In my original plans for this post I wanted to generate some names for new members of Santa’s flying reindeer team, but instead I went down a rabbit hole of Christmas canon. For example, much of our (meaning American) ideas about Santa Claus came from poet Clement Moore’s work “A Visit from St. Nicholas” which …
Estonia is one of those countries that, when I was growing up, wasn’t paid much attention to and wasn’t in the news a lot. Until 1991 it was part of the Soviet Block, but what it was like, I couldn’t tell you. In this sense it was similar to a backwater country on a fantasy …
Haven’t been posting much on this blog lately because I’ve been working on a novel… one aspect of which I will share here. Figuring strongly in the novel is a decadent nation where magic-using warriors ride dragons into battle. Dragons are, in fact, bred by the island’s royal family for that purpose. So it stands …
The pic above reminds me of UrsulaK. LeGuin’s Catwings series, the only children’s books she wrote. (Earthsea was intended for teens, though these days it’s shelved under Adult.) In this series a mama cat gives birth to four winged kittens who have names like Harriet and James, and the quartet uses the wings to escape …
A while back I speculated on what Narnian female names might have been like, drawing from names that were given to Victorian-era English girls. Since there’s a paucity of names for human Narnian commoners I came up with another list, shown below. (This is a sore point with me. I don’t like to be reading …
“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 …
Cavaransies have existed for thousands of years along trading routes in India, the Middle East, and North Africa. They provided travelers a place to eat, rest, and restock their supplies. Usually they were set at intervals along the road, the spacing calculated by the time spent in a typical day’s travel. Many of them were …
Like the Seven Isles, not much is known about Archenland. In the books it serves as Narnia’s steadfast ally, a typical Medieval European country ruled by humans that lacks the magic ** and the Talking Beasts of Narnia. It figures most prominently in The Horse and His Boy. Lewis gives it a few quirky details, …
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