All Things Charn (Part I)

This wasn’t intended by the artist to be Charn; but it could be.

Charn is my favorite Lewisian creation … more than Aslan, more than Narnia itself. No other place in fantasy embodies such grandeur, sinisterness, and decadence … which is quite the accomplishment, as Lewis only gives hints of it.

Jadis herself says, in a reflective moment:

I have stood here when the whole air was full of the noises of Charn; the trampling of feet, the creaking of wheels, the cracking of the whips and the groaning of slaves, the thunder of chariots, and the sacrificial drums beating in the temples. I have stood here (but that was near the end) when the roar of battle went up from every street and the river of Charn ran red.

As a child my mind connected the dots: the slaves were prisoners of war being marched by militia to the temple where they would be sacrificed en masse.  Sixth grade, ghoulish  me loved to imagine the evil, wicked goings on there under Queen Jadis. Of course, who knows if that’s what Lewis meant by this passage; but it’s amazing how so evocative and rich a place was brought to life by such spare, off-handed dialogue and a few well-chosen similes.

Lewis’s fellow Inkling J. R. R. Tolkien, in contrast, spelled things out. From reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy I knew exactly how the city of Minas Tirith was constructed and how it works to repel invaders. I can picture the Tower of Saruman the White and the Great Hall of Rohan. The POV characters — the Hobbits — were out of their element and everything was new to them and needed to be explained, and very kindly on the part of the writer to the reader. I can’t say the same thing about Lewis and Charn. As a narrator he was in control and let you know it. Everything he gives the reader is through his editorial lens, yet he also gives the benefit of a doubt, through the characters whose POV he chooses. Both writers had commonality in their subject matter and the omniscience of their voices, and both were prone to an English sense of coziness. But compared to Middle Earth, Charn is more fun for me to think about. It’s the perfect collusion of Bible tales and Weird Tales, SF and Fantasy. Any gaps that are there are for my imagination to fill in.

The concept of a city in ruins, destroyed for its sins, has precedents of course, going all the way back to Sodom and Gomorrah. Atlantis, which Tolkien also drew on for his isle of Numenor, is another source. The  cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, hotbeds of Roman vices buried in pumice from Mt. Vesuvius, might also have influenced Lewis, and let’s not forget Shelley’s well-known poem Ozymandias, of a ruined statue and a ruined kingdom.  Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, a castle so vast its inhabitants have forgotten they even live in a castle, might have been another wellspring for world-covering Charn.

What makes Charn unique, however, is its titanic scale and utter desolation.

[Polly and Digory ] went quietly up to one of the big arched doorways which led into the inside of the building. And when they stood on the threshold and could look in, they saw it was not so dark inside as they had thought at first. It led into a vast, shadowy hall which appeared to be empty; but on the far side there was a row of pillars with arches between them and through those arches there streamed in some more of the same tired-looking light. They crossed the hall, walking very carefully for fear of holes in the floor or of anything lying about that they might trip over. It seemed a long walk. When they had reached the other side they came out through the arches and found themselves in another and larger courtyard [… ] into another doorway, and up a great flight of steps and through vast rooms that opened out of one another till you were dizzy with the mere size of the place. Every now and then they thought they were going to get out into the open and see what sort of country lay around the enormous palace. But each time they only got into another courtyard.

There are no furnishings in the rooms the two explore, no glass, drapes, or other decorations; all looks hundreds or thousands of years old. The untold implication is that whatever riches there have long since decayed into dust. Only the stone remains, some tiles, and “a great stone monster with wide-spread wings” a centerpiece of a long-dead fountain, and  “the dry sticks of some sort of climbing plant which had wound itself round the pillars and helped to pull some of them down.”

The action moves from the (comparatively) small rooms of their entry point to the Great Hall of Images, where Jadis is freed by Digory ringing the bell, then opens out into even grander halls and chambers right up to the palace’s entry in “a hall larger and loftier than any they had yet seen” with colossal doors of a strange black substance “fastened with great bars, most of them too high to reach and all too heavy to lift. “

All the while Lewis keeps us moving, ever “onward and upward” to cop a phrase of his, into greater scale and greater strangeness. When Jadis takes the children’s hands and leads them onto a balcony overlooking the city they see:

…a great landscape spread out below them. Low down and near the horizon hung a great, red sun, far bigger than our sun. Digory felt at once that it was also older than ours: a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon that world. To the left of the sun, and higher up, there was a single star, big and bright. Those were the only two things to be seen in the dark sky; they made a dismal group.

And on the earth, in every direction, as far as the eye could reach, there spread a vast city in which there was no living thing to be seen. And all the temples, towers, palaces, pyramids, and bridges cast long, disastrous-looking shadows in the light of that withered sun. Once a great river had flowed through the city, but the water had long since vanished, and it was now only a wide ditch of grey dust.

I believe that Lewis received inspiration for Charn’s sky from the paintings of 1950s space artist Chesley Bonestall. The huge red sun and white star sound like a red giant star and its white dwarf companion, an image both beautiful and desolate.

Artwork by Chesley Bonestall

Red giant star and its white dwarf companion

The white dwarf, though much smaller than the red giant, is the dominant one, siphoning away its companion’s outer atmosphere. It’s a symbiotic relationship, or more to the point, a parasitic one.

If Lewis did indeed base his solar system around the Mira model, the relationship of the stars could be a comment on Charn itself – a small class of magic-using rulers exploiting and draining the greater populace.

That there are no other stars in Charn’s sky implies its universe is even older than it is and at the end of its life as well.

(Growing up I saw a painting of a red giant-white dwarf system many times in the NJ State Museum’s planetarium, done in groovy day-glo paint and displayed under ultraviolet lamps. It was one of the highlights of each visit. If I was wearing anything white that day, I was sure to glow a groovy lavender color as well.)

Alternately, Lewis may be copping a scene from the H. G. Well’s The Time Machine where the device’s inventor, having finished his adventure with the Morlocks, springs ahead through the centuries to an unearthly shoreline over which hangs a bloated red sun… our sun, Sol… grown monstrously huge, staining the sky in odd colors. Lewis describes Charn’s sky as  “… extraordinarily dark—a blue that was almost black” a phenomena observable at the border of manned flight – 70,000 feet or so – resulting from the lack of oxygen. It seems from this Charn’s atmosphere is being drained away as well.

View of Saturn from Titan, by Chesley Bonestall

“A blue that was almost black.”
Saturn as Seen from Titan, by Chesley Bonestall.

Thus, it must be magic that lets any living being still breathe. The air is dry and stale, and there is no water and no life. Not even any hints of life, like moss or lichen. The sense of displacement in Charn is huge. It’s as close as Lewis comes to cosmic horror in the Narnia series. I have to wonder again if he again copped some atmosphere from H. P. Lovecraft, whose fiction included huge, alien cities serving as tombs for eldritch horrors, awash in the light of distant stars. Like Lewis, Lovecraft only hinted at what these alien cities were like.

In fact, Lovecraftian artwork gives a far better picture of the dizzying, dead ruins of Charn than the actual depictions of Charn that I’ve seen.

Illustration of a castle from H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands that is bizarre enough for Charn.

(NOTE: This isn’t to say I didn’t like Pauline Baynes’s illustrations for the original edition of The Magician’s Nephew. Her Charn has a sorta Norman, sorta Italianate feel, like the engravings of ruined cities done by Renaissance artists to prove their mastery of perspective. Her  depiction is distinctive and memorable, and unfortunately never improved upon. Which is sad, because Charn just cries out for other depictions. I’d love to see what modern CGI can do with Charn if Nephew ever gets filmed.)

It is also a shame that Lewis shied away from cosmic horror by having Jadis’s awakening be without irony. She’s destroyed her entire world rather than let someone else rule it and enspells herself to sleep in hope of rescue, only to find out that rescue comes too late by a few hundred million years. What a blow to her self-esteem. Imagine her surprise and shock when she sees that huge, dying red sun instead of the smaller, brighter one she remembered.

“Was it the Deplorable Word that made the sun like that?” asked Digory.

“Like what?” said Jadis.

“So big, so red, and so cold.”

“It has always been so,” said Jadis. “At least, for hundreds of thousands of years. Have you a different sort of sun in your world?”

No, no, no. Methinks Jadis was just disconcerted, and lied rather than admit it. When I first read the book, I was sure that’s the way it happened, Lewis making a telling point about Jadis’s vanity and inflated self-importance. She wasn’t the hot catch she thought she was.

Whatever the case, after the bell is rung the whole palace begins to fall apart, either from the sound of the bell working on the palace’s age and fragility, or the spell preserving Jadis and the Hall of Images being dispelled. Here we have some of Lewis’ crazy humor, Jadis treating the kids like minions, unable to conceive of any different scenario for her resuscitation than infatuation from a powerful wizard (as narcissists tend to do) and giving them orders to convey her to their world, where she barks at Uncle Andrew: “Procure for me at once a chariot or a flying carpet or a well-trained dragon, or whatever is usual for royal and noble persons in your land. Then bring me to places where I can get clothes and jewels and slaves fit for my rank.” It’s amusing and tells us yet more about Charn.

One thing that remains unclear is the Deplorable Word itself. Jadis states that she was left the “only living thing beneath the sun” but did that include plants? After all, a climbing vine was seen to have pulled down some pillars. What about bacteria and fungi? For organic matter to disappear, there must have been decomposition, which requires mold and microbes. And what happened to the world’s water supply?

The sheer age of the world and the loss of its natural processes and atmosphere might explain that; but for the plants, I’ll say the Deplorable Word left seeds and spores intact. Those plants and other organisms ran wild for a few thousand years, but without pollinators, they declined year by year, century by century, until none were left. Furthermore, as Lewis does not say how the Deplorable Word worked and it’s messy to imagine large quantities of corpses everywhere (that alone might have induced Jadis to put herself to sleep) I’ll say the Word, like Jadis’s door-dissolving spell, turned living things into frail heaps of dust that blew away on the wind.

I’ll also posit that, freaked out by what she had done (not for the loss of life, but for a city-world to lord over and the luxuries of her station) she took her place in the Hall of Images, waiting for a rescue from some other world. Though the hitch there is she doesn’t seem a romantic sort or the kind to wait for reanimation by a powerful male. The message on the bell is a bit too coy, her position with the other images too easy to be overlooked. Perhaps she had tried other means of egress, and it was a last resort.

There’s yet another model for Charn and its decayed grandeur: The Dying Earth series by Jack Vance. Vance’s stories take place on a far-future Earth that also has a red, dying sun, but unlike Lewis, his adventures are sprightly, whimsical, ironic, and often gleefully wicked. They are not allegories, and any grandiosity is meant to be tongue-in-cheek. The first collected book of Dying Earth stories was published in 1950. It’s within possibility to imagine Lewis reading it or the stories that appeared first in the SF and fantasy magazines of the time.

But perhaps the greater influence on Charn was the Bible.

Worldbuilding Wednesday
9/2/20: Narnia XIV

The Last Battle first edition cover, artwork by Pauline Baynes

Original hardback edition, 1956. The more traumatic aspects of the plot were passed over in favor of this cover featuring Mr. Tumnus and Lucy conversing in Aslan’s Country.

So, with The Last Battle, we come to the end of the Narnia series, and of Narnia. There’s not much to say, except “Everybody dies.”

Or sort of. Really, it’s not as bad as all that.

The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis

A more recent cover depicting a pensive yet bloodied unicorn, alluding to the book’s theme of a childhood innocence lost. And does that unicorn have a penis?

I actually started to read Battle immediately after LW&W, and was rather confused, as you can imagine. I wanted to read about Jill’s character and it seemed she hadn’t been properly introduced in that book, so I gave up and picked up the series with The Silver Chair. Back then I had no idea the Chronicles were sequential. I thought they were like Nancy Drew in that the events of the previous book didn’t carry over and influence the next. When I picked up Battle again it was after I had finished The Magician’s Nephew  so I had a better idea of who all the characters were.

As for the plot… well. As an adult, it’s still painful for me to read how the Antichrist arrives in the person of Puzzle/Switch, how the Calormenes invade and despoil and kill the dryads, how even the Talking Animals turn on each other. It also had the most overt violence I can remember — Jill being pulled along by the hair and thrown into the stable.

Ah, that stable. It only occurred to me a few weeks ago that it’s an allusion to Jesus Christ turned inside out — death in a stable, rather than birth. Still, in the book they spend way too much damn time there and around there. It’s like that overgrown forest in Prince Caspian. In fact, structurally, Battle shares the most similarities with that book than all the others: there is no physical journey like the other five, the journey is that of endurance and faith. In that, it’s a downer. It lacks the exoticism we expect of fantasy. For that reason, I suspect, it’s not rated among the most loved books of the series by most fans.

I do like, however, the apocalyptic nature of Narnia’s end, beginning with the stars falling from the sky, turning into people, and walking through a makeshift doorway into a larger land:

Stars began falling all round them. But stars in that world are not the great flaming globes they are in ours. They are people (Edmund and Lucy had once met one). So now they found showers of glittering people, all with long hair like burning silver and spears like white-hot metal, rushing down to them out of the black air, swifter than falling stones. They made a hissing noise as they landed and burnt the grass.

Then, over the next few chapters, the Earth humans in Narnia realize that, though Narnia is destroyed, they’re actually in a richer, truer, larger Narnia, and the reason for that is… they’re all dead. On Earth, in a terrible railway accident, on trains in which they were traveling to meet, having sensed something was amiss in Narnia.

As a child, my face went WTF when I read this, because, while not being arbitrary for the purposes of the book — which was about death and endings —  seemed an awfully convenient way for everyone to die at once. As a child of the 1970s living in the US, train accidents on that scale were unimaginable, and smacked of author contrivance. But in doing the research for this series, I found that this part of the book was in fact based in reality: the Harrow and Wealdstone rail disaster of 1952. This lends Battle a new poignancy, as its possible whole families may have been wiped out in the wreck. Even asserting this, however, that plot twist is just too damn convenient and skims over what has happened to those who were left to pick up the pieces.

Like Susan. Queen Susan, Susan Pevensie, who wasn’t on that fateful train trip because she was trying too hard to be grown-up and and had dismissed her Narnia experiences as childhood make-believe. Three of the other characters even sneer at her for it.

One might be shocked (as I was on my first read) that a such beloved character could so easily lose her faith, and wind up missing out on all the niftiness of Narnian Heaven. There are plenty of other readers and even  writers who were outraged, from J. K. Rowling to Phillip Pullman, at the notion that Susan went to Hell for being interested in being an adult and dating boys. (Girls were not an option.) I’ll write more about that later; but I will say, that as a Catholic, I felt the message wasn’t that Narnia abandoned her because she grew up. It was because she dismissed her faith as silly and childish, and the “she’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations” comment of Jill’s was supposed to convey shallowness, not SEX!!! in giant flashing capital letters.

Lewis wrote Battle at a time when England was still recovering from WWII.  Austerity rations (food rations) existed well into the 1950s, and it follows that cosmetics would have been expensive as well and highly prized by young women. (Battle was set in the Earth year 1949 according to Lewis’s timeline of the series.) Nylons, too, were an expensive indulgence, not something to be bought at the local five and dime. Though Lewis wrote the book in the early 1950s, his mindset was still that of wartime, when nylons and lipstick would have been unthinkable vanities for those struggling to eat, keep the economy going, and avoiding Hitler’s V-bombs.

As for invitations, I assume that’s for coming-out parties where one might meet the “right” people and make a good marriage, as the Pevensies were presented as middle upper-class sorts. Which raises the question of how complicit Susan’s parents were in encouraging her to make a good match. Or it may have been for frivolous parties where young adults listened to jazz and smoked newfangled reefer cigarettes, which would have probably outraged Lewis. We don’t know.

At the end of it, Susan was shallow and self-delusional, and she was “punished” for it by staying alive while the rest of her family dies. The book doesn’t go into the horrible part: SHE JUST LOST HER WHOLE FRIGGIN’ FAMILY.

(To Lewis’s credit as a writer, it takes a lifetime with the books and some hard thinking to reach that realization.)

After the Susan business, we discover that the walled mountain garden where the silver apples grow is actually another Narnia in miniature scale, going about its own business independent of the larger one. I still don’t know what Lewis meant by this. I think it was to illustrate “farther up and further in” but in reverse. For child-me it was creepy to think of a mini-world that could be easily destroyed by someone stomping all over it.  The epic last paragraphs of the book make up for it though.

And soon they found themselves all walking together—and a great, bright procession it was—up towards mountains higher than you could see in this world even if they were there to be seen. But there was no snow on those mountains: there were forests and green slopes and sweet orchards and flashing waterfalls, one above the other, going up for ever. And the land they were walking on grew narrower all the time, with a deep valley on each side … Lucy saw that a great series of many-coloured cliffs led up in front of them like a giant’s staircase. And then she forgot everything else, because Aslan himself was coming, leaping down from cliff to cliff like a living cataract of power and beauty.

I’ve looked and looked and have yet to find any artist who has taken it on himself or herself to illustrate these concepts.

What other books like The Last Battle might have been written?

 

Variations on The Last Battle

The Last Sign

The Last Prophecy

The Last Victory

The Final Challenge

The Long Vengeance

The First Curse

The False Mask

The Darkness Calls

The True World

The Realm of Chaos

The First Age of Man

The Blood Feud

The Seeking of the Great Beast

The Eternal Bond

Prince Doofus

I am not sure what language this is (Czech?) but the book seems to be Prince Caspian, going by the prominence of Susan’s bow and horn, Reepicheep, and Trufflehunter on the borders. The second creature from the left could be one of the Bulgy Bears, or a de-maned Aslan. The goofy “wizard” of the central panel is, I’m guessing,  a cartoony Dr. Cornelius, with  a crystal ball. This is the oddest Narnia cover I’ve yet to see.

Worldbuilding Wednesday
8/26/20: Narnia XIII (Let’s Talk About Charn)

The ancient city of Petra in Nabatea. Compare the facade in this pic to Pauline Baynes’s drawing of Charn below.

Illustration by Pauline Baynes, colorized for a later edition

Charn vies with Tashbaan as my favorite Narnian fantasy setting. Not that I’d want to live there, of course. It’s dead, dry, and spooky. But Charn in its prime… well! It must have been something to see.

One of the reasons it’s so evocative is the name. It’s short and blunt, like a location of the Bible — Kish, Nod, Punt.

But also, that char- sound. It sounds like an animal’s snarl. Not only that, it recalls to the reader char (as in burnt) charnel (a place filled with death and destruction) Charon (the ferryman of the dead, in Greek myth) and, perhaps inadvertently, charm, alluding to the magical nature of the place and its ruler’s reliance on magic.

Charn only appears in two chapters of The Magician’s Nephew, but the shadow it casts is  long, both in the book and the series. The Deplorable Word Jadis uses to kill all life is widely taken to be an allegory for nuclear war, and the dry depression where once its gateway lay in The Wood Between the Worlds is meant by Aslan to be a stark warning to the people of Earth.

Here’s some names that sound like Charn and would also make a good ruined city in some fantasy work.

 

Variations on Charn

Charth

Clurn

Chaph

Chuell

Chylitz

Chuatt

Cheull

Chyons

 Cherm

Chuik

Chydash

Chouph

Chourse

Chryne

Chyrt

Chylax

 

I was not only fascinated by Charn, but also by its sister cities. These places are named by Jadis on her rampage through Edwardian London, aimed at the policemen who are trying to stop her: “Scum! You shall pay dearly for this when I have conquered your world. Not one stone of your city will be left. I will make it as Charn, as Felinda, as Sorlois, as Bramandin.”

These are strange names, seemingly made up by Lewis on the fly, but they do sound Biblical in the same way that Charn does, at least to my ears. Sorlois has a French ring, while Bramandin brings to mind India and its Brahmin caste. Felinda has a similarity to Felimath, a name of one of the Lone Islands. Felix is also a Latin word  for “happy” so we can surmise Felimath was a happy place until the ancient Charnians were done with it.

 

Variations on Charn’s Sister Cities

Sorlois

Sarzeis

Sardulus

Sorloob

Sorlaash

Sarluth

Serlinde

Sarlin

 Felinda

Farucha

Fetindi

Eulinda

Fylandra

Vulindi

Fantando

Fescharza

 Bramandin

Beyanta

Brucannon

Bedanchon

Brymenthin

Balynsen

Batronen

Bragantium

Dry, dead Charn

Beruna

Liberating the River God, by Justine Sweet. Concept Art for the 2008 movie Prince Caspian. But… there was nothing in the text about a waterfall at Beruna. And surely, when Aslan did this, it was clear, sunny day … ?

 

Stone Knife and Stone Table

Even in contemporary children’s and YA books (as of 2020, when I am writing this) it’s hard to think of a more shocking passage than the White Witch killing Aslan at the Stone Table.

Four Hags, holding four torches, stood at the corners of the Table. The Witch bared her arms as she had bared them the previous night when it had been Edmund instead of Aslan. Then she began to whet her knife. It looked to the children, when the gleam of the torchlight fell on it, as if the knife were made of stone not of steel and it was of a strange and evil shape.

At last she drew near. She stood by Aslan’s head. Her face was working and twitching with passion, but his looked up at the sky, still quiet, neither angry nor afraid, but a little sad.

Not only is shocking, but I’m also getting a strange sexual vibe from it.

The world of Oz had nothing like this. Though a pioneer in children’s fantasy, it was a more homey, folkloric, fluffy series of books. The Lord of the Rings trilogy might have come close, with Gandalf’s presumed death in the mines of Moria by the whip of the Balrog. But that took place offscreen. Gandalf wasn’t trussed up and shaved and sacrificed like Aslan was, to the accompaniment of the White Witch’s cruel words.

First, a page from a graphic novel.

The childish lettering style makes this all the more disturbing, as do the skulls on sticks, the sobbing girls, and the black-cowled figures in the background who resemble devil worshippers. It’s intense.

Pauline Baynes’s illustration from the original The Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe. It’s busy, ambitious, compositionally complex, and almost too awful to look upon.


A more abstracted and less graphic image by Elys Dolan. I’m seeing Picasso’s Guernica in this, which I had the privilege of beholding in person. In re-reading LW&W, I noted Lewis’s reference to “evil apes” which seems fitting as one hastens the end of Narnia in The Last Battle.

A version similar to Baynes’ by artist Michael Hague with inspiration from Arthur Rackham. There’s some bizarre beasts here, like the human-handed antelope.

Concept artist Henrik Tamm’s portrayal of the witch at the Stone Table. Where did the arch come from? And that statue? Myself, I had always pictured the Stone Table as being rougher, more like a Bronce Age trilith — a flat slab of stone supported on three or four boulders.

Justin Sweet’s version, showing his original dark-haired concept of the White Witch.

Another piece of concept art showing a very detailed, beautifully crafted table.

Lewis himself always denied that this scene was not a crucifixion allegory. But what he did instead was to take that page from the Bible, treat it as folklore the same way he treated the satyrs and dryads, and created something new from it. The scene was meant to invoke the feelings one should have when reading of Christ’s ordeal on the cross, and such apprehend it in a new light. Same concept, different clothes.

Did it work? Yes.

Worldbuilding Wednesday
8/19/20: Narnia XII

Two covers for The Magician’s Nephew.

The Magician’s Nephew ranks third (tied with The Horse and His Boy) as my Chronicles favorite for the Weird Tales awesomeness that is Charn. As I wrote in The Wild Lands of the North, Lewis was more than a little influenced by the pulps (and the pulps influenced by Lord Dunsany and E. R. Eddison, his British forbears.) Elements from stories of this ilk began to creep into Narnia around the time of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. And as long as we’re at it, let’s add Gothic to the list. There was something very daring and transgressive in his mixing two innocent, likable Victorian-age children into this wild weirdness that is borderline too-kinky-for-kids literature.

I’ll get into Charn in a later post, however.

Like The Silver Chair, Nephew has inspired a diverse group of cover illustrations, but as the text is less grim than Chair, they are more attractive: winged horses, gardens, mountain landscapes. I’ve seen variations on Fledge and the kids’ travel to the Phoenix Garden, Charn and Jadis, Jadis and the Kids, Uncle Andrew in his laboratory, the green and yellow rings. The 1970 Roger Hane cover featured an enraged Jadis pulling Polly’s hair as they float above the Wood Between the Worlds. The original edition from 1954 had Baynes’s illustration of Digory and Polly peeking into Uncle Andrew’s magic workshop.

Speaking of Baynes, the book also featured one of her most distinct illustrations.

“Who has rung the bell?”


I don’t know about you, but it seems Baynes must have read the same H. P. Lovecraft stories Lewis had, for Jadis looks like she has a cephalopod sitting on her head, and her cloak is covered with eyes, Shoggoth-style. Her slinky pose here, with its narrow silhouette, is more 1920s than 1950s. The kings and queens behind her wear a variety of crowns, but they all look kind of Norman, as did Baynes’s illos for the humans of Narnia.

Here’s another Jadis to the left, also with a slinky pose, an exposed navel like Cher in the 1970s, and long clawlike fingernails. Actually, any photo of an unsmiling Cher in one of her TV show getups might have made a good Jadis back in the day.

Lewis himself said, in the scene where Digory and Polly come upon the Hall of Images in Charn:

This time Polly took the lead. There was something in this room which interested her more than it interested Digory: all the figures were wearing magnificent clothes. [ … ] The figures were all robed and had crowns on their heads. Their robes were of crimson and silvery grey and deep purple and vivid green: and there were patterns, and pictures of flowers and strange beasts, in needlework all over them. Precious stones of astonishing size and brightness stared from their crowns and hung in chains round their necks and peeped out from all the places where anything was fastened.

Though it’s Digory that rings the bell — and is piggish about it — and thus later ruins the virgin birth of Narnia, it’s Polly that takes the first step into the room, for reasons of vanity. Vanity is part and parcel of female ruin in Lewis’s canon. It’s mentioned pointedly in The Last Battle that the pursuit of youthful frivolousness is what makes Susan turn away from Narnia (and God), and also what tempts Lucy to cast a spell in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

There might have been another story, somewhere, like The Magician’s Nephew, but a little different…

 

Variations on The Magician’s Nephew

The Goblin’s Best Friend

The Minotaur’s Aunt

The Angel’s Nephew

The Magician’s Father-in-Law

The Necromancer’s Cousin

The Mage’s Half-Brother

Hiccup’s Grandfather

The Naga’s Assistant

The Weird Guy’s Friend

The Viking’s Grandson

The Troll’s Unbirthday

The Storm King’s Beasts

The Demigod’s Guardian

The Temptations of Temptation

The Dastardly Dragon’s Dear Son

The Frost Giant’s Unwanted Sibling

The Wise Old Wizard’s Anachronistic Ally

Mock-up

The Dawn Treader mock-up used in the movie, looking less than impressive next to modern dock equipment.

Worldbuilding Wednesday
8/12/20: Narnia XI

Tashbaan, by concept artist Alexandra Semushina

The Horse and His Boy ties for my third favorite of the Chronicles with The Magician’s Nephew. Perhaps Nephew has the edge, because of the awesomeness of Charn, the Wood Between the Worlds, and  Aslan’s Garden. But Horse has Tashbaan and the desert. It’s a close call.

The flavor is different from the rest of the Chronicles; it’s more of an Arabian Nights pastiche, complete with wry comments on that pastiche by Lewis himself. Some readers take this as him poking fun at Middle Eastern cultures and putting them down, but he’s really making fun of the whole literary tradition of Eastern folktales, which is also shared by author Tanith Lee who gets up with snarky commentary of her own… though Lee is definitely for grownups. The story is different in theme, too. Like the best Narnia books it’s structured as a journey, but it’s also a tale of escape for Shasta and Aravis, then a rollicking adventure after  they become mixed up with the Narnians in Tashbaan. (When I first read the book, the twin thing came as a complete surprise. Now I recognize it as a trope.)

But I wasn’t in love with the characters so much as the setting. If I could visit any part of Narnia, I think it would be Tashbaan, which is in many ways a dry run for the dead city of Charn. Charn can be considered Tashbaaan taken to excess. The picture above by Alexandra Semushina gives an idea of how one reader has imagined its majesty. Though for me, Tashbaan will always be Pauline Baynes’s illustration pictured below.

Tashbeen, by Pauline Baynes (script added later)

H&HB is also one of the books where the cover illustration is straightforward and doesn’t vary much. It’s mostly Shasta and Bree, sometimes together with Aravis and Hwin. One edition had a picture of the beehive-shaped ancient tombs on it outside the city, where Shasta spends a restless night. Then there’s this.

 

I don’t recall anything in the text about Bree being a pinto.

(This is a dappled horse, as Lewis said.)

Lewis developed Calormen  more thoroughly than Telmar (which wasn’t developed at all) but there are mysteries to it. One is its exact size. Lewis lets us know it is much larger than Narnia, but how much so, we are left to wonder.  There’s a difference between “much larger” and “completely dwarfing” and the official map by Baynes is not very helpful, as the unknown parts of the continent are either not shown or eclipsed by cavorting creatures. In the book itself Edmund states “My guess is that the Tisroc has very small fear of Narnia. We are a little land. And little lands on the borders of a great empire were always hateful to the lords of the great empire,” while Prince Rabadash says to the Tisroc, his father, “It is not the fourth size of one of your least provinces. A thousand spears could conquer it in five weeks,” but even as a kid, I always took the latter to be an example of the untrue Calormene hyperbole the natives tend to spout (like the untrue bit about Aslan being a demon that comes later) mixed with Rabadash’s fawning flattery, and Edmund’s statement more about, say, the size of Belgium compared to France, not Belgium compared to Russia.

Of all the characters, I like King Lune, Aravis and Hwin the most. Over the years, Hwin has in fact become one of my favorites. Shasta, like the young Caspian, seems thick, and a whiner to boot.  I’d bet, in fact, that Lewis starting writing Horse immediately after Prince Caspian; some of the humor is similar, like Prince Rabadash kicking the ass of Ahoshta, Aravis’s decrepit husband-to-be — I read it around 12 and even then thought the scene immature. Lasaraleen is also ridiculous with all her “darlings” and serves as rather broad poke at some spoiled society woman somewhere in read life, a farce that detracts rather than enhances.

After this list of alternate titles, I’m adding some names that could be used for Calormene characters. As with the Talking Beasts and the mythological beings, the named male ones greatly outnumber the female named ones. (Bree and Hwin don’t count because they have names in Horse language.)

 

Variations on A Horse and His Boy

The Horse and His Dwarf

The Horse and His Blacksmith

The Otter and Her Scholar

The Whore-Boy

A Hippogriff and a Boy

The Unicorn Becomes a Soldier

The Horse, His Dwarf, and One Boy’s Lie

The Horse’s Knight

The Foal and Farmer Monk

The Horse Trains

Horse vs. Valkyrie

The Horse that Was Big

One idea for the ancient tombs where Shasta spent a restless night.

Calormene Names

Female

Tsavina

Amira

Zulilah

Lassendra

Lyraleen

Shiriya

Saphna

Arudis

Faldeen

 Male

Kishva

Charaz

Uzhar

Ikir

Tsavish

Ansharam

Uchod

Hazar

Ashul

 

Calormen and the South

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 top of the map. Beyond it, Ettinsmoor.

South: The Archenland mountains.

East: The sea.

Northwest: Lantern Waste. (Not visible: Cauldron Pool and the Great Waterfall.)

West: The Western Wild (Not visible, but referenced in the text.)

Holy Cow! Examining these maps for the first time in many years, I’ve realized that I misremembered them, and filled in some blanks on my own. I was so sure that the Great Waterfall and Cauldron pool were in the southeast of Narnia-the-country, not the northwest; and that the hills between Narnia-the-country and Ettinsmoor ran straight east to west, and didn’t dip down as Baynes, and Lewis himself, indicated on their maps. Likewise, I assumed the castle of Miraz lay in the west of Narnia as well, west off the map where Trufflehunter’s cave is labelled, and not so close to Beaversdam. What rock have I been under?

(Caveat: I didn’t like Prince Caspian the book much anyway.)

I also added, in my mind, forested foothills all along Narnia’s western border that merged into tall, imposing mountains. I’ve seen these on many fans’ maps and some editorially-approved ones, but not consistently on Baynes’. But the Western Wild is going to be the subject of my fourth post on Narnia’s Four Corners.

Now let’s look at Narnia-the-world. This is Baynes’ most complete map, compiled of all the ones she did for the books, which had met with Lewis’ seal of approval. It’s been embellished with little frou-frou drawings but it’s still the most complete canon one.

narnia map

As seen, Narnia-the-world’s boundaries are:

North: The unnamed northern mountains and some blank space.

East: The Great Eastern Ocean; the Silver Sea, stationary wave, and sky-wall (not on map.)

West: The Western Wild, text visible just barely at the left. Fault of the photo cropping.

South: Calormen … and more of those frou-frou pics. The southernmost map feature is a truly huge mountain which isn’t labelled. Interesting. Methinks this might be The Flaming Mountain of Lagour. **

The question here is, how far does Calormen extend to the south and west? And what, if anything, is beyond these borders?

The text in The Horse and His Boy gives no indication of the Empire’s limits. A few places are mentioned but with no markers that would let a reader place them, so their locations are open to interpretation. Calormen’s size is mentioned in relation to Narnia, Narnia being “… not the fourth size of one of [Calormen’s] least provinces.” But since Calormenes tend to bend the truth when they want to flatter or frighten someone, I wouldn’t put much stock in it. Lewis indicates as such, if indirectly.

As for Bree’s and Shasta’s journey north, Lewis says it took “weeks and weeks past more bays and headlands and rivers and villages than Shasta could remember” but again, this doesn’t necessarily indicate Calormen’s size. What it does tell us is that Calormen’s eastern coastline is very convoluted. When Shasta sees the sea for the first time, he also notes it as well. Their trip thus zig-zags back and forth with the terrain, up hills and down, gaining latitude only slowly.  There was also another good reason they followed the coast  — the interior of the land was too harsh. Being closer to Narnia’s equivalent of an equator and thus in its desert zone, the majority of the country would be dry plains and scrublands. Lewis knew this either consciously or unconsciously. Even Tashbaan is situated close to the sea and is itself a major port.

I imagine the east coast of Calormen looked like this.

The text also tells us there are many villages and people in the hilly terrain Bree and Shasta traverse.  Which again makes sense: any settlements in an arid land like Calormen would cluster around water sources: rivers, lakes, the tops of high hills and mountains where water vapor rises and falls as rain or dew.

In fact, it’s reasonable to expect that Calormen is an empire where resources — namely arable land and water — are scarce and therefore fought over. In such a place, green, wooded Narnia must look like a paradise. But one that inspires greed and domination, not spiritual yearning. Though the Tisroc and his cronies may brag about Calormen’s wealth, size and might, at its heart it barely holds together. There must be roads such as the Roman empire had, with military outposts along those roads to keep order and enhance communication, yet even so, warfare is a constant. No other countries are mentioned, so the fighting must be internecine, between the Tarkaans, with the throne intervening when things get out of hand.

What lies south of Shasta’s home? Anradin, Shasta’s would-be owner, is said to have come from further south where he has an estate. There’s also a village to the south where Arsheesh, Shasta’s “father,” sells his fish. Lewis doesn’t tell us how far this south extends.

We are not told told, either, how long Calormen stretches to the west, only that there is a “far west” where there are rebels. As far west as Telmar, perhaps. Lewis had written, in his unpublished but accepted-as-canon Narnian timeline, that Calormen was the original colonizer of this land, which in Prince Caspian was said to lie “far beyond the Western Mountains.”

Let’s take a closer look. In Lewis’s original map of Narnia, the castle of Miraz is placed near Beaversdam and Lantern Waste, so it seems he intended for the Telmarines to have invaded close to that point. It makes sense for an invader to build a settlement at their entry point — which was most likely a fortress complex — to stage further forays. But on Baynes’s canon map above, Telmar is now indicated as being to the west of the eastern border of Archenland. If you squint you can see the tiny letters that say “Pass to Telmar.”

The exact location of Telmar will be a subject for my upcoming post on the Western Wild, but for now, let’s assume it’s closer to Archenland, over the mountains lying to its far west. In Lewis’s own imagined history of Narnia-the-world, the Calormenes colonized it in the year 300, only to be turned into “dumb beasts” by Aslan for their wickedness two years later and vanishing from the scene. So, somewhere, the two lands connect, and since no western sea is ever mentioned, the connection has to be by land.

So the upshot is, Calormene does extend to the west a good deal, I’d say half again its size at least. Again, this ties into why it has never successfully invaded Archenland or Narnia, until the The Last Battle. Most of its armies and resources are just too far off and too hard to gather and organize and march across the desert and then the Archenland mountains.

Telmar the country already exists during the timeline of LW&W and The Horse and His Boy, according to the Hermit of the Southern March in Horse (“There, as in a mirror, he could see, at certain times, what was going on [ … ] in the great Western forests between Lantern Waste and Telmar”) but is uninvolved in Narnia ‘s doings. Some of the wikis say Telmar and Calormen shared trade, but this isn’t in the books. It may be fan invention, or mentioned offhandedly in the movies.

The original Telmar continued to exist at least up to the reign of Caspian X.

The map above is interesting for its completeness, supplying new countries to the far south for Calormen to battle and absorb, as well as a southern branch of the western wilderness through which Calormen has  access to Telmar. It’s interesting to speculate that southern Narnia-the-world had a whole life and history independent of the north. But, though the idea is delightful, there’s nothing in canon about it.

This fan imagines Narnia-the-world as being  completely surrounded by sea. This makes sense if my hypotheses about the world being sealed in a globe is correct. Travel to the limit of any part of this sea, and you’ll find a sandy beach, short grass plain, and sky-wall of the same kind that was found The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, ensuring intrepid explorers  go so far and no further. Of course, Aslan also didn’t plan on the ingenuity and determination of humans.

There’s an excellent fanfic called The Corners of the World, by Elizabeth Culmer, that’s about the journeys of Jadis before she settled down to become the White Witch. In the far north, she attempts to climb over the northern mountains, but is hampered by the lack of oxygen at their heights… and the unearthly smell that comes from Aslan’s Country, invigorating to humans but poisonous to her. It’s a fanfic and not sanctioned by the estate, but to me, as reader and writer, it feels right; in the west and south, somewhere, must be similar barriers and passages. As a child, I supplied a limit to Calormen myself. At its south was another desert, wider, hotter, more inhospitable than the one in the north, with huge sand dunes that impeded further progress.

Perhaps, at the limits of this hypothetical deadly desert, there is a huge stationary sandstorm that acts as a curtain between Narnia-the-world and the next one?

Or, assuming the Flaming Mountain of Lagour is a volcano located at Calormen’s southern barrier, it might the beginning of a desolate land of cinder cones, boiling mudpots, lava wastes, and ultimately a river or sea of molten rock. If any living thing manages to reach this area, they will be cooked many times over.

Or, after the dunes of the Greater Desert, one finds a Great Jungle, full of impenetrable vegetation, heat and humidity, and deadly beasts, and a Great River that leads to Aslan’s Country.

The rainforest biome is one that Lewis never wrote about. I wonder why.

Let’s take leave of Narnia’s south now, and as Lewis himself said, further up and further in…

 

** Mentioned by Emeth in The Last Battle. This might be an actual geographical landmark, or a feature of a  story like Moses and the Burning Bush.