As for other influences, we've probably discussed elsewhere that we find monopods in medieval literature (I can't remember if the precise source was a travelogue type story or just fantasy beings). Goldwater definitely has hints of the Midas story. Cursed dragon hordes are again a trope rather than a single reference. The same is probably true of sea people. I'm not aware of any precedents of islands/places where your dreams/nightmares come true (we find later examples in scifi / fantasy literature).
Statistics: Posted by Ajnos — Thu Dec 03, 2020 9:29 am
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Statistics: Posted by knightofnarnia — Sat Aug 03, 2019 9:43 am
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Statistics: Posted by hobbit_of_narnia — Sat Aug 03, 2019 5:23 am
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We all know that during VDT, Peter went to Professor Kirke's cottage for tutoring so he could prep for entrance exams. During my first read through the Chronicles, I decided Peter was 14/15 in LWW. Thus, he was (in my mind) 16/17 in VDT. Made sense to me because I naturally am familiar with the schooling system of my present day and country, and entrance exams for post-secondary education at that age is normal for me. (When I later found out that Peter is canonically 12 in LWW, I willfully ignored it. I’m the type of reader who requires information like age and appearance early, and once I have a mental image firmly set in my head, I can be pretty inflexible about correcting said notion. I saw no reason why LWW Peter and Susan shouldn’t be in the 13-15 range, so that is how I perceived them, and anyway, I don’t think that perceiving them as a couple years older is really an issue… until something like WWII British education becomes a topic of interest.)
Somewhat to my surprise, though it really shouldn’t have been because of course Lewis knew what he was writing about, I found my long-time willful assumption of Peter’s age to be truly wrong. From what I can see from a not-super-in-depth look at pre-1944 British education (because VDT is in 1942, and 1944 saw some changes made to the system after the war), compulsory education covered ages 5-14. Peter, canonically, is exactly at the end of this range. Society deemed him mature enough to enter the world, at least to the extent of being employed full-time.
However, I can’t seem to find anything about post-secondary education from that time, at least, not anything pertaining to things like entrance exams or accepted ages or whether one had to go to a different type of post-secondary school before university. Does anyone know anything about that side of Peter's entrance exams?
Statistics: Posted by Ariel.of.Narnia — Mon Jul 29, 2019 8:02 pm
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(It's available online, but I'm refraining from linking - you can find it in several places, anyway.)
Statistics: Posted by marmota-b — Tue Jul 28, 2015 4:43 pm
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Another true story: Before that dream, my mom once told me and my sisters a story without an end. There was a hill in which there lived a many-headed dragon, and if I remember correctly (it might be just what I imagined), some of those heads would stick out of caves in the sides of the hill. Travellers would come to the hill, maybe even climb up, and the dragon would... kill them, maybe? I don't quite remember, except that the dragon was dangerous and people would come to fear the hill.
Hearing that story, I finished it: One day, someone would come and deliver the dragon.
Mom was, for some reason, astonished by that solution to the story, saying she never had thought of it.
I think I made it because I'd heard echoes of the green hill from that story in hers.
But it never occurred to me it could be applied to the Easter story so plainly!
Firstly, it might be because I knew the story of Jesus even before I knew Narnia, so it never occurred to me that Lucy might not? I never read the Pevensies as coming from a non-believer or barely-believer family, to tell the truth; I ascribed my own experience to them, including early familiarity with all manner of Bible stories, more so because of the contrast with Eustace. So the "finding me in your own world" was always, in my perception, about finding a personal relationship with God rather than about learning about Him from point blank.
(Now I'm wondering if my knowing the story of Christ's crucifiction so early is more common, or if it's yet another result of my having learned to read very early...)
Also, the tree = cross equivalence is not something you encounter often in Czech, so all I would have had to go on was the cup... and the translation didn't exactly help there, because the most commonly used word in Czech is equivalent to "chalice", not the more general "cup" translation used in the book.
And if we do do that (I have my doubts, see below), the green hill could also be the garden of Gethsemane...
Third point, what with the above experience with the dream (and maybe even mom's story), I don't think it was a story with symbols that would "stand for something". I think Lucy, as she was reading it, was experiencing it, sort of dreaming it, was inside the story, living it. Ouch, I miss an English equivalent of a very neat Czech word for what I have in mind! It's a word that can be used both for "experience/live through" and "really get/be into a story". So that would be why it was a spell, why it was magic: making you really live through it, the way good stories do but even more so.
Despite my doubts, Lewis very well might have really meant the Easter story in a way, and in writing that passage maybe aimed at mythical motifs that he himself had encountered somewhere before his conversion and that had given him those glimpses of Joy. Motifs, rather than symbols, if that makes sense... I tried to somehow make what I have in mind work inside the "icon, index and symbol" linguistic theory of signs, but neither of them actually works. The literary term of motif really applies best. And that's another reason why I did not think of the Easter story myself. It did not have to be it - maybe not the one from our world. Maybe it was yet another Easter story from yet another world.
Statistics: Posted by marmota-b — Sat Jun 20, 2015 8:59 pm
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