Caspian X (Prince Caspian in the book of tht name, King Caspian thereafter), had a son, Rilian, whose mother we meet briefly. I am almost entirely certain that Rilian was not conceived in vitro. My post is my cite.
Tosh.
Caspian married Ramandu’s daughter and had a son, Cor and Aravis got married in order to carry on fighting more effectively :D, the Beavers were an old married couple, and as has been repeatedly stated about Susan the problem with her was not that she grew up but that she was in too much of a hurry to reach one particular stage on the way to growing up and stay there as long as possible.
I don’t get the impression that Susan wants to get married at all. She wants to date a whole lot and go to a lot of parties. No full adulthood there; extended adolescence is what she’s after.
One thing that we’re all neglecting is that we don’t hear from Susan herself; nor does the narrator or Aslan (both clearly the voices of Lewis) condemn her directly, so far as I recall. Most of what we hear is from Lucy, who may not be entirely reliable on this subject; certainly she’s not objective, even if she is about to go to Heaven.
What about Caspian slobbering over the star’s daughter?
To repeat my earlier point, Narnia isn’t a religious series (except, always The Last Battle). It’s a story with religious stuff in it. It has other stuff as well. Reading it as an allegory is just plain wrong. Only a very, very few things have an intentional 1:1 with Christianity, and even those aren’t consistent.
As Malacandra (rather impolitely, but accurately) pointed out, any attempt to paint the Calormens as a criticism of Islam falls apart immediately. They are Arabian Nights characters, as imagined by children (and a very childlike grownup).
I am going to suggest that perhaps you are reading your own preconceptions about Christians into Lewis. Prof. Lewis was a loud, hard-drinking, hard-cursing man who hung out in pubs and loved vulgar humor. He was sexually experienced and (before his conversion) had a long-running affair with an older woman. (He continued to care for her as she aged – a complex, and frequently bitter, relationship.) His letters indicate that he likely experimented with homosexuality; in his public writing he insisted that he rejected homosexuality (again, this was before his conversion) not because it was evil, but because it was boring. Lewis was married when he wrote Narnia. Try AW Wilson’s biography.
Sexual repression in Christians is a vulgar stereotype; to push this onto Lewis is no more intelligent or tolerant than assuming that the President of the United States has a fondness for Citrullus lanatus.
It’s true, I am impolite.
For another sniff of a sexual relationship, we have King Frank the erstwhile cabman and his Queen Helen, who were married before they entered Narnia and remained very much married afterwards, founding Narnia’s first royal family - and their children even contracted interspecies marriages of their own with river-gods and wood-nymphs. :eek:
See also the final chapter “Venus at St Anne’s” of That Hideous Strength for a thoroughly sexually-charged atmosphere, yet no hint that there will be any impropriety about what follows - rather, that Mr Bultitude and his she-bear, and the elephants, and Ivy Maggs and her released-petty-criminal husband, and Jane and Mark Studdock, are all about to do what is very right, proper and blessed for their various stations.
I guess you have to leave it to childrens’-fantasy authors of an altogether more modern and unbelieving age to decide that their underage protagonists ought to go ahead and shag anyway. :dubious:
Eggs-actly - and that’s what occasions Polly’s exasperation with her.
Spoilers ahead:
Honestly, I consider all of the Narnia books to be about equally good. If I had to pick a “weakest” it would be Prince Caspian.
The Last Battle is probably my least favorite though, just because the atmosphere is so different. It’s dark. Yes, there is a very happy ending but it takes the complete destruction of Narnia to get there.
Previous villians (The White Witch in her various appearances, the Calormen, etc.) were all evil but identifiably “fairy tale evil”. On the other hand Tash is straight-up a demon.
Near the end of the book a lot of Narnians die violently.
The Dwarves that reject Aslan are forever “trapped” in the stable. That’s kind of depressing.
The mood of the story is an increasingly desperate last stand. And the last stand fails. The Narnians are defeated. Some of them reject Aslan. Aslan only meets the remaining believers after they are all dead.
Aslan watches over the destruction and unmaking of Narnia. I always find this kind of sad.
…of course, the ending is a happy one, but it’s a pretty grim tale up until then.
FWIW my absolute favorite of the series is The Horse and His Boy. I think a lot of people can’t get into this one because 1) It doesn’t take place in Narnia and 2) There is no aspect of jumping from England to Narnia. But I like it a lot.
Close second is tied between Wardrobe (first one I ever read, at age seven. Magic.) and Dawn Treader.
I don’t think they’re necessarily trapped forever. They’re trapped by their refusal to see the good thhings right in front of them, which Aslan declines (or is unable) to overcome by magical power because doing so contradicts the very basis of free will. But if they get tired of eating straw& drinking trough-water, they can choose to free themselves of it, because their prison is ILLUSORY. It exists only in their minds and is powered by their stubbornness. I see them eventually getting out, because eventually they’ll start to bicker amongst themselves, fight (and be unable to kill or even badly injure one another, as they’re already dead), and eventually part. When they are separated from one another they will stop reinforcing one another’s delusions and, I think, eventually see the truth.
I wish I thought so but, as we have seen in The Great Divorce, people without God move farther and farther into self and loneliness. Remember, Napoleon is all alone, very far away, saying its all other peoples fault. My thought was that the dwarves were each going to go their own way into self, so get smaller and smaller, and farther and farther away from others.
But the whole point of The Great Divorce was that Lewis shows, to quote TRUE ROMANCE, that while “that’s the way it goes, sometimes it goes the other way, too.” Some people do see the Light & struggle out of their petty selves to reach that Light.
yandoodan writes:
> I am going to suggest that perhaps you are reading your own preconceptions
> about Christians into Lewis. Prof. Lewis was a loud, hard-drinking, hard-cursing
> man who hung out in pubs and loved vulgar humor. He was sexually
> experienced and (before his conversion) had a long-running affair with an older
> woman. (He continued to care for her as she aged – a complex, and frequently
> bitter, relationship.) His letters indicate that he likely experimented with
> homosexuality; in his public writing he insisted that he rejected homosexuality
> (again, this was before his conversion) not because it was evil, but because it
> was boring. Lewis was married when he wrote Narnia. Try AW Wilson’s
> biography.
Um, yandoodan, you seem to be presenting yourself as an expert on Lewis’s personal life here. I’ve read quite a lot by and about Lewis, and you aren’t nearly as accurate as you think. First, Lewis was not married when he wrote the Narnia books. He didn’t get married until a couple years after he finished them. He started them before he even met his wife, Joy Davidman.
“Loud”? Yeah, I suppose so, although I don’t recall a lot of comment on that in anything written by people who knew him. “Hung out in pubs”? Yeah, that’s called being British. “Hard-drinking”? Not particularly for British men of his age and social class. There’s no indication in anything written about him that he was regularly drunk. There’s not a thing surprising in the fact that he occasionally went to pubs with friends and talked and drank some, except to some fans of his works who have a bizarre idealization of what he was like personally. “Hard-cursing”? Not really. There’s no indication in anything written about him that he indulged much in cursing. Again, that he might have occasionally cursed is only surprising to people who have a bizarre idealization of him.
“Sexually experienced”? For someone who lived to a week short of his 65th birthday, he wasn’t particularly sexually experienced. There’s no indication that he was ever involved with any women except for two - his wife Joy Davidman and Janie Moore, assuming that he really was involved with Moore. It’s not as clear as you think that he had a sexual relationship with Moore as you think. This is very complicated, and it would take a long discussion to go over all the evidence one way or another. In any case, it’s pretty generally acknowledged that if there was such a relationship, it lasted for about a decade and ended before he became a Christian.
Nobody - and I mean nobody - has ever claimed that he ever experimented with homosexuality. The only less conventional sexual practice that has ever been mentioned in connection with him is that in his letters to his friend Arthur Greaves, written in his teens, he talked about having sadistic fantasies. Although his letters to Greaves have survived, Greaves’ letters to Lewis haven’t. It’s known that Greaves was homosexual. I suspect that Greaves had confessed to Lewis that he had homosexual fantasies. (And probably only fantasies, since neither he nor Lewis was sexually active at the time, it appears.) Lewis’s mentions of his sadistic fantasies in his letters seem to me to be his half of the conversation of two nerdy teenagers describing to each other their masturbatory fantasies. Lewis was saying, I think, “Hey, you have fantasies about sex with men. Well, I’ve had fantasies about doing things to women before having sex with them.” And nobody- and I mean nobody - has ever found any evidence that he ever engaged in sadomasochistic practices.
It’s A. N. Wilson, incidentally, not A. W. Wilson. That’s not actually as good a biography as you think. You should read the other biographies. Look, this is going to turn into a huge hijack of the thread if we continue this discussion. If you want to start a thread about Lewis’s private life, please do so.
You have to read another book The Great Divorce to get some resolution on this
but Lewis was really clear that no-one is “forever trapped” in Hell. The Dwarves are only trapped there as long as they continue to value their “independence” from God*. As soon as they give that up and accept Aslan, they’re welcome to join him.
*Divorce is 2/3ds of a great book–The first 2/3ds are Dante-worthy in their exploration of Hell and Heaven and then it bogs down into a creepy hero-worshippy Socratic dialogue (the level of hero worship is what was vaguely creepy to me) between the unnamed narrator (presumably Lewis) and George MacDonald (an author Lewis very much admired).
*“Dwarves are for dwarves. We don’t need no Aslan or Tash.”
I never claimed it was a 1:1 match. I simply think that Lewis had an agenda and part of his agenda was to discredit other faiths.
You don’t see Arabs in the Calormenes? Well, okay. But I think it’s pretty clearly there, that those dark-skinned people are savages while those pale people are beautiful and kind and much more moral.
I’m okay with saying that Lewis was a product of his time. We’re all products of our times, though with a wide range of attitudes.
Thanks for the corrections. I was working from memory.
Not at all. I was merely trying to dispel what I perceived as an ugly anti-Christian stereotype, which I thought was being applied to Lewis and then used to discredit him. I intentionally pitched it strongly.
I am under the impression that he finished Narnia after the marriage, testing out the story lines on his stepchildren.
“Boistrous” then. Let’s not quibble over words. He was not a lush, particularly by the standards of “British men of his age and class”. However, he wasn’t one of these prissy guys who nursed a single glass of Chiblis all night. He knocked 'em back with the rest of them. Anyone holding a stereotype of Christians as tight-lipped prudes would be shocked to see him in a very, very cheerful state.
Of course some fans find the reality of this boistrous pub habituee a bit hard to take – but that wasn’t my point. I was aiming at his detractors who, parroting Phillip Pullman, attack him using anti-Christian stereotypes.
Let’s continue to apply the standard of “British men of his age and class”. By that standard, his language was pretty colorful, particularly when he was in a cheerful state at the local pub. Again, I am attacking stereotypes which his detractors attach to him – in this case, attacking the stereotype that, because he was a Christian, he had to have been a censorous, virginal neurotic.
Maybe, maybe not. Again, lets apply “standards of his age and class”. He was no virgin, and he was no prude.
AN Wilson (thanks for the correction, btw) quotes a letter which Lewis (after serving in the trenches during WWI and going to college, if memory serves) wrote to Greaves. In this letter Lewis discusses, in the bluntest terms, how he masturbated. Wilson indicates that there is plenty more where that came from. Make all the excuses you want; when an adult man describes his masturbations to a man he knows is gay, there’s more than a whiff of non-hererosexual action going on here.
Lewis said that he found homosexuality boring, not evil. Anti-Christian bigots like to paint us all with a vicious stereotype, and then blame us for it; and anti-gay is part of this stereotype. I was attacking this stereotype. Lewis’ experience with alternate sexuality is a part of his humanity, and plays a major role in his writings. (See the intro to Screwtape 2nd ed, and the man with the lizard on his shoulder in the Great Divorce.)
Lewis did not attack other faiths as part of his agenda. This is simply and demonstrably false, a Pullmanesque attack: “All Christians attack other faiths, and Lewis is a Christian, therefore…” Lewis explicitly stated, many times, that other faiths were valid. He saw them as darker, more trecherous paths to the same destination. IIRC, Prince Caspian deals with this (in the procession through Narnia, after the battle).
And I said that I saw Arabs in the Calormens – Arabian Nights Arabs. Remember? But Lewis explicitly and repeatedly states that they are not Islamic.
I probably should have phrased my post better. I mean that it was a possibility, not a definite thing, that the dwarfs would one “day” free themselves of their delusions, and gave the mechanism by which i think that would happen. In their case, it would be separation from other persons also caught in their delusion. It could happen in many ways–as simple as one of them claiming that that the small apple they had just eaten was a rat, while another insisted it was a cockroach, and the ensuing argument leading to their separating.
My point is that Aslan wasn’t done with the dwarfs yet–not necessarily.
yandoodan writes:
> I am under the impression that he finished Narnia after the marriage, testing
> out the story lines on his stepchildren.
No, look it up. He wrote the Narnia books between 1949 and 1954. He got married in 1956. You’re simply remembering things wrong here. There were some children that he considered he was writing the Narnia books for, but they were not his two stepsons, who didn’t get to know until the writing was almost finished. The children who he considered to be the ones that he was writing for were the children of his friends and the children who stayed at his house during World War II (when they were sent away from London to live in the country, as happened to many children during the war). Doubtlessly Lewis considered himself to be rather like Professor Kirke, who had children (who he barely knew when they arrived) come to live with him during the war.
Please don’t be offended, but you’re trying to talk about Lewis when your memory of what you read in books about him is a little shaky. Please, please, please don’t be offended by this, but you’re getting the details about Lewis’s life wrong. Look, I present myself as a minor expert on Lewis’s life because I’ve been reading his books and books about him all my adult life. I’ve belonged since 1972 to a group called the Mythopoeic Society which does research on the Inklings. I’ve met dozens of Lewis scholars and I even ran a conference on the Inklings once. I’ve done research on Lewis at the Bodleian Library at Oxford and at the Wade Center in Wheaton, Illinois, the two institutions with the largest collections of work on Lewis. In fact, I’ve been at the Wade Center longer tham Wilson was ever there. Wilson makes a snide comment about the Center (but then, Wilson makes snide comments about a lot of things). The director of the Center in reviewing Wilson’s book said that Wilson only spent about three hours there.
> AN Wilson (thanks for the correction, btw) quotes a letter which Lewis (after
> serving in the trenches during WWI and going to college, if memory serves)
> wrote to Greaves. In this letter Lewis discusses, in the bluntest terms, how he
> masturbated. Wilson indicates that there is plenty more where that came from.
> Make all the excuses you want; when an adult man describes his masturbations
> to a man he knows is gay, there’s more than a whiff of non-hererosexual action
> going on here.
A. N. Wilson, in this as in many things, doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Have you read the letters that Lewis wrote to Arthur Greaves (which were published in the book They Stand Together)? If you read them you will have exactly as much claim to understand Lewis as Wilson does, because Wilson took everything he said about Lewis and Greaves from those letters. Wilson makes a lot of wildly speculative psychoanalytic claims in his biography of Lewis. Wilson, who has no training in psychoanalysis at all, is one of those biographers who think that they can psychoanalyze someone who is no longer alive and who he only knows from what the biographical subject has written. Many of Wilson’s claims have no solid basis at all.
Lewis never mentions masturbation specifically in his letters at all. It was my term in calling his sadist fantasies (of which there are actually only a very few, not “plenty more where that came from”) masturbatory fantasies. These fantasies only involved women. Incidentally, it’s also just my guess that Greaves was describing his own fantasies in his letters, since his half of the correspondence hasn’t survived. In any case, claiming that a teenager who happened to describe his (heterosexual) sexual fantasies to another teenager who was (later known to be) gay thereby proves that the first teenager must therefore also be bisexual is downright bizarre.
Once again, please do not rely on Wilson’s biography. There are a lot of other biographies. Please read them. There are three big books of Lewis’s letters. Please read them. There are lots of other books on Lewis. Please read some of them. Wilson is not a trustworthy source on Lewis. (Also, Wilson’s book is almost twenty years old now, and lots of new information about Lewis has come forward.)
Well, you’re going to have to say something offensive first. :eek:
The simple reason I am getting stuff wrong is that I am upstairs, and my Lewis books (which I’ve been buying and reading since the mid-1960s) are downstairs.
I did not know that the Greaves letters had been printed. Thx.
I understand that my mental picture of Lewis is darker than yours – and yours is probably darker than that of some other fans. He was a complex person, and by no means a cardboard saint. An actual Saint, rather – and like other real Saints, a strong and distinctinctive man who had experienced a wide range of temptations. I expect all real Saints will have a dark side. You don’t think old Screwtape would let 'em go without a fight, do you?
I discuss Lewis’ biography in this thread only to dispel Pullmanesque canards about Narnia. I consider Pullman to be a morally vicious bigot; there’s a white sheet under that humanist disguise. Unfortunately, his poison deceives many.