Lucy's Cordial

[HermitoftheNorthernMarch]

I was wondering yesterday about the nature of the healing cordial that Father Christmas gave Lucy. We know that Lucy used it to heal Edmund, Reepicheep, and soldiers after battles of deadly injuries. We also know that she used it to heal Eustace's seasickness. The thing is, with the powers of the cordial, I would guess that any sick Narnians and Archenlanders would want to be brought to Cair Paravel to be healed. However, by the events of Prince Caspian, 1,000 years later, the cordial has been left in the royal treasure chamber and is apparently still usable.

Is it simply that the healing effects of the cordial are a closely guarded secret and no one knew to use the cordial for those thousand years?

Was the cordial only used to battle injuries and not common sicknesses? I don't remember any plagues breaking out in Narnia - probably a benefit of having so many different species in their country that it makes illnesses hard to spread - but there could be plagues in Archenland.

When I was a kid I assumed that Father Christmas just refilled the cordial every Christmas...

[Ariel.of.Narnia]

Good questions. I’ve thought of them myself, though with the added difficulty of my assumption that Father Christmas did not refill the bottle.

Regarding illness, I think I’ve gone with the assumption that it was rarely ever administered as a cure. For one thing, there are already very excellent healers in Narnia; why (potentially) waste the cordial when a concoction of herbs will do the trick? As for something like plagues... I honestly hadn’t thought of that angle. Hmmmm.

Something like battle wounds seems trickier — after all, battle seems to carry a higher chance of mortality. It seems as though Lucy healed every wounded soldier at Beruna (we’re not given to believe otherwise), but her later use of it seems small-scale: Trumpkin’s shoulder, Reep, Eustace twice; and we know she didn’t always carry it around even to battles, or else she would have administered it at least once in HHB. No mention is made of her using it after the Second Battle of Beruna that I remember (besides Reep). (Come to think of it, no mention is made of Peter getting his wrist sorted beyond the binding.)

I really don’t know what to make of the frequency of Lucy’s use of the cordial. I can only assume that the Narnians after her chose to treat it much like Cornelius treated Susan’s horn: to use it only at the greatest hour of need. Caspian called it a “treasure of Narnia” in VDT, so perhaps the Narnians didn’t take it out to battles so as to protect it from theft/loss/damage (a policy implemented by Peter himself); as such, the Narnians ran the risk of soldiers succumbing to their injuries before they could get the cordial.

And then as far as the abandonment/fall of Cair Paravel during the Dark Ages, the Gifts may have been 1) left there to protect them from the Telmarines, 2) forgotten, if maybe only by time, 3) deemed too dangerous to retrieve, or 4) deemed improper to take and use. (Not that this matters, technically, but the PC video game shows Narnians hiding the Gifts during the Telmarine siege.)

As for whether anyone knew how to use the stuff, I imagine that wouldn’t have taken too long to figure out, and the cordial seems to be flexible. One drop in Edmund’s mouth sufficed to take care of... whatever unnamed injury/injuries he had, while it was applied topically to every single wound on Reep. (Sounds like a consistency issue, personally.) And I don’t think it was as though no one could use it. After all, Caspian brought it on the voyage (yeah... perfect opportunity to lose it, if you ask me); he made it sound like he brought it simply because it was a “treasure of Narnia”, but let’s be real: he probably thought it could come in awfully handy in dealing with who-knows-what horrors from the Eastern Ocean.

I don’t know, haha. My biggest questions are 1) why didn’t Lucy use it more liberally (after Beruna) and 2) why didn’t anyone use much (if any) after she left? (Again, running on the assumption that it did not get refilled.)