Narnia-themed lacquered box by Russian artist Vera Smirnova.
I love the detail on this piece and how the story of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe has been culturally translated. The artist drew on the imagery for the movie, not the book, as the polar bears and armored centaurs attest… as is High King Peter riding on his unicorn.
Japanese editions of the Chronicles, in slipcovers, but one can tell from the small pictures on the spines what books they were.
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 wrote Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Horse and His Boy. The agreement with the publisher, Geoffrey Bles, was that the books would come out one a year, from 1950 onward. Horse was ready in July 1950 so Lewis had plenty of wiggle room.
By the time Prince Caspian was released under the agreement in 1951 Lewis had already finished another book, The Silver Chair. It was slated to follow The Voyage of the Dawn Treader even though The Horse and His Boy had been finished first. It’s easy to see why. The series was following the adventures of the Pevensie kids, their cousin, and his friend Jill, and to suddenly go backward in time would have been a major jar. With The Silver Chair as the fourth book, the saga of the Earth kids comes to a clean end (or so we think.)
Concurrent with the four books above, Lewis was working on The Magician’s Nephew, picking it up and putting it down in the way that writers do.
Next to be published, in 1954, was The Horse and His Boy, which explored the Arabian Nights setting of the Empire of Calormen, Narnia’s nemesis and downfall. It’s the most baroque of Lewis’s settings, and in retrospect, it’s natural that he would have written it after The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where it had been introduced in the Lone Islands chapters. (Although I don’t recall anything in Voyage that let the reader know Edmund had interacted with the Calormenes before.)
Lewis considered The Magician’s Nephew complete when he began The Last Battle, but went back to it after Battle was finished for some finessing. So it’s actually the last book written. The Silver Chair was just being published as The Magician’s Nephew was completed, so again there was no rush.
As published
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Chronological
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Order written
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As I read them
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I’ll call the publication order the classic order, and it’s at the far left of the chart. When the books began to be released in the United States, this was the order in which they were numbered, and how they appeared in boxed sets, libraries, and book catalogs.
The original British editions were not numbered. When they moved to different publishers and began to be put in a sequence, the chronological order was used.
In 2005, Harper Collins, which was then publishing the books in the U.S., began to use the chronological order, which caused some confusion. Lewis himself had never thought of his books as “The Chronicles.” That was a title put on them by someone else.
I myself prefer the classic order. It’s the one I grew up with, so of course I am prejudiced. But it also shows Lewis’s progression as a writer and conveyer of complex ideas. A child could start reading the series with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe at age 7 or 8, and actually grow up with the books to age 13 or 14, assuming they read one a year. And I do think there is merit in how gradually the land of Narnia itself is opened up and refined, old elements discarded by not being mentioned again (like that sewing machine in LWW) while new ones take their place (the mountains of Aslan’s country in The Silver Chair) with all the elements building on each other to make the world wider and wilder. In LWW we have a kingdom of talking animals with a witch-queen, a sacred lion and four kids, but at the end there are hints of it in the line “And they [the Pevensie kings and queens] entered into friendship and alliance with countries beyond the sea and paid them visits of state and received visits of state from them.” ** In Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader we are introduced to it. Telmar is mostly discarded as a plot element, but Calormen, the various islands, and star-people become part of the canon and enter in later.
Then, there is the order that I-the-writer read them.
I read, or rather heard, LWW first, read to my sixth-grade class by an exceptionally hip, creative nun. After that, I think she started on Prince Caspian, but left off at the point where the Pevensies are lost in the woods and Lucy starts to cry because her siblings won’t believe she saw Aslan and talked to him. I really wanted to hear the rest of it, but someone else in my class had beat me to it and checked out the book from the school’s library. So I hopped ahead to The Last Battle. I had no idea the books were a continuing story, figuring they were like the Mary Poppins series or Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Doolittle books in that it didn’t matter what order you read them in.
I was more than a little confused by Battle, not knowing who Jill and Eustace were, or why so much fuss was being made about a stable. I’m not sure I finished it.
The next book, I’m sure, was The Silver Chair because it had the coolest title. Finally I got to read the story of Jill and how she came to Narnia. To this day I think it’s the most perfect of the Narnian books. If you have to read just one, this should be that one.
After that came I think The Magician’s Nephew, which I also enjoyed, and then The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Horse and His Boy. When I think “Narnia” I think of these four, the pinnacles of the series. (It’s not that I don’t like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; it just doesn’t hold up that well as an adult book.)
After that, I read The Last Battle again, and felt let down and confused, as I’m sure many young readers were. But even so I was entranced by some of the imagery.
I stopped for a while after that, maybe a year, then read Prince Caspian like I had originally wanted to. I was not impressed. To this day I consider it the most dreary of all the Narnia books, and after The Last Battle, that’s really saying something.
Could Lewis have written more of Narnia? I’m sure he could have, if he wanted. Unlike Middle Earth, Narnia was not a closed world with a set history and geography. Lewis himself gave hints of other adventures, other places, in the text.
The copyright on Narnia will expire in 2034. Where will it go from there?
** In Voyage of the Dawn Treader, these are revealed to be Galma, Terabinthia, and The Seven Isles. Though they are “in” the sea rather than being “beyond the sea” as Aslan’s country was. It’s likely that in this point in the writing Lewis had the mental map of Narnia as being like England with the unnamed foreign countries being stand-ins for France, Spain, Hungary, etc.
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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 embody them.
This is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord. C. S. Lewis, |
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Queen Prunaprismia the snob.
(Vanity, by Frank Cadogan Cowper)
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 is rendered redundant, and must flee for his life into Old Narnia.
Prunaprismia is the only female Telmarine who’s ever named, and for the sin of being married to Miraz that name is awkward, twee, fussy, and pretentious. Lewis, as he makes clear in the rest of the Chronicles, detested social pretense in all its forms, so while Prunaprismia is not called out in the text as being abusive to Caspian, it’s implied she is one of the villains, and deserves whatever fate comes to her as a widow with an infant son. **
Where did it come from? Lewis may have intended it as an in-joke for the literati. Charles Dicken’s novel Little Dorrit has a quote in it which goes “Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism are all very good words for the lips.” The speaker of the quote may have been Mrs. General, a tutor for the Dorrit children who was also marked by pretension, primness, and snobbery. Thusly, poor Prunaprismia is doubly damned, and in addition, is noted as having flaming red hair in the text, another marker of ridiculousness. I’ve also heard a story that Lewis had a bet with another member of the Inklings that he could name a character from that quote, and that he hated prunes.
Whatever its genesis, from the name it is possible to make projections for Telmarine female names in general.
The male names and surnames of Telmar sound like a mash-up of French and Spanish with generous usage of z, sp, elle, and ian. Both countries have a history of invading or threatening England over the centuries, so it’s natural Lewis would have modeled the Telmarines on them. I kept to that pattern for the women’s names.
The female names are also intensely multisyllable, at least for the nobles. Prunaprismia may be a mashup of two names, Pruna and Prismia; perhaps this is a way of honoring the child’s grandmothers or godmothers. Using the names below, one may make other mashups like Tristacaspra or Zinellaneza.
Lastly, the names would sound a little off and ugly, old-fashioned, Victorian. Old-timey girl’s names like Hazel may be making a Steampunk comeback, but not the ugly ones like Bertha or Gertrude.
So, let’s go!
| Blodwella
Caspra Drumilla Espritza Ezma Drosta Ermina Erzula Glizma Grizelda |
Imeralda
Ineza Lazuli Mavriel Mazitta Olma Otherica Pipella Pompella Prisa |
Rhoona
Rhunotta Sprivella Sunezza Trista Tinta Trintessa Zanetta Zita Zinella |
** The excellent fanfic “In Exile,” by the_rck, describes what happened to Prunaprismia and her son after Miraz’s defeat.
Sample drawings from a (probably unauthorized) manga adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Note Aslan seems to be wearing a crown of thorns and the dessert Mrs. Beaver is holding is a Swiss roll cake, a Japanese favorite.
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 of lotuses. Only the dull bit about the conflict with some slavers at the beginning mars its perfection (and that deserves another Pet Peeves post.)
In some other space and time, there were books like these.
| Voyage of the Night Threader
Destiny of the Leaf Tree Trader A Passage of Wild Treading Adventures of the Wickthorne Holiday in the Blue Dawn Voyage of the Moongrave Sailing the Skywraith Exodus with the Grace Child Wanderings of a Winter Spirit Voyage of the Drawn Leaper Journey of the Fast Stepper The Voyager of Dawn |
A deadly White Witch quartet.
The most iconic character (after Aslan the Lion, that is) of The Chronicles of Narnia is The White Witch, the villainess of both the first book and the sixth, and referred to in all the others. She’s a sorceress, a wicked queen, a petty spoilsport, a warrior general, and a femme fatale all in one. When the series begins (I’m using the old chronology here, of publication date) she has ruled the once-fair land of Narnia for a hundred years, covering it in eternal winter, and ruling it with the help of her secret police force of wolves (shades of Hitler and Mussolini) and army of evil dwarves, wraiths, hags, and haunts. A prophecy has been made that she will lose her power when the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve sit on the thrones at Cair Paravel, so she polices her realm most closely for visitors of human blood. When Lucy, the youngest of the Pevensie kids, stumbles into the realm through the titular wardrobe, the real story begins.
The White Witch’s name is given as Jadis in the text, though she’s never referred to by it, and that name is given through the medium of a written order and not spoken. But she’s the same Jadis who appears five books later in The Magician’s Nephew as a sorceress-queen who kills the entire population of Charn with a single spoken magic word.
In LW&W she’s regal, brittle, thorough, and calculating, as well as being tall and inhumanly beautiful. No misshapen wart-faced witch, she. In Pauline Baynes’s illustrations she has long black hair which has become iconic for the character, even though her hair color was never mentioned by Lewis.
Illustration by Pauline Baynes.
We meet her first in the forest when she comes upon young Edward, who has stumbled into Narnia in the hope of proving his sister Lucy wrong about its existence. Here, in the first visual depiction of her, she stops her sleigh and looks at him in an unfriendly way. It’s so simple and delicate, yet so strong, how she frowns and leans forward with her whip in her hand, and Edward raises his hand to his mouth in astonishment. In a later illustration it’s implied she uses the same whip on him, though the sinisterness is undercut by the silly Turkish slipper-like shoes she wears which are inappropriate for a wintry forest.
Barbara Kellerman played the White Witch in the BBC live-action version from 1988. Her depiction adhered closely to both the original illustration and the character as depicted in the book: haughty, brutal, slightly mad. You can believe she’s ruled Narnia for a hundred years.
Tilda Swinton’s version from the 2005 Disney big screen movie. The sled design is right-on, but overall I am not a fan of this depiction. Though a wonderful actress, Swinton lacks the vitality of Kellerman’s version (despite her turn as a faux-Boudicea in the battle scenes.) Her White Witch is less brash and fun, and more distant. Autistic, almost. Swinton specifically asked to play the role as a blonde, to draw attention away from the witch being seen as a POC with dark hair, and towards a more Aryan one with allusions to Nazi Germany. But the blonde dreadlocks are just wrong. How does she comb them?
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Well, I guess she doesn’t. The flowing hair she wears for the the big battle scene was supposedly Aslan’s.
As for the metal headpiece, the two points that come down over her forehead do not make sense. How easy would it be for it to get knocked out of position and the points penetrate her skull or eyes? And the spangly blue gown she wears in the throne room, with its wide shoulders and exaggerated neckline, is too cartoonish for Swinton’s slender frame.
An illustration by Christine Birmingham for one of the later editions of LW&W. I like this one even better than Baynes’. It’s evocative of a cold, clear afternoon on a forest road, and the palette is attractive: pale blue, red, white, and gold against which Edmund’s human coloration stands out. The White Witch wears her hair pulled back, looking both cruel and serene.
I wish I knew the name of the artist who made the wonderful rendition above, but I can’t read Russian. It’s almost perfect, save for some difficulties of scale: both Edmund and the reindeer are far too small.
A close-up showing the witch in all her marvelous cruelty.
A fan’s version of the meeting. The White Witch and Edmund, by Briana Gallegos
Edmund and the Witch, by Kelsey Michele
In this one Edmund meets the White Witch by moonlight. He’s in his pajamas, as happened in the movie, instead of short pants like in the book. He’s shivering so we know it’s cold, and the White Witch is about to offer him a hot drink as she does in the book. She’s got a smirk on her face which is out of character, but otherwise, it’s OK.
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The same scene, by artist Deborah Maze, for a 1997 picture book adaptation. The witch here shows a little too much… glee… as she tempts an underage boy, putting her arm around him as he’s mesmerized by the steaming chalice. Well, we’ll get around to that in the section below. |
If all these depictions seem familiar to you even if you haven’t read the book, you are right. The same scene occurs in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale The Snow Queen, in which the glamorous, supernatural Queen of Winter encounters young Kay as he is sledding in the woods. She tempts him away from his childhood sweetheart Gerda and carries him off in her sleigh.
The Snow Queen, by Debra McFarlane
Artwork by Elena Ringo
Artwork by Angela Barrett
Illustration by Rudolf Koivu, 1940
Sometimes, as in the Russian illustration above, the Snow Queen has Kay hitch his sled to hers. Other times she bundles him up inside with her, with more than a little hint of eroticism in it.
“He’s mine, all mine!” Illustration by Vladislav Erko
Though sex is not mentioned, it’s a tale of seduction: a young boy lured away by an older, more worldly woman who keeps him enthralled. But for all her glamor she is emotionally cold, leaving it up to Gerda to fight for what’s hers and bring him back home. I’m pretty certain Lewis played around with this motif on purpose. Edmund, like Kay in the story, is a twisted sort, with the difference being his flaw is cruelty, while Kay’s personality has been warped by a shard from a magic mirror.
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Two vintage Snow Queens, the second in a sleigh bedecked with bells, both of which Lewis may have read as a child.
After eating the Turkish Delight, Edmund returns through the wardrobe where he lies about being in Narnia, making Lucy cry. But a few days later all of the siblings enter the wardrobe to escape a tour group, and see for themselves that Lucy was telling the truth, and Edmund lying. But they don’t know Edmund has promised the White Witch to deliver them to her. At some point during dinner with the Beavers, he sneaks off to her castle.
The White Witch’s Throne Room
Concept art from the movie. Too ornate and oversized for my taste, in the way CGI makes it all too easy to do. The white tiger was not in the original book.
Illustration by Christine Birmingham
Edmund sees the statues of the petrified Narnians as the White Witch waits expectantly for him. The scale here is better, but errs on the side of being too narrow and intimate. Edmund’s apprehension is a nice touch.
The White Witch shows her anger and Edmund cowers. Aside from the odd hitching of her arms, this depiction does a good job with her the castle. Like a Medieval church it has a vaulted ceiling and hanging lamps, and it is made of stone blocks. The wolf at her feet looks like a cross between a rat and a lion, harking back to Aslan… but she’s the anti-Aslan, as Lewis intended: Yin – Female – Cold – Silver vs. Yang – Male – Warm – Gold.
An animated version of LW&W by was released by Rankin/Bass and broadcast on CBS in 1979. I remember watching this and my brother making fun of it. Judging from the screen grab of the White Witch on her throne below, it was pretty awful. Peter’s clothes (turtleneck sweater, bellbottoms, and pointy-toed Beatle boots) are suspiciously dated for the late 70s when disco, the punk scene, and Valley Girl fashion were entering the mainstream. How this won an Emmy award I don’t know.
There’s some interesting discussion about the cartoon here.
The witch on her throne.
Artwork by Leo and Diane Dillon
Leo and Diane Dillon depict a literally bubbleheaded White Witch here in their unmistakable style. There are some interesting details here, like the Negro features of the dwarf and the strange bird heads on the chair’s armrests. Her wand, more of a staff, is tipped with a skull. She seems to be baring her teeth in the same way the wolf is. Very nice image.
Edmund and the White Witch by Deborah J. J. Lee
Edmund goes from the frying pan into the fire! The White Witch looks ready to poke him with her spear here as the wolves snap and howl. The artist’s technique is very like that of Erte which is no mean accomplishment.
I’ll be posting Part II later.
A maenad and her leopards.
As I mentioned in last week’s Worldbuilding Wednesday, almost none of Lewis’s female Narnian creatures received a name, whether they were Talking Beasts or mythological beings. I’ve attempted to rectify that here. Naiads and maenads have Greek-type names, and dryads and hamadryads those relating to trees. As Hamadryads are bonded only to a particular kind of tree, that type became part of their name. For fun, I added in river-gods (the male equivalent of a naiad) and star people.
It’s also worth reflecting on that there was plenty of miscegnation going on between Narnian natives and human beings from our world. In The Magician’s Nephew, the children of King Frank and Queen Helen are described as marrying naiads and river-gods and thus founding the human population of Narnia-the-world (as opposed to Narnia the country.) In Prince Caspian, dwarves have intermarried with humans, producing human-dwarf hybrids. In Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Caspian marries the daughter of a star person. Her mother is not mentioned, but since she’s living on the earth, mom was probably human as well. Star blood thus passed into Prince Rilian and down through the last kings who likely already carried naiad and dwarf blood.
This puts Aslan’s prophecy that the throne of Narnia shall only be occupied by sons and daughters of Adam and Eve into a new light. As they were from this world, they did not have the taint of dwarf or naiad or river-god; and presumably, neither did Caspian, being of a Telmarine noble family descended from South Sea pirates.
| Living Stars
Beteldu Zularea Marethyn Saphomon Demisda Sabelin |
River-gods
Videas Atphos Barathus Vinderus Valeropus Ganthus |
Naiads
Sayra Villsa Shirna Issenta Elspa Persa |
| Maenads
Ternia Nephera Uvala Orpha Mirlana Fonara |
Dryads
Brightwood Darkdew Greenbraid Silverjade Feathertwig Bluemoth |
Hamadryads
Applejoy Starplum Yewgrass Snowbeech Mosswillow Hazelbrook |
This boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia was my Holy Grail for a few years. Released in 1970, it was the first time all the books were offered together in a decorated cardboard slipcase. The original Baynes drawings were used on the inside, but the covers, with their vague art deco leanings and childlike, airbrushed figures, were very much of the 1970s, and still remind me of embroidered denim, platform shoes, and cheap dangle earrings decades later. In high school I finally bought a used set at a yard sale that served me as reference and inspiration when I began writing myself.
The covers of the books all together. Each one is surreal enough to be a Magritte painting. There’s an echo in them of Rousseau as well. The scenes are caught in mid-action, yet the result is flat, frozen. There is no affect, no irony. I wonder if it’s because some editorial decision was made not to depict the stories literally. They are Christian allegories, after all. They are mostly true to the books, except Jadis did not have red hair as depicted on The Magician’s Nephew, and the dragon head bow of the Dawn Treader is greatly oversized.
The same fantastical aesthetics are visible in the interior illustration above, for a cardboard toy, which appeared in Scholastic’s Dynamite magazine. Scholastic put out the Narnia boxed set as well. Dynamite was aimed at junior high kids and also appeared in the1970s.
From whence came the artist’s original inspiration? More than likely Peter Max, who did this notable poster for Earth Day in 1970.
There were female centaurs in the Narnia movies, but not in the books.
In addition to Talking Beasts, Narnia was home to many other beings from Western mythology, as well as a few Lewis created himself. Some were referenced often, like centaurs and dwarves. Others received just one mention, like the laundry list of baddies under the White Witch’s command who bind Aslan to the Stone Table. I’ve attempted here to separate them all out.
From Grecian and Roman myth:
Fauns
Satyrs
Centaurs
“Man-headed bull” (Minotaur?)
Dryads
Naiads and River-gods
Maenads
Merpeople
Sea People
Winged Horse (Pegasus)
Unicorns
Phoenixes
Griffons
Monopods (Dufflepuds)
Incubi
Salamander
From European Myth and Folklore:
Dwarves
Giants
Ettins
Boogles
Ghouls
Horrors
Grues
Hags
Werewolves
Ogres
Orknies
Spectres
Woses
Wraiths
Dragons
Sea Serpents
Toadstool people
From Arabic Myth and Folklore:
Jinn
Efreet
Lewis’s Own Creations:
Marsh-wiggles
Earthmen
Black Dwarves and Red Dwarves (Lewis separated them into races)
Living Stars (Ramandu and Coriakin)
White Birds of the Sun
Various media adaptations added many more creatures that were not included in the books, like cyclopses, minoboars, polar bears, gorillas, gryphons, tigers, and jaguars, presumably for visual effect. Pauline Baynes, the original illustrator, also took the liberty of adding creatures not mentioned in the books.
The size of Narnia-the-country, and the larger world that was built around it in the later books, was never explicitly stated, but to accommodate this mythological ecosystem logic dictates it would have been quite large. The problem is the distances given in canon seem quite small. For example, at the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe the Pevensies reach Lantern Waste within an afternoon’s ride from Cair Paravel. As Lantern Waste marks one of the borders of that land (most commonly the northwest on maps) it implies Narnia proper reaches no more than 10 – 15 miles inland from the coast, at least in that direction. This is very small. But that’s all for another post, since Worldbuilding Wednesday is all about the names.
In making up the list I was surprised to find that most of the named Narnian creatures are male. In the books, there are no mentions of female centaurs, dwarves, satyrs/fauns, earthmen, or marshwiggles, and of all the others, only a female monopod (Clipsie in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) is mentioned by name, and rather offhandedly at that. Even Caspian’s eventual wife and Queen, Ramandu the Star’s Daughter, goes unnamed. (In the movie, though, she’s called Lilliandil.) Even the creatures that are traditionally female, like maenads, dryads, naiads, and mermaids, don’t get names. They’re referred to in clumps, as a group rather than individuals. Though the books have a balance of both male and female protagonists, with perhaps the meatier arcs going to females, the same was not true of the minor characters. Very odd.
Like the Talking Beasts, many creatures have names that refer to their characteristics or what they do. But an equal amount have a made-up name. Most of the time, given than many are of Greek origin, it’s something like Tumnus or Oreius, or rural Medieval English like Poggin or Puddleglum. I kept to those styles here.
| Giants
Bramblehead Troughgird Bumblebrave Wanderworth Nubbinnoodle Beltblister |
Centaurs
Moravias Malthier Runekeeper Sunstream Archdrake Gandalfor |
Fauns
Verius Raphincus Falgus Phoedus Androcus Saphus |
| Dwarves
Gibblenik Flintfinder Girdlepop Ruggle Maffin Niknas |
Earthmen
Nugg Muthgram Gorm Grimfor Wigand Storg |
Marshwiggles
Purseplum Smagglemor Drabseed Toadtooth Mudrumple Mudbanks |