Worldbuilding Wednesday 8/20/25: Let’s Talk About the Splendour Hyaline (Narnia LXII)

Close to what I imagine the ship looked like, minus the sails.

“It’s like old times,” said Lucy. “Do you remember our voyage to Terebinthia—and Galma—and Seven Isles—and the Lone Islands?” “Yes,” said Susan, “and our great ship the Splendour Hyaline, with the swan’s head at her prow and the carved swan’s wings coming back almost to her waist?” “And the silken sails, and the great stern lanterns?” “And the feasts on the poop and the musicians.” “Do you remember when we had the musicians up in the rigging playing flutes so that it sounded like music out of the sky?”

This passage, from the beginning of Prince Caspian, hints at the adventures the Pevensies had as adult kings and queens in Narnia. In fact, aside from The Horse and His Boy, it’s the only place their royal lives were described. (The hundreds of fanfics don’t count.) It’s more than a little bittersweet, though the  idea of hanging musicians in the rigging (that is, the sails) seems ostentatious; it’s the sort of thing the Narnian equivalent of Kim Kardashian might done. I mean, if I was a musician I certainly wouldn’t want to be dangled from the spars on a windy, moving ship, though to be fair, likely it happened when the ship was moored for a party.

That aside, I had always assumed the Hyaline of the ship’s name referred to springtime, as the similarity to hyacinth suggests. Not so! Hyaline is an archaic English word that refers to a smooth or glassy appearance that can be either  transparent or semitransparent.  It is derived the Greek hyálinos, meaning transparent, and hýalos, meaning crystal or glass. Together with Splendour the name suggests a ship sailing on a clear, glassy stretch of sea, as hyaline was also used as a poetic synonym for a body of water or even the sky.

From heav’n-gate not far, founded in view On the clear hyaline, the glassy sea.John Milton, Paradise Lost

These days hyaline is rarely used even in poetry. It mostly turns up in medical terminology where it refers to all sorts of nasty stuff.  Which makes sense, given in how it made the jump from Greek to Latin.

I imagine most Narnian sea-faring ships had similar high-falutin’ names, such as The Dawn Treader which was built after Caspian’s Telmarine liberation. In fact, I’ll postulate the Pevensies kept two Royal ships in the Golden Age, the other being named the Opaline Splendor. It makes sense.

Using a mix of lovely-sounding archaic words, here’s some ship names the Narnians might have used. More than a few sound like modern-day cruise ships, but oh well.

Names of Narnian Ships