Worldbuilding Wednesday 6/10/20: Narnia II

Ben Barnes as Prince Caspian in the movie version, decidedly older and hunkier than the character in the book.

C. S. Lewis actually wrote Prince Caspian, the second book of The Chronicles of Narnia, hot on the tail of the first.  In it, he explored an idea he had been playing around with for a while: What if King Arthur actually returned to England during the Battle of Britain as prophesied (when England was in its “darkest hour”) thereby saving the day? He cast the Pevensie children in the role of Arthur, made the peril out to be an invading kingdom bent on destroying Narnian culture, and so Prince Caspian (named after the sea, no less) was born.

Though the book was second in the series, I read it the last, and might have been spoiled for it by the other books. Still, it’s the weakest, IMO, of the Narnia books. The plot is frustrating (there’s a lot of dull wandering  around in the woods before we get to the action) and many decidedly un-Narnian elements in it that never recur, like necromancy, werewolves, and Narnia being converted into a facsimile of a repressive British town complete with a bureaucratic  school system.  If the books had stopped there, as a duology, the worldbuilding might have made sense; but the wilder and more metaphysical elements of the later books sit oddly with the modern-day (mid twentieth century) elements of this one. It’s also a disappointment for readers, I think, to discover that the Narnia they loved and knew had been been completely plowed under in the intervening years between the events of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and this one. (I could say more, and will, in a later entry.)

Prince Caspian does, though, have the simplest title of the Narnia books; and here are some alternate versions with the same sound.

Variations on Prince Caspian