Chronicles of Narnia

Mrs. Beaver's sewing machine is most likely the peddle-operated variety, not electric. They were all the rage in the Victorian era.

Edit: Note that Narnia has lots of Victorian elements. Mr. Tumnus is practically a Victorian gentleman, with his umbrella, paper-wrapped parcels, afternoon tea (with toast, sardines, and cakes), and bookshelves in his cave, none of which could be considered medieval. Lewis was doing this on purpose, of course.

I'm sure Lewis repeats several times that it is a silly thing to get into a wardrobe and close the door behind you because he didn't want to be blamed for encouraging kids to get trapped in wardrobes.

Edited by Bense on Aug 4th 2021 at 12:05:01 PM

It's interesting how the tone has shifted between Wardrobe and Magician's Nephew. The latter is much more explicitly speaking to children in its narrative, the way it talks about "grown up stuff" being boring.

Wait... is Aslan walking on his hind legs? The way Lewis is describing him clapping his paws and then putting his paw on Peter's shoulder sure makes it sound that way. Those would be very awkward moves walking on four legs. He also knights Peter, somehow.

Edited by Redmess on Aug 4th 2021 at 8:37:05 PM

All of the talking animals in Narnia must have opposable thumbs and be able to walk upright. Mrs. Beaver couldn't use her sewing machine otherwise. Or Reepicheep his sword. The illustrated versions I have show talking animals often walking upright and handling tools.

If anything it would be Edwardian, considering it takes place around World War 2 to start with.

Also yeah, the "Wardrobe" is basically an Armoire.

So Aslan is basically walking around like the lions in Madagascar?

Didn't the movie have him walk on all fours at all times, though? It's been a while since I watched that movie. Also, Maugrim definitely walks like a normal wolf, and fights like one too.

I don't understand what is going on with the Deep Magic. Why would the Emperor over the Sea even agree to such a thing? Such a law sounds more like it would be Tash's thing in any case.

Not that Magicians Nephew even mentions the Emperor, or Tash, or this Deep Magic, for that matter.

I think the Magician's Nephew mentions that some animals, upon becoming Talking Beasts, did start walking on their hind legs while others stayed on all fours. I don't think that was ever the case for Aslan though. It certainly wasn't for Bree and Hwin.

Well, he certainly doesn't walk on his hind legs in Nephew. I think the characters would have taken notice of that otherwise. Especially Uncle Andrew.

That Deeper Magic also seems too specific. Surely since the Beginning of Time, someone, somewhere an innocent has willingly offered his life in sacrifice for a traitor?

The whole business of Aslan sacrificing himself and the Stone Table breaking as a result is the most allegorical part of the book, in that just about everything in those chapters has obvious parallels to Christian theology and the crucifixion.

The Stone Table breaking is basically the Law of Moses (Deep Magic, and the laws by which Narnia operated up to that point) being superseded by Christianity (deeper magic from before the dawn of time, a higher law that allows mercy and rebirth/resurrection).

Had any other innocent freely given their life in place of a traitor? Apparently not in Narnia, or the Stone Table would already be broken. There is also the possibility that Aslan is the only one who was completely innocent and would allow the deeper magic to function.

Edited by Bense on Aug 4th 2021 at 3:25:19 AM

The illustration of Aslan talking with the Witch in my version shows him walking on his hind legs with his front paws folded behind him just above his tail. Google "Aslan and the White Witch talking" and I'm sure you'll find it.

It would be this one:

Edited by jouXIII on Aug 4th 2021 at 12:20:59 PM

II don't have that picture in my version, but I do have the cover with a giant Aslan lunging over the Stone Table, though it is ambiguous whether he is just lunging over the Table or standing behind it swiping over it.

Well, it is allegorical, except for the part where Aslan briefly turns into a playful giant kitten and plays with the girls, and is being rather adorable. I like that Aslan much more than serious, scary Aslan, and I feel we got to see precious little of that after this book. It makes him much more human (for lack of a better word) and relatable.

Wow. That looks so strange. I've always imagined him as a lion, but bigger. He certainly doesn't look quite so human on my book cover, either.

To be fair, I'm also seeing a lot of cover artwork of Aslan as a more traditional lion.

Edited by Redmess on Aug 4th 2021 at 11:27:57 AM

This is what my cover looks like:

That's one big cat. With crazy hair.

"The enchanted land behind the clothing closet." No mention of lion or Witch at all in the Dutch title. Very cool. I should have realized you were reading a Dutch translation instead of the English original.

I wonder if there are any significant translation variations between the two versions?

Edit: I was just reading in the other wiki about how the Icelandic translation of Dracula is very different from the English version, with whole characters and plotlines absent because it was made from an earlier draft that Stoker gave Valdimar Asmundsson, his Icelandic translator.

Edited by Bense on Aug 4th 2021 at 4:01:58 AM

"Kleerkast" is a good translation of wardrobe, actually.

Well, I don't think Sherlock Holmes was mentioned in the Dutch version of Nephew. I also felt the first line of the Deep Magic verse was terrible in translation - translating poetry is hard, after all. I noticed neither book can decide between calling Jadis queen or empress, and neither can she, apparently.

The biggest discrepancy so far seems to be that Jadis is called a daughter of Adam's first wife, which is flatly retconned by Nephew.

I don't really understand this idea of Aslan not wanting to explain certain things (and by extension, the narrator) about what happens to certain characters, most notably here what he and Edmund talked about. That seems like a big deal to me narratively, but the book just brushes it off with a "you don't need to know", and everyone just forgives him on the spot and never mentions it again.

I'm also wondering why there needs to be a High King amongst the four kings and queens. I guess this goes back to the medieval idea of strict hierarchy of the universe.

I wish we got to see a little more of Cair Paravel. We get like, two sentences in this book, and some reminiscing over ruins in Prince Caspian.

Wait, the kings and queens abolished mandatory education? What?

Edited by Redmess on Aug 4th 2021 at 12:15:44 PM

Jadis claims to be "Queen of Narnia and Empress of the Lone Islands". Peter and Caspian both claim the same titles later when each becomes king. The Lone Islands appear in Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Aslan doesn't explain what he and Edmund talked about because the point is that Aslan has completely forgiven him and he wants the other children to forgive Edmund too. The children show they have forgiven Edmund in part by never bringing his betrayal up again.

Apparently the idea is that dwarfs and satyrs don't need schooling the way human children do, and forcing them to go to school is the work of "busybodies and interferers."

Edited by Bense on Aug 4th 2021 at 4:53:03 AM

That's in the original too. Too be fair though, Mr. Beaver is probably just repeating a rumor that's become "common knowledge" over the past century.

And I think you can count on one hand how many times Lewis has something good to say about the education system. I have to wonder if he had a particularly miserable time in school. Heck, Calormen's teaching style is compared to more favorably than England's!

He apparently was a strong opponent of more liberal schools.

I think Lewis may have had trouble with resolving such serious conflicts in his narrative. He does something very similar with Prince Caspian two books later.

Oh yeah, Empress of the Lone Islands. I don't know about the English books, but in the translation, this seems to result in queen and empress to be used somewhat interchangeably, and applied to Narnia as a whole.

He also clearly has a Thing about "busybodies and interferers", it comes back from time to time.

The title reflects how, back when India was a British colony, the monarchs' list of titles were "King/Queen of England, Scotland, etc." and also had "Emperor/Empress of India" thrown on at the end.

Yes, that makes sense. It's just that the book never explains this. Which you may well miss as a foreign child reading the books 50 years later.

Man, it sure is a good thing none of the children got married or got children later in life. One of them could have been pregnant going through the wardrobe. Now that would have been traumatic. Not that it wouldn't already be somewhat traumatic anyway, especially for the kingdom they leave behind.

It's also a good thing the wardrobe doesn't just de-age them, but also reverts their maturity and speech patterns to a large extent. They talk like posh royalty when they go through. Oh, and it also gives them their old clothes back. That's some very specific magic right there.

Interestingly, Susan was the most reluctant to start the adventure into Narnia, and now she is the most reluctant to explore beyond the lamp post. Perhaps she is just deeply averse to change.

Speaking of the wardrobe, how did no creature from Narnia ever blunder into our world? It isn't exactly hard to find.

Aslan magic makes it a one-way trip, I expect. Half the purpose of Narnia's existence is to provide lessons and coming-of-age experiences for good British Christian schoolchildren, and so only such beings (and a batch of random pirates for some reason) can enter and leave it. (Otherwise, why would the entire universe be born, live, and die in the span of ~70 years Earth time?)

Edited by HeraldAlberich on Aug 5th 2021 at 3:58:51 PM

Well, you've already noted the contradiction there. Aslan is clearly the Great Gatekeeper here... and yet some rando pirates managed to sneak by him.

Lewis' objections were not to education as an ideal (after all, he was himself a professor), but to some of the ways in which education was being pursued in his day. He approved of schools that made their students work hard and awarded talent and merit. He very much objected to students being given "busywork" and teachers trying to make sure no student ever felt badly about their efforts rather than actually educate them.

The question of "why did no one from Narnia ever find the other end of the wardrobe portal by the lamp post?" is probably best answered by "Aslan did it." If you remember, the children were practically herded into the wardrobe in the first place. They try to avoid a tour group coming through the home, find it's coming up by a different set of stairs than they expected: "And after that - whether it was that they lost their heads, or that Mrs. Macready was trying to catch them, or that some magic in the house had come to life and was chasing them into Narnia they seemed to find themselves being followed everywhere-" until they decided to hide in the wardrobe room. My vote is #3 - they were being directed into Narnia.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader features a route into Narnia that is even more random. Eustace's family has a picture of a ship in their house that is quite out of character with what we know about the family, and then it suddenly becomes a portal to Narnia with no warning and no apparent cause. It just happened to be time for Lucy and Edmund to return and for Eustace to come along and learn to not be so full of himself.

How time passes between the two worlds also seems completely arbitrary. Centuries pass in Narnia between The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, but only few years between Prince Caspian and Voyage of the Dawn Treader, even though the time in the real world is roughly the same. Again, it's because Aslan has a master plan he's following that requires the presence of Earth children in Narnia at specific points, and at the same time the kids need to go to Narnia at those time periods in their lives.

The pirates didn't "put one over on Aslan". They were part of the plan all along. If they hadn't fallen into Narnia there would have been no Caspian.

It is a two way trip. Lucy goes to and from Narnia through the wardrobe on her own, and later all the kids do. But in between and afterwards the wardrobe doesn't let anybody through either way.

Aslan isn't always involved, or at least not directly, with bringing people to Narnia. Susan's Horn just up and nabbed the kids from Earth. The rings and pools do the transporting for Diggory and company, and presumably Eustace and Jill later on.