Curious Words from the Chronicles of Narnia
By Jeremy Marshall
Many dictionaries and guides are careful to warn readers about the difference between a faun and a fawn. However, anyone familiar with the tales of C. S. Lewis is unlikely to confuse these two shy inhabitants of woodland glades, since the goat-footed, part-human faun of classical Roman mythology is the first strange creature we encounter when reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Those who know the film/movie version will be flocking back to the theaters this month to see more fantastical creatures in Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Many legendary creatures from ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle East, and Northern Europe inhabit Lewis’s Narnia. From the classical world come the beautiful maidens called nymphs, including the dryads, spirits of trees, and naiads, spirits of streams and springs. (Lewis also calls the naiads ‘well-women’, which now reads rather oddly to anyone who has heard of ‘well woman’ health clinics.) Also familiar to most readers are the centaur—half horse, half human—and the more sinister minotaur, or bull-headed man. The classical cast is completed by the god Bacchus, with Silenus and the satyrs—similar to the fauns, but linked more to drunken revels than pastoral idylls—and by the monopods, a one-legged race featured in The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’, whose history can be traced back to ‘tall tales’ of the wonders of India, written down by credulous (or unscrupulous) ancient Greek writers and repeated by the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder.
Mismatched myths
Alongside these—in a mythological mix which is said to have irritated Lewis’s friend Tolkien—we find the dwarf of Germanic legend and the ogre of old French tales, as well as the merman, the werewolf, the bogle (Lewis uses the old northern spelling boggle), and the wraith. Among the retinue of the White Witch are three entirely unfamiliar types of creature, the orknies, ettins,
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