Other posts in this series: The Odd Geography of the Utter East The Wild Lands of the North When speaking of Narnia, the name can mean both the country, and the world. Narnia-the-country’s boundaries are straightforward. This is a Baynes map from Prince Caspian. North: That line of hills that has a V-shape at the …
Let’s continue to explore Narnia’s four corners by moving from the Utter East to the Wild Lands of the North. The north has always been a wild, untamed place in Lewis’s mythos. In The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, giants live there, which High King Peter battles as part of his royal duties. In …
Of all the places in Narnia, I’m most fascinated by the Utter East, that area of Narnia-the-World that lies over the Eastern Sea. It’s one of the most transcendent of Lewis’s creations – full of so much rich, mystical bizarreness that those passages remain one of my favorite pieces of writing, any writing, to this …
The 1970 version and a more recent one (right) The Silver Chair is my favorite Narnia book. The protagonists travel across and into many worlds — the mountains of Aslan’s country, the swamp of the marsh-wiggles, the bleak moors and the bleaker ruins of the giants; then the cavernous underworld and the subterranean city of …
I admit Prince Caspian has its moments, like the madcap romp with Bacchus and the maenads. But compared to the rest of the Chronicles of Narnia, I don’t like it very much. In fact, I’d rather it didn’t exist at all. There’s no need for it to. The same themes of The Lion, the Witch, …
In last weeks’ Worldbuilding Wednesday I took a look at the etymology of Prunaprismia and how other women of Telmar might have been named. This week, I’ll look at the men. I think Lewis designed his names with French and Spanish in mind. The pronunciation of them, glottal and oily, recalls spoken Italian as …
How should one read the Chronicles of Narnia? As originally published, or in chronological order? That is hard to say, because C. S. Lewis wrote the books in neither. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was completed in early 1949 and published roughly 18 months later in October 1950. Hot on its heels Lewis …
Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then collected information about child-psychology and decided what age-group I’d write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out ‘allegories’ to …
One of the most oddly named characters in the whole of Narnia is Queen Prunaprismia, the wife of King Miraz. In Prince Caspian Miraz murders his brother, Caspian’s father, and usurps the kingdom, but keeps Caspian as his heir because he has no progeny of his own. But when his wife Prunaprismia becomes pregnant, Caspian …
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is my second favorite Narnia book. It’s sheer delight with its depiction of an Odyssey-like island journey with many stops and many opportunities for adventure. Not to mention the trippy last chapters with the sun becoming larger and larger, the water sweeter and more shallow, until it blooms full …