Worldbuilding Wednesday 7/16/25: Perils of the Great Eastern Ocean, Part 2 (Narnia LXVII)

The Aspidochelone, or turtle-island

Here’s some more mythical sea perils that Lewis left out of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Or, as a reader suggested to me, might have inspired him. Part 1 is here.

I also forgot a trope that relates to giant whirlpools. Which is — a trip to Atlantis! More than one pulpy story, comic book adventure or movie/cartoon/TV show features a ship that descends into the maelstrom only to wind up in the lost world of Atlantis. According to TVtropes, it’s known as a Portal Pool. The Wood Beyond the World in The Magician’s Nephew is, of, course, the portal pool to end all portal pools.

 

Perils of the Narnian Sea

Aspidochelone The official name for a sea turtle that is so gigantic it appears as a small island, often with trees, soil, and other features. It’s also used for other titanic beasts with vegetative back coverings. Anyway you slice it they are perilous for sailors because they are fooled into going onshore only to find the ground shaking and the island sinking as the turtle moves. Which, in much of the folklore, ensues because someone foolishly lights a fire on the island.
Icebergs Though Caspian & crew were sailing in southern waters it’s not unusual for an iceberg or two to appear. Driven by rogue currents, these massifs can travel a long way before finally melting. Such an occurrence could tempt the crew with the promise of fresh water.

But icebergs are dangerous as the majority of their mass is invisible and underwater. The ship might breach on an ice shelf or be damaged by hidden outcroppings; there would also be dangers as the iceberg melts and breaks up. More than one iceberg could trap the ship within their midst and slowly crush it. Finally, there might be things living on the iceberg: polar bears, aggressive elephant seals, yeti, hostile tribesmen, or ice dragons (or cold-drakes, as Tolkien would say.)
Swallowed by a whale Another trope that’s been featured many times, all the way back to the Old Testament and the story of Jonah. Sometimes it’s another creature, like a giant fish or sea dragon, but the concept is the same: the entire ship is ingested and stranded inside the whale’s innards, facing a dreary existence of living off periodic intakes of fresh fish. Such was the fate of Gepetto, Pinocchio’s father.

In folktales as well as modern retellings the ship and crew can escape by merely starting a fire inside the beast, which annoys it enough to vomit them out (or expel the characters through its spout if it’s a cartoon. Yes that’s anatomically impossible.) Notably, the Aspidochelone is irritated by the same thing.

Alternately, the characters can wander through the beast’s internal organs (ala Fantastic Voyage) and even meet other travelers stranded there.

In truth Lewis used aspects of this trope in the Dark Island adventure the ship and crew experienced.
Tsunami/Rogue wave A real-life danger especially near coasts, where the ship could be capsized or stranded many miles inland.
Fish men These beings have many names, but are basically humanoids with fishlike features. Lovecraft’s Deep Ones are one type; the Kuo-Toa of AD&D fame are another. The Creature from the Black Lagoon is perhaps the archetype. Fish men can breathe water as well as air and are prone to attacking ships, rising up from the sea to claw their way up the hull. They are usually bestial and primitive, but not always.
Disappearing island Like an oceanic version of Brigadoon, the disappearing island is there and… then it’s not. The island may be an Aspidochelone creature or have a sinister purpose, like H. P. Lovecraft’s R’lyeh.

The myth was likely born from sightings of the real-life Fata Morgana. The same optical phenomenon is responsible for floating cities and ships. Because it’s so otherworldly looking here’s a pic.

 

Collars

I think this photoshopped pic is hilarious, making visual allusions not only to the plastic hood of the witch’s sleigh, but also to her wardrobe with its immense fur hoods and the wide collar of her ice-blue gown.

Two French Flammarion Editions from the 1980s

Another entry in my series of French editions of the Chronicles.

Here are books one and two side-by-side, published in the early 1980s. That is clear because the first is no longer titled Le Lion et la Sorcière Blanche but L’armoire Magique — The Magic Wardrobe. If you do a search on this title and misspell it as L’amour Magique (Magic Love) you will find books about Tantric sex. No kidding.

(More recent French translation have the full and correct title.)

The cover artwork is unique to these editions and looks hastily done. The White Witch has worms, or snakes, or something around her neck. What is it? Vines? Thorns? While on the Prince Caspian cover both Caspian and Trumpkin are riding Aslan, which I don’t think happened in the book, and there’s an inconspicuous badger and a bunch of mice suspended in front of him. Well, both get the main points of the story across, unlike some covers. Both look cheaply and quickly released.

Of more interest here is their publisher. Castor Poche, which means Pocket Beaver in English, is the imprint for children’s and young people’s literature under the Flammarion publishing banner. Castor Poche was  created in 1980 and is still one of the leading paperback collections for young people in France.

On to Flammarion, and here’s where it gets interesting. Flammarion is now a subsidiary of Groupe Madrigall, the third largest French publishing group, but it was originally founded in 1875 by Ernest Flammarion, brother the astronomer Camille Flammarion, to publish Camille’s book Treaty of Popular Astronomy. The company also published Émile Zola, Maupassant, Jules Renard, Hector Malot, Colette, and other medical, scientific, geographical, historical works and … the Père Castor children’s series. There’s that beaver again!

Three Père Castor books from the 1950s with distinctive and colorful artwork on the covers.

An early advertisement for the imprint.

After some translation and research I found out Père Castor, or Father Beaver, was a character created by children’s book pioneers Paul Faucher and Lida Durdikova. Like any good father, Père Castor told stories to his children, young beavers Câline, Grignote and Benjamin, stand-ins for curious children who want to learn.

Père Castor and his children from a 1990s animated TV show.

So it looks like there’s where the Pocket Beaver imprint came from. It’s also very fitting for the Narnia books, because Mr and Mrs. Beaver were major characters in the first one.

 

Worldbuilding Wednesday 7/9/25: Perils of the Great Eastern Ocean, Part 1 (Narnia LXVI)

Henry Justice Ford (1860-1940), ‘Adventure with Scylla’, from ”Tales of Troy and Greece”, ed. by Andrew Lang, 1907

The Voyage of The Dawn Treader has an episodic structure consisting of the many adventures Caspian, Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace have while seeking the lost lords across the Eastern Sea. Many of them derive from myths, fables and earlier fairy tales, like the encounter with the sea serpent, the isle of the dragon, and the pale-skinned sea people. Of course, Lewis added his own spin on them: the sea serpent is a not-so-bright entity who is dealt with in a practical, albeit strenuous, way; Eustace becomes the dragon who was originally lord of the island; and the sirens have their own underwater civilization and things to do.

(Lewis rather flippantly deals with the fact that Eustace ATE the original dragon, who may have been a transformed Lord Octesian — that means Eustace committed cannibalism. Let’s hope this is one of the details he wanted later to correct.)

Other adventures read like they came from combined, remixed, and re-imagined folk tales: the island with a pond that turns things to gold, tempting others with greed; the black cloud-island that brings nightmares to life; and the Island at the End of World where a feast awaits those who reach it, like Valhalla. Then there are  mundane perils like the pirates mentioned in passing and the horror of being enslaved.

But there were more dangers the ship may have encountered on its journey.

 

Perils of the Narnian Sea

Scylla In The Odyssey, the hero Odysseus, returning from the Trojan War, has to guide his ship through a strait where there are two perils: on one side, a giant whirlpool known as Charybdis, and on the other, a sea monster, Scylla, who lives on human flesh. The ship must be navigated exactly between the two to avoid danger, but on the sea’s moving currents this is impossible, so Odysseus chooses to err towards Scylla … weighing the loss of a few men against the loss of the whole boat.

Later myths give Scylla an origin story. She was a once-beautiful naiad who incurred the wrath of a goddess, who caused long necks with the heads of monstrous dogs to grow out of her lower body; in her anger and despair she preys, or her monster heads prey, on passing sailors who pass beneath her cave. The dog heads made keening puppylike  noises, and from a modern perspective Scylla was likely no more than a cliff with dangerous underwater outcroppings where sea lions chose to rest.

Over the years artists have depicted Scylla in many creative ways like the Edwardian one above, where the heads are human and bearded with tentacles. There’s enough variation that I might do a visual essay on her one day.
Charybdis/
The Maelstrom		 I’m lumping these together because they are both giant whirlpools that can suck down a ship and destroy it.

Like Scylla, Charybdis was once a human female. She has several origin stories, but the one I’m going with is that she stole some cattle from Heracles (Hercules) and was punished for her greedy nature by being chained at the bottom of the sea forever sucking down the seawater.

The Maelstrom is Charybdis’s Norse cousin, popularized in Edgar Allen Poe’s famous story. Either one of these would provide plenty of adventure for The Dawn Treader and her crew.
Sargasso Sea This feature is a real-world one, a calm section of the Atlantic Ocean bordered by four different currents. The seas here are calm and blue,  the weather still, and greenish-brown  sargassum seaweed abounds. Pulpy adventure stories such as Uncharted Seas portray the seaweed as being so thick it entraps ships, but that’s exaggeration; the layer of seaweed is shallow, and its structure is small and fine, allowing even small hulls to cleave through. The real danger for sailors is the lack of wind and current.

I’m surprised that Lewis never used this trope.
Ghost Ship Legends abound of sailors finding abandoned ships on the open ocean (see the case of The Mary Celeste) and most of the time no good comes from exploring them. There’s room for another adventure there.
Giant Cephalopods/Jellyfish Another staple of pulp fiction, these (pulpy — sorry for the pun) creatures are depicted as entwining a ship in their tentacles to draw it down into the sea. To make them even more monstrous, they snatch sailors at the same time to eat. Of course, Lewis did something similar with his sea serpent, and IMO there’s room for only one snaky or tentacled ship-wrapping creature in the book.

(Lewis does allude to Krakens existing in a later chapter.)
Orca attack Killer whales have been ramming boats in Portugal for a few years now. Perhaps they do so in Narnia?

Jadis and Her Sleigh, Part 3

Edmund Meets the White Witch, by Laura Alderson

The witch, in an unusual nostrils-up pose, pointing at an offscreen Edmund as if to say “And what, pray, are you?” as the dwarf pulls back the reins in surprise. A lot of action and attitude packed into one pic. Note the artist’s good use of black, white and red which differs from the usual blue/aqua palette. This is the only witch I’ve ever seen with brown hair.

The White Witch of Narnia, by Heidi Smith

A dour Jadis and hostile dwarf done in an unusual textured graphite style.

The Queen, by Jessica Lanan

The witch rides away into the distance as two beavers observe,  evocative despite its lack of detail. The witch sports one of the highest crowns I’ve ever seen on her.

How the witch, sleigh, and dwarf appeared in the 1979 cartoon.

A design for an illuminated witch and sleigh for a “Festival of Lights” Christmas display at Longleat.

Another design for a Christmas display, this one showing, oddly, Edmund being brutalized by the dwarf. The design cribs from Baynes’ original but the witch is different.

The witch and sleigh from the 1988 BBC production. The costume and sleigh, with its deerskins and gargoyle heads, remains distinctive even after all these years.

 

New Narnia Book Covers by Owen Richardson

Late to the party here, but I thought I’d post these new Harper Collins Narnia book covers by artist Owen Richardson. They came out in April 2025 for the 75th Anniversary of the publication of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, considered the birth of the series.  They are for the hardback versions of the books.

I did some research on the artist, Owen Richardson, and his background is in fantasy illustration. He did the artwork for the Warrior Cats series, the middle school books about clans of feral cats. He also did a lot of work for trading card series, e,g, Magic: The Gathering, and I can see that in these covers. In general, they’re more flashy and violent, more action-oriented and cinematic, than the Narnia covers of past decades.


As an artist, I think they are OK. Competent, but I’m not knocked out of the park by them (save for one — more later.) My favorite of them is Prince Caspian (to the left — unfortunately, the full wraparound cover was unavailable) which is odd because it’s my least favorite book. The composition is strong, there’s no unnecessary detail, and the color range is good; I feel the action and the dynamic nature of the scene. Even though the title character is not on the cover (and to be fair, on a lot of PC covers over the years, he isn’t) it conveys the plot nicely — old Narnia vs. new Narnia. (When you think about it, Caspian is a very passive character … he’s almost a bystander in his own book. It’s only in The Voyage of The Dawn Treader that he gets to shine.)

I’ve heard complaints from some fans that they look too AI generated. Which is unfair, because it’s the reverse: AI generations look like the artist’s style, which utilizes tons of layering and other manipulation in Photoshop or a like program. This style can look overdone if you’re not careful with the embellishment.

Here’s the rest of the artwork along with my critiques — click on the pics to see them full size.


The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  It’s OK, but having all the Pevensies fighting the Queen together, armed with weapons even, is a bait-and-switch. It doesn’t happen in the book! Still, I could tolerate if only Lucy was armed correctly; she had a dagger, according to Lewis, which was gifted to her by Father Christmas, so she should have been in a knife-fighting stance. And why do so many artists ignore that the witch has a golden crown on her head?

Continue reading

Have you seen this cat?

This pic was from an ad campaign for the North Caroline Zoo. But it could be applied to Aslan as well … and one’s faith if you want to go meta.

Worldbuilding Wednesday 7/2/25: A Calormene Feast (Narnia LXV)

In the Chronicles life in Tashbaan is presented as one of decadent, ostentatious luxury. That would include the foods on which the nobles dined.

Lewis doesn’t mention which foods, with the exception of garlic and the cool sherbet Aravis and Shasta dream about when crossing the Great Desert. But we can infer from descriptions of real-life Turkish and Ottoman banquets and what ingredients were generally available in the Middle East. Mashing all these up, I came up with something unique.

(I figured many of these dishes would have elaborate names, Chinese court style.)

 

Foods served at Calormene Banquets

The Tisroc’s Moonbread: A pocket bread made with exceptionally white, fine-ground flour and egg whites said to resemble a full, rising moon when cooked.

Serpent Jelly: Like the English dish jellied eels, but dyed bright green and served in small bowls with green crushed pistachios on top. (Eels are rare in Calormen and a luxury item.)

Salanika: Any kind of fish stuffed with sweet dates and tangy blue cheese.

Jewelbox of the Sea: A stew of small mussels, clams, and oysters in a citrus and mint based sauce.

Black wine: No one knows the recipe for the alcoholic drink, but it is very black, tastes strongly of sweet grapes, and is highly alcoholic.

Four Slave Treasure: Called so because the dish was so huge four slaves were required to carry it out on a platter. It consisted of a pigeon stuffed with anchovies sewn inside a duck, which was then used to stuff a large hen, then a small, suckling pig, then a kid, and finally a calf, all roasted slowly and basted with exotic spices including cinnamon. So elaborate it was served only at the most special of occasions, like nobles’ weddings, the Autumn Feast, and the like.

Towers of Sunrise: Stacks of thin-sliced, slow-roasted lamb meat served on a vertical skewer, drizzled with a pomegranate glaze. Named for its rosy pink color. The meat is shaved off and served inside moonbread with spiced chickpeas.

Royal Kebabs: Skewers loaded with marinated chunks of lamb’s heart, cooked over a smoky charcoal grill.

Game-playing Beans: Boiled white and black beans arranged in a checkerboard pattern on a large, flat platter, topped with chopped parsley and nisa-nisa (see below.)

Tastyhearts: A type of pancake made with chickpea flour and soft farmer’s cheese, served with honey and molasses.

Lovers in the Blankets: Eggplant puree served over the largest of hen eggs, which were soft-boiled and halved and placed yolk-side down.

Orange rice: A pilaf-like dish made of yellow rice suffused with orangewater. It was cooked with dried chopped fruits and nuts and slivers of quail meat.

Nisa-nisa: Chopped walnuts sautéed in butter, used as a topping for vegetable dishes.

Pearls of the Phoenix: Hollowed pomegranate shells filled with a crème of goat milk, saffron and honey. (This is a figurative name only; Calormenes really don’t believe in phoenixes.)

Marzipan flowers: Almond paste shaped and colored to look like exotic blossoms.

Tashbaan sherbet: No one makes sherbet like the Tashbaani confectioners. The ice comes from the Western mountains, packed in deep layers of hay to keep it cool on its trip downriver. Some flavors are rosewater, lemon, violet, honey, mango, melon, and lavender.