Chronicles of Narnia

Lewis was definitely trying to do better for his female characters with Polly, though. She was clearly written with having her be the main character in mind, though Lewis quickly falls back into having a male protagonist once the rings come into play.

A bit of historical context often forgotten about the setting is that sugar was rationed in Britain during WWII due to food shortages and attempted blockades by Germany. Edmund may have thought the Turkish Delight tasted like the best thing ever because it was the first real sweets he had had in a while.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Aug 11th 2021 at 2:45:38 AM

That's not the only factor. Lewis' choice for Turkish Delight goes all the way back to the late Victorian age, when it needed to be imported from Turkey and was considered a very rare delicacy. That alone would have made it a valued treat, even if you didn't particularly care for the taste of rose water.

It's rather hard to imagine in these days where you can buy high quality candy from every supermarket and gas station you come across.

None of the child protagonists in the series are particularly three-dimensional. They are intended as audience identification figures, so they can't be, really.

My vote for "least consequential protagonist" would not be Susan, but Edmund in Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The plot would have looked exactly the same if only Lucy and Eustace had been swept into the painting.

Edmund’s a bit different though. He’s one of the most important characters in Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and he does quite a bit in Prince Caspian too.

Susan could easily be removed without meaningfully impacting the plot since the stuff dependent on her doesn’t actually happen with her agency, it just kind of happens at her. The biggest impact she had in Narnia is leaving her hunting horn behind…which Father Christmas just gave her because Christmas.

Edmund is a case of appearing in one too many books because what character arc he has is completed and he basically doesn’t have anything left to learn. Susan doesn’t have an independent character arc at all, she just gets the “maybe we should trust Lucy” arc twice, which everyone else gets too. Caspian gets a bit shafted too in Prince Caspian, because he doesn’t actually…do that much. Everything gets dumped on Peter and Edmund when they show up. Sure, he does get a lot of the Narnians together, but he’s barely involved in the climax, it’s kind of weird.

There’s a reason the movies added so much stuff generally, and it’s because if they hadn’t given Susan the stuff with Caspian in the Prince Caspian movie, or Edmund the stuff about wanting to be more like Peter, they’d both have spent their last movies just sitting around and barely doing anything. And it’s a lot more obvious on screen when a top billed character does nothing than in a book.

I think Edmund was mostly there to provide continuity between Caspian's story and Eustace's introduction. Lewis seems to prefer rotating his main characters in and out like that.

As for Caspian, he is clearly suffering from Not The Main Character syndrome. Only humans from the real world partaking in the Christian allegory can be main characters in these books, and Caspian isn't one of them. At least the movies have no such qualms.

Except in A Horse and His Boy.

And the Last Battle.

Oh yeah, the Horse and His Boy.

I have a feeling that book probably made JRR Tolkien really mad. Calormen makes absolutely no sense the way its all characterized and Archenland raises so many questions. Calormen is apparently at the heart of this vast trading empire, but there's never anyone established for them to trade with. Not even in a passing reference, and we know they didn't have formal trade with Narnia or Archenland. Not to mention that Calormen is kind of weird and very racist in the way it's haphazardly assembled from random Arabian Nights tropes.

And Archenland is just like...okay, so the White Witch conquered Narnia and humans are so rare as to be a myth, but there's a human kingdom just to the south and the border is hazy enough that it's really easy to just wander back and forth by accident? There's also the very random mention of Archenland in Magician's Nephew (Diggory just randomly points south at one point on Fledge's back and goes "that must be Archenland!" Okay, how do you know that?) that feels like Lewis trying to retrofit it in that just totally fails.

Uh, I want to note, I actually do really like Narnia, I just think it's fun to poke at the many, many holes it has.

Edited by Zendervai on Aug 12th 2021 at 9:55:04 AM

I assume Calormen trade with nations to the South and West of them, which are far enough removed from Narnia to never enter into the plot.

That said, I've never liked there being human nations in Narnia's world. It goes against the brilliant bit where Narnia is full of creatures from our legends, but in their realm, us humans (or "Sons and Daughters of Adam and Eve") are the mystical, legendary beings.

...

On a slightly different topic, anyone ever notice how, after the first two books, we spend almost zero time in Narnia proper?

"It could also be that she wanted to grow up too fast. It's a common trope in fiction, characters that are still children or teenagers wanting to be seen as grown-up and mature and thus dismissing all their old likes as "childish fantasies". "

Yeah, in many ways narnia link beliving in god in the same way once belive in fairy tails: something people do as children because we have a propensity of imagination and them people often dont because they get caught in the "real world", is why lucy is nearly the protagonist of narnia, she belive in Aslan in hte efforless way a child would while every other doubts.

I think Aslan mentioned Archenland to King Frank, hence why Diggory figures out where it must be.

And there's nothing wrong with pointing out the flaws. I still love the books too despite them.

And yeah, it is weird that Calormen is a trade empire without anyone to trade with. I think the real problem is that Lewis made a really tiny world with just three countries (four if we count the giants) and a lot of wilderness.

"A boy and his Horse" always felt a bit out of place in the series to me.

Edited by Redmess on Aug 13th 2021 at 10:24:44 AM

Six countries if you count those two little island nations. Seven if you count Telmar.

Partly because A boy and is horse feel more like tradicional fantasy with empires and battles than this fairy tell esque children story lewis usually deal.

Also, I admit I love charm, is one of the few times you see a fantasy encumopolis, the place feel so full of.....dread.....

Just curious, is that a typo, or does the Dutch title actually translate as "A Boy and His Horse"? Because the inversion of A Boy and His X in the title The Horse and His Boy is rather important to the story.

I liked it as a refreshing change of pace; last time I read the books it was via their audiobook versions, each of which has a different narrator, and (looks it up) Alex Jennings did a good job with that one.

The incredibly halfassed worldbuilding is honestly just funny to me. I mean like...with the way Voyage of the Dawn Treader talks about it, those island nations and the Lone Islands were also home to humans the whole time the White Witch was around. It's just funny to me that everything from Archenland south is just all humans with very few talking animals at all and everything north of Narnia is all giants and monsters and Narnia itself is apparently the only place in the world with a large number of talking animals.

It's like, wow, Aslan really halfassed the creation process, didn't he? He put in all this work for the north half of the world and then just grabbed a bunch of humans and went "eh, you do it from here, I can't be bothered to populate all these areas."

The human presence is definitely something you just have to role with. I assume Lewis just didn't put that much thought into the greater world building when he wrote the first book. And I suppose an advantage of skipping around the timeline like the stories do is that you don't need to think too hard about why things are as they end up being versus what they were a century or ten ago.

I recall a line in The Horse and His Boy explaining away the lack of humans in Narnia despite being surrounded by them as a result of the White Witch's eternal winter making conditions to cross the border through completely impossible. Which makes it interesting because of the implication the eternal winter was a defensive measure on Jadis' part to keep out any Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve. She just wasn't able to do anything about them taking the magical route.

Also, amusingly, according to a timeline done by Lewis Calormen was founded by Archenlanders. So it seems pretty much every large human society baring the Telmarines is descended from a dude named Frank.

You're right, I just remembered it wrong off the top of my head. The Dutch version has "The Horse and the Boy", which is close but not quite hitting the sense of it.

Yeah, but that also doesn't quite work, because Jadis doesn't seem to know what a Human even looks like when she meets Edmund. Also, the whole prophecy about four human children doesn't make a lick of sense if there is a whole nation full of them just over the border. The prophecy very clearly intends for those four to be the first humans to ever come into Narnia, not just four children who happen to bypass Jadis' magical border patrol.

Edited by Redmess on Aug 13th 2021 at 12:42:48 PM

Yeah a lot of this is retcons that just work because lewis implemened this fairy like logic to narnia, the whole series feel closer to wizard of oz or neverland in that there this is sense of magical montains, pool or forest just around the corner with little though on how this fits.

Maybe the reason Jadis comes off as so weird and uncaring of what she did in Charn was because she has a weird memory issue? Like, she can remember base details long-term but she can't remember anything contextualizing them or anything emotional? The weird cross-world memory thing works really quickly on her in London. I don't think she'd be exactly broken up about what she did to Charn, but you'd think she'd have some level of emotion about it, if only because she doesn't have anything to rule over anymore. But she doesn't seem to care at all. It'd work if she remembered the stuff about the Deplorable Word and fighting her sister, but not any of the context or emotional connections.

So when Edmund shows up, a thousand years after conquering Narnia and killing the last humans, she can remember that humans are a thing and Cair Paravel is intended to be inhabited by humans, but she can't remember anything about humans.

Edited by Zendervai on Aug 13th 2021 at 8:48:01 AM

I think the simpler answer is that the Charn backstory simply did not exist when Lewis wrote Wardrobe. It's clear he had a very different, more explicitly biblical origin in mind. Charn and Diggory and Polly are retcons from much later in the series. The Professor isn't even named in the book, so even that isn't much of a clue.

Which admittedly was an interesting idea in its own right. You don't see Lilith's descendants mentioned in fantasy that often, and it makes for an interesting concept of a secondary set of humankind.

Well, Lilith as the progenitor of vampires is a pretty common trope.

Yeah, Lilith is ether a demon, a witch or a vampire in general, beaver mention she was the daughter of a gigant and a genie, almost a she is part of narnia, which is nonense given the backstory of charm.

Eh, the Beavers being wrong isn't exactly a plot hole. Jadis really doesn't seem the type to explain her backstory to anyone in general. I mean, she does in Charn but in that case, she's trying to ingratiate herself to a pair of kids who clearly came from another world and could probably help her escape, especially since she doesn't really know how they got there in the first place. But in Narnia, why would she bother? She hates the locals.

I was reading this blogpost, and came across this bit:

And that last part makes me realize that there seems to be an undercurrent of racism in Narnia that is never touched upon. There are good and evil creatures in Narnia, and they tend to stick with their alignment, but some, most notably the Dwarves, seem to be able to move between factions much more easily. But here, the Beavers seem to judge them on the basis of their race, rather than their alignment: Mr Beaver says Dwarves are always bad news, and Mrs Beaver "corrects" him by saying they know some good ones, which sounds a lot like the sort of talk you hear from casual racists.