Narnian headcanon week, 6

[heliopausa]

Oh my!  running late(ish).  But all sorts of things have been happening today (all good).

Sixth in the series:

 

King Lune was once Prince Lewin – he had an older brother, the heir apparent, Prince Lew, who was lost at sea.  In the Archenlandish way, this tragedy (this particular kind, of a complete and mysterious disappearance) was not referred to again, after one year's full mourning. 
In the same way, the loss of Prince Cor was not mentioned after the end of the mourning period; hence Corin himself had never heard of his brother, nor had the younger members of Lune's court, nor the Narnians (who had been still caught in Jadis's Winter when it happened).  For this reason, Lucy and Edmund and Corin don't any of them, on seeing the brothers together, draw the conclusion which would have been obvious, had they known the story. 

“Why, so he is your double,” exclaimed Queen Lucy. “As like as two twins. This is a marvelous thing.”

When Lune speaks to his two sons about kingship, he is doing so remembering, and even repeating, partly, the same words used by his own father to him, the bitter night they accepted that Prince Lew was lost forever.  (Hence, by the way, his use in this passage of the archaic forms he does not usually adopt.)

Comments

[snacky]

I like this! I also have headcanon about Lune having a brother - although in this case, he's a younger brother, and he is killed because he gets in with people plotting to take the throne of Narnia in his name.

hence Corin himself had never heard of his brother, nor had the younger members of Lune's court, nor the Narnians (who had been still caught in Jadis's Winter when it happened)

But I'm pretty sure it's canon that Cor and Corin were born after Jadis, when the Pevensies were already Kings and Queens. Because of this passage: Well, Corin and I were twins. And about a week after we were both born, apparently, they took us to a wise old Centaur in Narnia to be blessed or something.

I MEAN IF YOU WANT TO TWEAK OR ANYTHING. :D I agree, it's weird that Edmund and Susan wouldn't have figured it out after Tashbaan. Or maybe they did, and just were waiting to tell Lune in person and Cor showed up before they got a chance.

[heliopausa]

Thank you! :)

I'm still holding to Cor and Corin being born in the last days of the Winter, and to the first visits of the Pevensies to Archenland not happening for about a a year or fifteen months after that.
Re: the Centaur business... my take on that is that Cor is talking about something that he knows only from hearsay, and we already know that he is not a very exact listener, by his shakiness about "embezzled", and of course by the "or something" in this speech. He's trying to take in a lot of info, all at once, too, in a very jumbled and high-emotion time.

My head-canon is that the Centaur was not in fact IN Narnia, but a Narnian Centaur who had found refuge with an Archenlandish hermit (on the Western March? If the one in the south was the only one, they wouldn't have needed to differentiate him by saying "of the Southern March") since the hermits fill a social role somewhat analogous to the Centaurs, in the seer aspect.

The only Centaurs that Cor in HHB has heard of, though, are the Narnian Centaurs in the battle, so he makes the understandable slip (for a boy who doesn't know much about these Northern countries, who's trying to grasp a heck of a lot all at once) that the encounter with a Narnian Centaur took place IN Narnia.

:)

What was Lune's younger brother's name? Was this plot after the Disappearance?

head-canon collision

[transposable_element]

I just stumbled across this, and I think it's funny that you and I have such similar head-canons (which I didn't realize when I posted Lost and Found over on AO3!). In mine the taboo is emotional rather than cultural -- the queen, and to some extent Lune, can't stand to talk about Cor's disappearance, so nobody does. I think by the time the Narnians meet Shasta again on the way to breaking the siege at Anvard, Edmund (who has earlier deduced Cor's existence from Archenlandish naming conventions) has figured out that Cor isn't dead and that Shasta is Cor. But of course Edmund's got other things on his mind just then.

I also had a similar explanation for the "wise old centaur in Narnia," that Cor misunderstood what he had been told, which is why in my story the centaur is a Narnian living in Archenland.

Re: head-canon collision

[heliopausa]

:) I'm glad you've found it! I had fun sharing some of my head-canon.

I think a lot of the difficulties people have with the Narnia books can melt away when we factor in that even the "good" characters are only telling the truth as far as they know it. (Or as far as they see the need to share information, depending on who they are talking with!)

Re: head-canon collision

[transposable_element]

Yes, and C.S. Lewis has a rather oblique way of getting into his characters' heads, at least in the Narnia books. He often invites the reader to imagine the characters' thoughts and feelings; he speculates about what his characters are thinking or feeling or doing, as though he doesn't know (Polly said she bathed, but we know she couldn't swim, so maybe she didn't). Or he glosses a character's experience by telling about its effects, or what the character said about it afterward (Edmund's conversation with Aslan, or Lucy reading the story in the Magician's book). Or he explains an experience (like riding on Aslan's back) by analogy. Even when he tells us what a character is thinking, he doesn't stray far from the authorial POV -- so when Shasta is with the Narnians in Tashbaan, he tells us what Shasta is thinking, then repeatedly steps back and explains why he's thinking and behaving the way he does.

Re: head-canon collision

[heliopausa]

"oblique" is a good way to put it! And inconsistent, from book to book.
I think partly he explains the thinking when he wants to explain/justify the behaviour he thinks his readers might find not admirable in the characters he wants them to like.
Or maybe this is only when the character is new to the reader? Hence - just thinking this out on the run - Shasta's thoughts are explained at length, as are Edmund's in the early chapters of LWW, but in VDT there's no such elaborate backgrounding given to that quarrel on Deathwater Island, because by then he expects his readers will accept Edmund's/Caspian's/Lucy's petty scrapping without wiping them as characters? (Though actually, I don't think highly of Caspian anyway. I think he's a fair portrait of someone who's learned bullying as a child, and never shakes it off - i.e. stays something of a bully all his life.)

Re: head-canon collision

[transposable_element]

Yes, it's inconsistent from book to book and even scene to scene. When I started thinking about this it made me feel a little better about some of the awkward POV shifts in my own writing. Sometimes there's no way to tell the story except by getting into the character's head -- Shasta spends a lot of HHB alone, for example, and Eustace can't talk while he's a dragon. But the more I try to make generalizations about his use of POV, the more exceptions I come up with...

I was never fond of Caspian as a character, but I always thought it might be because for some reason, when I first read the series, I read VoDT before I read PC. In fact, I think I may have read VoDT several times before getting around to PC. I have a vague memory that our copy of PC was missing or falling apart. But yes, Caspian does love throwing his weight around, doesn't he? Even in a good cause, like combatting slavery, it's unpleasant.

Re: head-canon collision

[heliopausa]

Absolutely! He's arrogant and VI-O-LENT! (As you've pointed out, and in his terrible dealing with Drinian in TSC.) Which I think is great, in that it shows Lewis (in the later books at least) was creating a character who's not perfect, far from perfect, but still a protagonist.
And surely creating him such deliberately, partly on the model of the complex, morally questionable characters in the Arthurian cycle and the chansons de geste - lots of precedent there for this sort of thing.

Re: head-canon collision

[transposable_element]

And PC inevitably makes me think of Hamlet, another flawed protagonist, although from what I know of C.S. Lewis I doubt it was his intention to make that parallel. I think it's interesting that he doesn't allow either Caspian or Peter to kill Miraz. It's certainly not due to a squeamishness about the idea of the boy kings killing men in battle, because Peter lops off somebody's head immediately after Miraz is treacherously killed.

I have a theory that he didn't know what to do with the adult Peter because he'd made him Too Good. Even Lucy is allowed some flaws.

Re: head-canon collision

[heliopausa]

Sorry for the delay in replying here.
And... Hamlet. :) I don't suppose Lewis was trying precisely to draw a parallel in Prince Caspian but I'm guessing that he was well aware - not so much of echoes, but of what might later echo for his presumed child audience. He is explicit about the resemblance of Rilian to Hamlet in TSC (where there's also echoes of madness, of course).

What you say about Peter is a lovely thought-starter! I disagree (but that's three-quarters of the fun of such exchanges, isn't it?) that Lewis didn't know what to do with him, but I agree that he set himself a very hard task, (now in the hands of the fanficcers!) in setting up an adult male character defined very largely by straightforward goodness and valour.

Re: head-canon collision

[transposable_element]

I'd forgotten that he describes Rilian as looking like Hamlet, all in black!

The main reason I say that about C.S. Lewis not knowing what to do with the adult Peter is that Peter is the only one of the Pevensies who doesn't appear on stage in HHB. It's possible that the plot just doesn't require him, especially since Edmund is there to take on on the heroic warrior role, which does make for better continuity with the first half of the book, but I tend to think there's more to it than that. And then in TLB Peter comes across to me as very flat and generically noble. Many of the characters are pretty flat in that book, but Lucy starts seeming a lot more like Lucy when they get to the episode with the Dwarfs refusing to be taken in. Possibly I'm also influenced by the Baynes illustration of Tirian peeking through the stable door with Peter standing nearby looking like Superman. (I think a lot of my visual ideas about Narnia come from Baynes, which is why I cannot see Peter as blond! Of course she also draws Lucy with dark hair, in direct contradiction to her description in the books, so I'm not sure why I take Peter's dark hair as canonical.)

I've done some rather awful things to Peter in my own fanfic, the worst one being to place him at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. I'm not sure why, except that I always feel the impulse to shake him up somehow.

Re: head-canon collision

[autumnia]

Finally, someone else who sees Peter as dark-haired. Like you, my visual cues have been taken with Baynes' illustrations (so for me, Peter is dark, Edmund is blond) though of course, there is the issue of Lucy. But having Lewis be more description with the the girls, it's easier for me to move past the point where she is drawn with dark hair sometimes while others, she is blond (in the Friends of Narnia illustration in TLB for example).

Re: head-canon collision

[transposable_element]

I've always taken a lot of cues from the Baynes illustrations because C.S. Lewis rarely gives detailed physical descriptions of his characters. But I have read that he wasn't happy with many of her illustrations, especially early on in the series.

Re: head-canon collision

[heliopausa]

The PaulineBaynes illustrations were enormously important for me as a child - and so for sure they've stayed as important influences. But we're running into the same squashed-up-layout difficulty. If I open a thread on the NFFR site, could we talk more about them there? (http://www.narniafanfiction.net/forums/index.php)

[edenfalling]

Interesting! I tend to go with Cor and Corin being born about a year after the end of the Winter, and the reason people are so surprised to see him and Corin together is that for thirteen years, everyone KNEW he was dead. It can be hard to adjust one's thinking even in the face of inarguable physical evidence. But I really like the idea of a sort of taboo of silence around vanishments. It makes me wonder what could lead to that tradition -- does mentioning those who have disappeared sometimes summon them back... only they come back wrong?

[heliopausa]

Ooohhh... "come back wrong". That's terrifying! All sorts of horrific possibilities.