Worldbuilding Wednesday 7/26/23: Rilian’s Brothers (Narnia XLIV)

Prince Rilian: A pampered only, and lonely, child?

A few days ago, in the Narnia subreddit, I discovered a glaring discrepancy in The Silver Chair I had never noticed before.

At the end of The Voyage of The Dawn Treader, Lewis has this to say about Caspian and Ramandu the Star’s Daughter:

Caspian married Ramandu’s daughter and they all reached Narnia in the end, and she became a great queen and the mother and grandmother of great kings.

Yet, none of Rilian’s brothers are mentioned in The Silver Chair. This implies that the outcry and tragedy of his disappearance means he’s Caspian’s only child, or at least the only son. Without him, the king’s line cannot continue, according to the patriarchal notions of Medieval English kingship. (Interestingly, the Caspian kings never received a familial name.)

It’s a discrepancy ripe for fanfic. Did the other siblings die? Were they females, and thus married off, perhaps to the kings of another land? Strange, however, that they weren’t mentioned. Perhaps the other sons did something terrible, and Caspian disinherited them. Or maybe they had enough of the prince business and disinherited themselves. Who knows. Likely, it’s just due to a writer’s forgetfulness.

And the way it’s worded can mean Star’s Daughter begat two kings, and she was mother to one and grandmother to another; or she was grandmother to several kings. It could be taken as just a fancy way of saying that many of her male descendants turned out to be great kings — Rilian, Erlian, Tirian — and since it wasn’t specified they were all Narnian kings, her daughters might have borne kings as well.

But, in case Rilian did have brothers, here’s some names for them, in keeping with -ian names of the Telmarines.

Prince Rilian’s Brothers