is a character in the story. There are other Telmarine characters as well, and the story is mostly told from their POVs, not Caspian’s, a refreshing change. Also refreshing is that Caspian is an overprotected, daydreaming, bookish sort, and he also suffers from PTSD caused by his uncle Miraz’s upbringing. All this is a promising setup.
My only criticism is that there are too many viewpoint characters to keep track of, but it really was well written and would appeal to fans of the movie who wonder about what Telmarine society might have been like.
Prince Caspian, book and movie
High Queen Hazel the Wise, by potterhead0928
Many, many fanfics are written about the addition of a fifth character to the Pevensie quartet, sometimes another sibling, sometimes a cousin or a relation of the Professor’s. Usually the character functions as a stand-in for the writer. Not really a Mary Sue, because most of the time there’s nothing extraordinary about them; mostly it’s a way for the author to re-experience the original story with a personalized viewpoint of it A rewriting, if you will, as most of these tales don’t venture far from the original plot.
This story began like one of those, but it’s more melancholy. Hazel is the youngest child, younger even than Lucy, in her teens still when her older siblings vanish through the lamppost. Naturally she’s distraught and searches for them with the magic spyglass given to her by Father Christmas during the events of LWW. But over the chapters hope fades and she realizes she has to get on with her life: she marries, has kids, and goes on living in Narnia.
But then… Aslan causes her to return to England, and unlike her siblings, she remembers all of her life, in vivid detail. The dissonance this causes while she’s in the physical body of a seven-year-old is agonizing, especially because she’s lost her husband and children.
It’s a more nuanced exploration than most stories of its ilk and ends at the beginning of Prince Caspian — with all the Pevensies discovering their former castle in ruins. Tantalizingly, no more has been written since that chapter. But there should be.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
