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He may not necessarily have known the Czech one specifically - I've already encountered the fact that there are similar motifs and situations between Czech fairy tales and completely different tales in different cultures half the world away. Meaning, sometimes different cultures do share things in their oral culture (Lewis actually has an argument somewhere about Jesus' mythical qualities revolving around that same phenomenon), so he could have come across similar motifs - who knows, maybe even in several tales rather than one!
Or Narnia itself came about from some deep mythical source, of course...

HermitoftheNorthernMarch wrote: I am now wondering if Lewis did know about the Czech fairy tale,

I think he did, since he had probably read it in Andrew Lang's collections (not sure which one of the books).

Andrew Lang was a most thorough fairy tale collector, unlike Grimm Brothers not limited to Germany, but very international.

marmota-b wrote:Or Narnia itself came about from some deep mythical source, of course...

1) CSL wanted to show a Paganism where the gods were not devils and deceivers, were not rebels against God.
2) CSL wanted to show how Paganism prefigured Christianity (it is commonplace how OT Hebraism did, especially in Church Fathers)
3) CSL named the place Narnia because that is where Hannibal's troop were brought to a halt before Rome (and Narnia/Calormen very much reflects Rome/Carthage in The Everlasting Man by Chesterton - read it, it is on the web)
4) CSL put things in another world so that a Lion on a Stone Table would not be an intrusive and inappropriate image of Christ on Calvary.
5) CSL knew the idea of "other worlds" from Medieval scholastic theological discussions.

Could God create ONLY one world? No, answered Bishop Tempier in 1277. Limiting God's omnipotence is heretical.

This threatens to get off topic... I found one with the same name from the Brothers Grimm in the Green Book - White Snake - but it is in fact a motif I know from a completely different Czech fairy tale, that of a curious servant eating a piece of snake and learning how to understand animals (and just to prove what I said above about motifs, the rest of the Czech story is rather different)... Anyway, I should thank you for the tip, because it's a good source for all sorts of fairy-tale-ish things; I hadn't realised that this was the most likely source for most Anglophone people's knowledge of fairy tales. Off to search further.

... back. There's a similar one from India, "The Snake Prince" in the Olive Fairy Book, but it's not the same, and in its second half lacks some of the important similarities between the Czech version and The silver Chair (= the lucidness/lack thereof at night), so...? Probably really what I thought, similar motifs being combined in different tales throughout the world, and into yet another tale in Narnia.

(Completely off topic edit: Since most if not all of those tales come from collections done by other people throughout the world, I don't think I'd call Lang a collector as such - more like a compiler. That doesn’t make him any less thorough, but comparing him to the Brothers Grimm is comparing apples and oranges. He could only do what he did because of people like them writing down the oral traditions in the first place. If you want to continue in this kind of conversation, we should probably from now on move it elsewhere.)

hansgeorg wrote: ↑

Tue Jul 28, 2015 3:27 pm

1) CSL wanted to show a Paganism where the gods were not devils and deceivers, were not rebels against God.
2) CSL wanted to show how Paganism prefigured Christianity (it is commonplace how OT Hebraism did, especially in Church Fathers)
3) CSL named the place Narnia because that is where Hannibal's troop were brought to a halt before Rome (and Narnia/Calormen very much reflects Rome/Carthage in The Everlasting Man by Chesterton - read it, it is on the web)
4) CSL put things in another world so that a Lion on a Stone Table would not be an intrusive and inappropriate image of Christ on Calvary.
5) CSL knew the idea of "other worlds" from Medieval scholastic theological discussions.

Could God create ONLY one world? No, answered Bishop Tempier in 1277. Limiting God's omnipotence is heretical.

Good points. Unfortunately there are still a few Christians I've met who won't read Narnia because it mentions Bacchus and mentions fauns and centaurs, not understanding that Lewis simply wanted to include these ancient myths in a way that was not connected with evil.

If God created more than one universe, though, I think He'd keep us from knowing so we wouldn't contaminate it like in The Magician's Nephew.


Getting back to the topic, though, I am inclined to think that the LotGK was more enthralled with the idea of ruling Narnia rather than marrying the prince. I imagine after ten years of hearing his anger toward her when he was tied to the silver chair and in his right mind that the LotGK would have a hard time actually loving him even if there was a real romance when she enchanted him.

Good point, Corintur, and welcome to the TLC forum. I guess at the time when Lewis was writing, other planets, worlds and universes were equally remote in the popular imagination. So he could transfer the idea of our world having the potential to contaminate other sentient worlds in his different types of fiction. I seem to remember that he also addresses the topic in his essay on "Religion and Rocketry". It has been some time since I read it, though, so I can't remember the specifics.