I can still recall the dissonance as a child, reading the Santa bit. Enough to throw you right out of the suspension of disbelief. Do you have a link to the article?
Accepted the children's arrival in Narnia as the magic of the wardrobe... I read the books when I was 7-8 and was much better pleased with a lion as a god than a three-pronged mess I could make neither head nor tail of (I went to a Convent). Father Christmas just got to me. But we are all different.
No I don't want to give them clicks! (I mean I saw it as a screenshot in the first place). It might be a perfectly reasonable article but I don't want to reward the headline!
Of we're going to throw "children's book" around as a pejorative I'm going to assign that to Martin's mean spirited I told you so stop having fun guys slog and not the fairly well plotted and snappy LWW.
It’s “standard fantasy world.” I don’t mean that as a slight, it wasn’t nearly as standard when it was published, but the reason the modern reader doesn’t see anything unique in it is because it’s a foundation of our ideas of fantasy worlds. It’s fine. It serves the purpose.
The first time I watched "Enter the Dragon", I *almost* said "Man, this move has EVERY Martial Arts cliche!" but I was able to stop myself by realizing "Yes, because it created most of them!". (Or at least brought them to a large Western audience.)
Yes I'm sure directors absolutely hate it when the source material contains too little explicit lore and they have to fill in the gaps with their own original ideas
Didn't they make like seven fairly successful fantasy epics about this a few years back? I thought Tolkien's big issue with Narnia was it's Christian allegory, if he even had problems. Didn't he help edit it?
The entire series is world building and retcons. That's all it ever was. I agree with a lot of the commentary of the tolkien's ghost is responsible for this article
As a big fan of fantasy and scifi and world building and all this and that, I am beginning to feel as though “world building” is about to become one of those terms. I mean it’s a set of books that are still in print and considered seminal to the genre, “problems” isn’t a word that comes to mind.
The Magician's Nephew, The Horse And His Boy, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair are entirely about exploring the world. To very mixed success but nobody can deny the material and precedent is all there.
It's not even ignorance from these outlets, just lies.
To the contrary, they have very little worldbuilding because the don't describe an interconnected world, but rather isolated parts of minimal relationship to each other. And the parts that are linked, such as the Lone Islands, don't fit well with the earlier books.
Nah, I gotta say, the Narnia universe changed drastically book to book. As a child I was perplexed by the bizarre inconsistency and "cool place, let's never visit that again"ness of the series.
*Sigh* Maybe because Narnia is as much a spiritual and imaginative world as it is a physical one...kind of the whole point about the wardrobe...it's a porous border not fucking Westeros
A problem with this world is that we have dulled-down imagination. If we can't get it in a detailed (so we don't have to think), but compressed form (short attention spans) then it has no value.
Narnia was as much about imagination as anything. That should be freeing for creators, not restricting.
The world is basically “England, but with cute talking animals” next to “Turkey, but demon-worshippers” and that’s the entire map. Still love those books!
If you still have world building questions after you found out where the lamppost came from, you're just going to have to accept that you're not going to get answers.
I myself have thought that as well! When you compare The Chronicles of Narnia to the other big fantasy world from an Inkling, Middle-Earth, it feels quite... scant? And Tolkien made sure to let Lewis know it. There are glimpses of a wider world, but not enough on the dynasties. Still, there's room!
I think the difference is that Tolkien was writing mythology, but Lewis was writing fairy tales. "East of the sun and west of the moon" or "back when hens had teeth" are perfectly acceptable ways to introduce the setting of a folk tale.
Fair point. Tolkien was someone who took it much more seriously in putting together his world and languages and so on. Lewis was going for a more fairytale logic approach, throwing together various things like talking animals and Father Christmas. I suppose that people now expect more.
“While Narnia is a richly imagined world … The novels jump around in the timeline and aren't released in chronological order. This makes it tough to keep track of what piece of information was dropped and where in the books the characters learned about it.”
I look forward to the flood of clickbait articles claiming SW and Narnia are "the same" because both contain elements of the Hero's Journey and other tropes that effin' go back to the Epic of Gilgamesh and likely to some unknown storyteller among the first humans to evolve.
Tangent: Most books have problems with building out their worlds. It's particularly sloppy in contemporary, western worlds. Situ is fuzzy at best in LOTS of works, not just sff.
I agree with many of the replies that world building isn't the be all and end all, I just think with Lewis it's indicative of a general half-assedness and mild contempt for his readers that runs right through the series. In this, as in most things, I stand with Ursula.
I went on Radio Five once with the Bishop of London to talk about CS Lewis and was delighted that his take was broadly “these books would be absolutely wonderful if he’d ease up on all the Christian nonsense…” We had a lovely chat.
HAAA! People hate him for alerting balrogs to their presene or whatever but really, his truest crime, is requiring a cross-referenced wikipedia article from Gandalf...
Written by yet another person who thinks the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the first book, ignoring the paths (pools) to different worlds and the entire Narnia creation story.
I've definitely noticed a trend in the last decade where the formerly-confined-to-neckbeards standard of "Nitpicking & Pedantry as the Measure of Fan Engagement with an IP" has leaked into media criticism.
EVERYTHING MUST BE EXPLAINED IN DETAIL to have value in eyes of the pedants.
She can work within the plot gaps to build a better world. Hopefully she’s able to get rid of the racism and sexism while adding some queerness. Grownup King Peter should totally hook up with Mr. Tumnus.
Online Narnian fans are hilarious for this - I keep seeing posts asking world building questions and just know that they have put +1000 more thought into this than CS Lewis, all his timelines are broken and he just does not care!
There's constant stuff about dark skinned calormenes and white narnians all the way through. Mostly cultural. A bit of devil worship stuff in the last battle though
Ploughing through the horse and this boy led to a lot of interesting conversations.... She enjoys shouting out when she finds something a bit sexist, but the racism was too subtle for her so was down to me to explain
The Calormenes are definitely a good way to introduce the concept of racism to kids, and sadly I mean that in both senses. You can skirt around the exact reasons their depiction is bad by rhetorically sidestepping to "well, in *history*", and the slander of Muslims as demon-worshippers is *ancient*.
I remember reading these books over and over and thinking I wish there was more world building. I suppose, there was the part where Aslan built the world. And every moment the characters spent in the wardrobe.
"You call that worldbuilding? In my day we didn't consider a world built until we had five cities, ten generations of family trees for each major bloodline and a pantheon!"
"You don't want another fucking elf? How do you sleep at night adding fucking SANTA to a world with fauns? FAUNS AND SANTA! It's a disgrace before the face of god!"
Silver Chair had one of the Narnian's ask to come to Earth because he's curious how spherical worlds are compared to flat worlds. (I read somewhere Lewis and Tolkien got livid when people said Middle Ages scholars thought the world was flat.) But heck, people often miss that Aslan = Jesus.
One of my fave movie theater stories is from one of the Narnia movies and a woman leaned over when the big guy got on screen and loudly whispered to her companion "Aslan is Je-sus!" in like dreamy worshippy tones.
My friends and I still quote and giggle about this one to this day.
Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQLfgaUoQCw
Nah, the real reason Tolkien wouldn’t have written that is because he just wouldn’t say such a blatant falsehood in reference to Lewis’s work
me [interrupting]: oh is it the only one, is that why
I know they don't meet in the books, but a Reepicheep & Puddleglum buddy movie would be Epic
I would watch it no matter what!
And then decide if I am going to dive deep or not.
It's not even ignorance from these outlets, just lies.
Tolkin and Lewis were friends
plus if he did write this, we'd still be reading it because of how much detail he'd put into his point while getting a history lesson probably
Tolkien: “God is a wizard!”
Lewis: “God is a lion!”
Tolkien: “God is a WIZARD!”
Lewis: “God is a LION!”
Librarian: “SHHHHHHHHHHH!”
Tolkien & Lewis: “Pub?”
Tolkien & Lewis: "Fair."
And a lot less singing.
Also, I suspect that Pratchett at least met an editor at some point in his career.
Narnia was as much about imagination as anything. That should be freeing for creators, not restricting.
(This is why I'm struggling through the two towers...
Why is it about tree branches all of a sudden!?(
“While Narnia is a richly imagined world … The novels jump around in the timeline and aren't released in chronological order. This makes it tough to keep track of what piece of information was dropped and where in the books the characters learned about it.”
I know, because I saw them…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBKwFb9_k1Q
Hilarious!!
"Father-shitting-Christmas --!?!?"
deeply inferior version
of DARK CITY (1998).
He was also more interested in good storytelling than consistent lore.
In both cases, they were begun after the authors' first novel in their series but published years later.
They both display their relevant author's world building.
EVERYTHING MUST BE EXPLAINED IN DETAIL to have value in eyes of the pedants.
Whoooooo
JRRT: LEWIS! Where are you, I just want to talk.
Lewis: 😨 *jumps into the reincarnation queue*
https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/entertainment-celebrity/why-j-r-r-tolkien-hated-narnia-s-father-christmas/ar-AA1m1GSh
My friends and I still quote and giggle about this one to this day.