This artist’s depiction of Aslan, with its eerie staring eyes, shares a disturbing similarity to the cat pictures of popular Victorian English artist Louis Wain. Wain is often cited in psychology textbooks as a classic case of how schizophrenia alters the afflicted’s sense of reality.
Category: Fantasy
Worldbuilding Wednesday 6/24/20: Narnia IV
As written by Lewis, the Talking Beasts of Narnia cover a wide range of species. The Magician’s Nephew, which was the third book Lewis wrote (but the 6th published) gives a good depiction of their genesis: they bubble up from the earth itself like bubbles of gas through hot lava. There’s an elephant, big cats, …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 6/17/20: Narnia III
Speaking of Prince Caspian, the book contains one of the most memorable of all the series’s peripheral characters: Reepicheep the Mouse, short in stature but long on bravery. To me he was the Narnia equivalent of Scrappy-Doo, Scooby-Doo’s more eloquent little nephew: annoying. He does introduce, however, the Narnian way of naming mice: three-syllable names …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 6/10/20: Narnia II
C. S. Lewis actually wrote Prince Caspian, the second book of The Chronicles of Narnia, hot on the tail of the first. In it, he explored an idea he had been playing around with for a while: What if King Arthur actually returned to England during the Battle of Britain as prophesied (when England was …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 6/3/20: Narnia I
British writer C. S. Lewis’s well-loved children’s fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia, began in 1950 with the publication of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by publisher Geoffrey Bles (in the U.S. Macmillan was the publisher.) The book was, according to Lewis, inspired by a drawing of a faun — a satyr — …