narnia has actually way too many completely devastating concepts in it that are not explored At All
We talk a lot about how in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Pevensie children live full adult lives as kings and queens of narnia before stumbling out of the wardrobe by accident and being children again after like 15+ years. But I’ve never seen the same level of analysis devoted to how in Prince Caspian they return to Narnia and discover that over 1,000 years have passed in Narnia since their last visit.
Imagine undergoing the grief of losing an entire life you lived in another world, being forced back into the body of a child and to grow up all over again without the ability to even talk about what happened in the decades you lost. Every person you knew and loved, vanished, leaving no indication they were ever real and no guide for how to move on.
But returning to that world where you were a King or Queen and discovering that centuries have passed without you and that the people you lost are not only dead, but mostly aren’t even remembered? That’s almost worse.
That series is really something for “worldbuilding threads picked up and never touched again” too like
in the silver chair it’s confirmed that deep underneath the earth in narnia there’s a molten, fiery abyss world called Bism that is apparently populated and also apparently gemstones are living creatures that live there, and what we understand as diamonds, emeralds, rubies etc. are just the discarded husks of once living creatures
Jadis is actually not originally from Narnia, but accidentally gets sent there at its creation (making her one of the oldest beings in narnia) and she annihilated all life in her world of origin. she also very much does go to literal actual London and terrorize people. she is like 7 feet tall and can tear iron with her bare hands like it’s taffy.
Jadis makes it “Always winter and never Christmas”…what the FUCK is her beef with Father Christmas. I know it’s supposed to be like a metaphor or some shit but I’m imagining what exactly the fuck must have happened between them for jadis to specifically want to prevent him from coming to narnia to the extent that her powerful seasonal-change-stopping magic also includes a “fuck that guy in particular” clause.
like think about it, Jesus is not a thing in narnia, he’s just aslan. and aslan did not get born. ergo, the origin of such a concept as Christmas is the entity Father Christmas. Christmas is not a religious holiday to Narnians it has no symbolic meaning it is just specifically the time of year when Father Christmas fucks around across the landscape giving children gifts, such as very deadly real weapons. There’s no reason for him to do this. It’s just what he does. And Jadis fucking hates it.
another thing from the magicians nephew that is never brought up again is that Polly and Digory don’t go directly to Narnia, they end up in this intermediate place between the worlds that’s like a forest full of pools leading to other worlds, potentially infinite other worlds, and they end up in Narnia pretty much at random.
I think it’s also confirmed that Archenlanders were originally from Earth, and are the descendants of a small group of people who traveled to Narnia by accident and got stuck. One wonders why Aslan didn’t whisk them back out. Or why being too old wasn’t a problem for them.
I think this is early installment weirdness but there are Roman gods in narnia. ?????
stars are sentient???
narnia is flat. this is not actually an unresolved thread but I don’t think it’s common knowledge even though in one of the books they literally sail to the edge of the world. caspian specifically thinks it’s super cool that the earth is round
I LOVE the whole concept of Bism. Like Lewis really just said oh yeah there’s a whole world under Narnia where people live and jewels are alive too actually you wear dead ones in your jewellery and then no one ever spoke about it again, not even the fandom
No wonder this series infuriated Tolkien so much. Lewis just threw paint at a wall and jokingly asked the man who’d spent a decade on a single painting if he liked it.
Holy shit there is a lot about Narnia I don’t know.
Writer’s block? Why not try peppering panpsychism into your atheist-turned-christian young adult literature and never addressing it again?
So many fics, so little time.
So the thing about “worldbuilding threads picked up and never touched again” in Narnia…
…is that “worldbuilding”, as understood and judged by that intersection of “fantasy nerds” and “consistency diehards” that so many of us inhabit, didn’t exist in C. S. Lewis’s philosophy of literature.
It kind of existed in Tolkien’s. More accurately, it has grown, beanstalk-fashion, out of one element in Tolkien’s writing methodology.
What Tolkien actually said, in his famous essay On Fairy-Stories (1947), was
Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun. Many can then imagine or picture it. But that is not enough — though it may already be a more potent thing than many a “thumbnail sketch” or “transcript of life” that receives literary praise. To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode.
The phrase story-making in its primary and most potent mode should be a clue that Tolkien is not talking about getting your plate tectonics and your ecological zones and your geopolitical socioeconomics correct before you sit down to write a story about two mermaids falling in love whilst saving a baby otter from a sea-serpent. He’s talking about worldbuilding as part of the story, worldbuilding to make the events of the story feel like things that could really happen.
And that’s Tolkien. Lewis observed and admired what Tolkien did with Middle-Earth, but he didn’t emulate him. In his own essay An Experiment in Criticism (1961) he too discusses fantasy vs. realism, and indeed he distinguishes a couple of different senses in which a story can be “realistic” – but he doesn’t mention, even briefly, any consideration of what we would now call “consistent worldbuilding”.
(It’s worth noting that both On Fairy-Stories and An Experiment in Criticism, both of which I highly recommend to anyone interested in fantasy and literary theory, were written during the mid-twentieth century when realism was considered by many critics to be the prime, perhaps the only, literary virtue. That’s presumably why both essays seem oddly combative about it. That this view didn’t survive the century is very largely thanks to the efforts of Tolkien and Lewis.)
Sorry, getting sidetracked there. Lewis didn’t emulate Tolkien’s method of immersive, consistent worldbuilding. You can’t go through the Narnia books and construct a history or a culture the way you can with Tolkien. If you try, you run into absurdities or even outright contradictions.
Lewis knew Tolkien and knew Tolkien’s work. Not following Tolkien’s model and method has to have been a choice on his part. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there is only one character who appears in all seven Narnia novels. Just as he is the only common character, Aslan is the only consistent narrative element – the only through-line that you can follow to its end. To appreciate Narnia for what it is, you have to come to terms with who Aslan is and what he means. And I am quite certain that this was intentional.
Which is not to endorse Tolkien’s opinion and call the Narnia Chronicles a “hodgepodge”. At least twice, Lewis put into the novels a fictional elaboration of an idea which also turns up in his literary nonfiction. Much of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader relates to the chapter on the words “free” and “liberal” in Studies in Words. Much of The Silver Chair is recognisable in the chapter on natural hierarchy in A Preface to Paradise Lost. I’d be surprised if there weren’t more such examples.
One theory, which I find surprisingly compelling, is that the seven Chronicles are written to reflect the Seven Planets of Ptolemaic cosmology, a subject Lewis returned to again and again in every genre he wrote in, including passing illustrative remarks in both the chapters I just mentioned. This was originally thought of by a guy called Michael Ward, who wrote a whole book about it (called Planet Narnia); not all of his arguments are convincing but, to my mind, when you skim off the unsound stuff there’s still a solid core left behind. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe represents Jupiter; Prince Caspian, Mars; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the Sun; The Silver Chair, the Moon; and so on.
So yeah. Judged as Tolkienian or post-Tolkienian secondary-world fantasy, Narnia falls short of the ideal. But I think that’s because we’re judging it as something it’s not meant to be.
“Friends outside of Minnesota please read. I’m sharing a post written by a personal friend and medical doctor: Friends outside MN, you need to know what is happening here. Everyone knows that ICE shot and killed a woman here on Wednesday. But that’s not the only thing that’s going on:
ICE agents are cruising areas with immigrant-owned businesses, and kidnapping patrons and employees alike. Yesterday they abducted two US citizen employees at a suburban Target, one who was begging them to allow him to go get his passport to show them.
ICE is going door to door in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, asking residents where their immigrant neighbors live. Read that again. If it sounds like something out of your high school history textbook, that’s because it is.
ICE is targeting schools and school buses. They pepper sprayed teenagers and abducted two school staff members at the high school up the street from me on Wednesday. Police are literally escorting school buses to ensure children can get to school and home safely. The Minneapolis Public Schools have moved to virtual learning for the next 4 weeks because it’s unsafe for children or teachers to physically come to school.
They are targeting hospitals and clinics. Patients are scared and are cancelling their appointments or just not showing up. Kids are missing their checkups and vaccines, folks aren’t getting their cancer care, etc.
They are smashing windows in cars and homes.
ICE is increasingly picking up Native Americans—again, targeting folks based on skin color alone.
They are arresting and beating legal observers. A friend of a friend had her arm broken yesterday. Folks are showing up at local hospitals, brought in in ICE custody, with severe injuries that are absolutely inconsistent with mechanism of injury reported by ICE. (Think: patient appears to have been beaten unconscious, while ICE agent says he slipped and fell.) I can’t emphasize enough that these ICE agents do not have warrants. There are 2,000+ agents here and they are simply hunting for anyone that’s not white. It doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen or a green card holder, they will kidnap you first and ask questions later.
But the community is fighting back.
Protests are happening every day.
Community groups have been leading know-your-rights sessions for months, often to packed venues.
Whistles are being distributed by the thousands, carried on keychains and worn on coat zippers, always at the ready to be blown in warning if ICE is spotted.
Drivers are following ICE vehicles, blaring their horns in warning.
Businesses are locking their doors even while open to keep employees and customers safe. As I type this, I’m standing guard at the locked door of our neighborhood burrito joint while I wait for my takeout order, so the employees can focus on their jobs. The place is packed with neighbors supporting this small business.
Anti-ICE signs are posted everywhere. The community is making it crystal clear that ICE is not welcome here.
Parents and neighbors are standing guard outside schools, organizing carpools, and escorting kids to and from school on foot.
Parents of kids in Spanish-immersion daycare (there are a LOT of these daycares here!) are keeping their kids home so the teachers don’t have to take the risk of coming to work.
Churches and community groups are holding fundraisers to buy and deliver groceries to families who don’t feel safe leaving home.
Mutual aid money is going out to folks who can’t make rent because they can’t work or because a breadwinner was abducted, or who need a warm place to stay after their home’s windows were smashed.
THAT is what is happening here. This fight is ongoing and it’s horrifying to watch. But we are not backing down. To my friends in other cities and states, don’t think for a minute that this won’t happen in your town. It will. Be ready. Learn from us, as we have learned from Portland and Chicago and New York. Fight back. Don’t let us get to the last line of Martin Niemoller’s poem.”
Apparently ICE now has agents posing as utility workers to get into people’s homes. The electric and gas companies have posted information on how to tell if it’s one of their workers, and numbers to call to confirm whether they’ve sent someone to do utility work on your house.
