I’m in the process of readin The Chronicles of Narnia to my kids at bedtime and the other night we started my favorite entry, Voyage of the Dawn Treader (coming in December to a theater near you). Now I’ve read all these books many, many times but last night I suddenly had a problem.
If you’ll recall, in Narnia’s “Golden Age” there were only four humans in Narnia: Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. Prior to their arrival, humans were considered mythical. When the children returned to England, no humans remained behind.
Generations before the events in Prince Caspian, some marooned pirates and South Pacific women from our world entered the world of Narnia – specifically, Telmar – and from there invaded and populated Narnia (and, presumably, Archenland and Calormen). But we are specifically told how the Telmarines avoid the coast and are afraid of the water (they even build a bridge over the river at Beruna, where there is a natural ford). Navigation is all but forgotten, so that when Caspian decides to head out to sea the ship, while nice, is nowhere near as impressive as the ones Lucy and Edmund remember from their time.
However, as the Dawn Treader reaches the islands out at sea – Galma, Terebinthia, the Lone Islands… there are plenty of humans there! Where did they come from?
Come to think of it, my timeline above is inaccurate because we know from The Horse and His Boy that Calormen was well populated – with a long history – during Narnia’s Golden Age. So where did all those humans come from? And why didn’t the old Narnians (the fauns, dwarves, etc) know about them?
You have to distinguish between “Narnia” the world, and “Narnia” the country. There were plenty of humans in Narnia-the-world back in TLTWATW, just none in Narnia-the-country. The White Witch ruled over Narnia-the-country, but not Narnia-the-world. Calormen and Archenland and the islands and so on were populated by humans, and not ruled by the witch.
The mythological beasts and talking animals who were suprised to see living humans thought that humans might be mythological because they had never traveled to those foreign countries. Likewise, the people of Calormen didn’t believe in talking animals because they had never been to Narnia.
Peter tells Caspian during the voyage that the Lone Islands were Narnian property in the days of the White Witch, and there is a throwaway reference in The Last Battle to King Gale freeing the Lone Islanders from a dragon. So there had been other humans in the Narnian world since ancient times - presumably entering through another of the “chinks or chasms” - but they hadn’t been seen in Narnia proper for centuries, long enough for the fauns and so on to consider them only mythical.
Okay, after posting my OP I found NarniaWiki which answered my question.
Basically, after Narnia’s creation and the coronation of King Frank and Queen Helen, their descendents populated Archenland to the south. Eventually outlaws from Archenland fled across the Great Desert and founded Calormen. It was also during this time that Narnians discovered and populated places like Galma, Terebinthia, etc.
When Jadis appeared, she presumably wiped out any humans left in Narnia (or they fled to other lands). I still think the Narnian creatures forgot about them awfully quickly though, since Archenland was a close ally and right on the other side of the mountain pass.
What about the Telmarines? Was the period from their conquest of Narnia to the rising against Miraz any longer than the period of the Witch’s winter? The Telmarines have managed to make the memories of the very creatures they conquered to take Narnia, a handful of generations before, into “fairy tales,” though the wiser among them know there’s truth to the stories.
Moreover, as I recall, the animals for the most part didn’t lose faith in the reality of humans–humans had just passed into a legendary status, along with Aslan himself, in fact. Don’t the beavers debate whether Aslan was actually or just metaphorically a lion?
On one of the islands, they find the posessions of one of the ‘lost Narnian Lords’, including…
Which fits very well with the picture of Narnia in the time of the High King Peter, or after Caspian the Tenth was crowned. But the seven lords were Telmarines, and they lived in the days when Telmarines ruled Narnia their way. They didn’t venerate the Lion, and they were petrified of trees. So, obviously, they wouldn’t put either on their coins.
[nerd]I hope somebody got fired for that blunder.[/nerd]
No, that was Bree, a horse who’d been foalnapped and grown up among ‘dumb horses’ in Calormen.
The Age of Winter was one hundred years. By contrast, the time of the Telmarine’s invasion (Caspain I) to Caspian X was, well, nine generations; about 300 years. Here is the Narnian timeline from the wiki I linked to:
Year 1 - creation of Narnia
1 - 900 Age of Conquest (Frank and Helen and descendants)
900 - 1000 Age of Winter (White Witch)
1001 - 1015 Golden Age (the Pevensies)
1016 - 1998 Dark Age (little or no recorded history)
1998 - 2303 Age of Telmarines (Caspian I through Miraz the Usurper)
2303 - 2356 Age of Exploration (Reign of Caspian X)
2356 - 2555 New Dynasty (Caspian’s descendants)
2555 End of Narnia
I don’t recall that, but I think Trufflehunter the Badger may have said something like that. I was recalling Mr. Tumnus’ book on his shelf, Is Man a Myth?.
That’s a good nitpick, although the Telmarine Lord could have picked up those coins on one of the Narnian islands like Galma or Terebinthia which were never conquered by the Telmarines.
Wait, so it was longer from the age of the Four Thrones to Prince Caspian, than it was from the Creation to the Four Thrones, or from Caspian to the Last Battle? I find that mind-boggling.
As well as the entire World lasting less than three millennia… Compare to Tolkien’s work, which had individual characters who were far older than that, all over the place.
Now, by the time of Caspian’s voyage, the Lone Islands looked like they had been effectively ‘conquered economically’ by Calormen, with a thriving slave market and Calormen crescents the frequently encountered currency. We don’t really know if that was the case when the seven lords passed through and the first of them stayed behind, or if it developed during his lifetime.
It always bugged me somewhat that we never really found out where Telmar was or how the Telmarines had gotten from there to Narnia. My mental map of the Narnian world gets a little simplistic, though. We sort of know what’s in each direction from Narnia, but not where the boundaries go at the diagonals, or ‘what’s beyond that’, if anything of relevance:
North: Northern wastes and giant country. (Also witches)
West: Western wastes, possibly somewhere a tree garden if it hasn’t long fallen into ruins.
East: The sea, an interesting string of lands and islands out to the world’s edge.
South: Archenland and Calormen.
It’s not so much that they are stupid, but that they don’t live nearly as long, so a generation is a much shorter time. Remember, the Centaurs, which are long lived, actually remembered and believed in Man.
You’ve also got to remember that Biblical chronology (which Narnia is based on) is very, very compressed. Narnia (the world) only lasts for a few thousand years.
