By the end of the reign of the Telmarine kings, the human population of Narnia had grown. In The Silver Chair, in fact, it’s stated that one in five citizens was a human, the rest being dwarves, Talking Beasts, centaurs, and the like. And if there’s one thing humans love, it’s having a drink in …
As I speculated in last week’s Worldbuilding Wednesday post, the family line of Caspian never had a proper name. English history had the Plantagenet kings, the Lancasters, the York, Tudors, and Stuarts… all the way down to the House of Windsor, that of the newly crowned King Charles III. What gives? I know, writer forgetfulness …
A few days ago, in the Narnia subreddit, I discovered a glaring discrepancy in The Silver Chair I had never noticed before. At the end of The Voyage of The Dawn Treader, Lewis has this to say about Caspian and Ramandu the Star’s Daughter: Caspian married Ramandu’s daughter and they all reached Narnia in …
The Lady of the Green Kirtle, IMO, is one of Lewis’s most terrifying creations in the Chronicles… so terrifying she doesn’t even get a proper name! Duplicitous, poisonous, beguiling, only when her power is defied does she show her true nature: she morphs into a giant snake that is more dragon than serpent. Her …
E is not one of my favorite letters, I’ll admit. True, it can be elegant, extravagant, enticing, enjoyable, and a slew of other en- words. But it’s also enormous as an elephant, with an old-fashioned, outdated, Victorian feel. Sound out the words Elizabeth, euphonious, evangelist, and Euphrates, and you will see what I mean. Though …
Victorian writer Charles Dickens was known for the odd and whimsical names he gave to his characters, presumably so readers would better remember them. As his stories were first serialized in publications over many weeks or months, this makes sense. These odd names also served a satirical purpose. Some of the more memorable of these …
As in, why did the band pick that name anyway? Logic might tell you it comes from a long line of band names that change one or two letters of an ordinary word to become something wacky and eye-catching. As in The Beatles, The Monkees, The Byrds, Cyrcle, Def Leppard (a Led Zeppelin imitator if …
When it comes to Led Zeppelin songs, their titles recall mostly about one thing: Blues, Blues, Blues. Unlike Beatles songs, they didn’t dabble in storytelling or psychedelia. This makes the song titles themselves not too interesting, but they’re also easy to recreate. Maybe there’s a bootleg of these around somewhere… Led Zeppelin Songs, what …
Above is a portrait of the most recent of Hungary’s exports: the Vizsla, wearing a traditional peasant outfit courtesy of AI art. The speedy, good-natured hunting dog joins the rank of other notable exports like paprika, ghoulash, video pioneer Ernie Kovacs, and Gene Simmons (by way of Israel) to name a few. Situated in Central …
Like the color green, the color yellow has a split personality. Yellow, and its cousin gold, can mean wealth, sunlight, cheer and happiness, even life itself. But it is also the color of sweat, feces and urine, cowardice and betrayal, just as green’s sour side is that of poison, jealousy, snot, and pus. Unlike green, …