I came across this back cover in a search for Narnia images a few weeks ago. It was in connection with The Magician’s Nephew, but since there was no front cover I wasn’t sure, and the file original jpeg was titled in alphanumeric gibberish.
But, since the publisher’s name was there, I did another search.
The edition was published in 1980 and the wraparound cover artwork was a new commission from Paulines Baynes, the artist who did the line drawings for the original editions. (The tormented shapes of the mountains confirm it.) If you’ll notice Fledge is the correct color (chestnut) and his wings are attached to his body in the same way as Bayne’s earlier drawing, by a featherless band of sinew as the drawing to the right shows.
But what’s interesting to me is how the landscape below has been colorized, detailed, and expanded. In the book, Narnia is newly created, hence no roads, towns, cities or other works of man; yet it’s also explicit they fly up and over what would later be named Caldron Pool and the Great Waterfall and into the hills and later mountains, following the valleys instead of going over the high peaks, which might have caused them oxygen problems.
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Next moment the country dropped away beneath them, and whirled round as Fledge, like a huge pigeon, circled once or twice before setting off on his long westward flight … All Narnia, many-coloured with lawns and rocks and heather and different sorts of trees, lay spread out below them, the river winding through it like a ribbon of quick-silver. They could already see over the tops of the low hills which lay northward on their right; beyond those hills a great moorland sloped gently up and up to the horizon. On their left the mountains were much higher, but every now and then there was a gap where you could see, between steep pine woods, a glimpse of the southern lands that lay beyond them, looking blue and far away.
… now a great barrier of cliffs rose before them and … (Fledge) began flying to and fro, getting higher at each turn … they could see the whole valley of Narnia stretched out to where, just before the eastern horizon, there was a gleam of the sea. And now they were so high that they could see tiny-looking jagged mountains appearing beyond the northern moors, and plains of what looked like sand far in the south… Now they were over the top of the cliffs and in a few minutes the valley-land of Narnia had sunk out of sight behind them. They were flying over a wild country of steep hills and dark forests, still following the course of the river. The really big mountains loomed ahead. But the sun was now in the travellers’ eyes and they couldn’t see things very clearly in that direction. |
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But the description in the book doesn’t match what we see in the 1980 picture.
It might be a view of the trio looking south, with the body of water to the left the Eastern Sea. But what’s that little island? The spit of land Cair Paravel was later built on did not became an island until Caspian’s time thousands of years later, and none Narnia’s island nations would have been that close to the coast. And the text says they did not fly over Ettinsmore and the moorlands.
If we are looking toward Narnia’s north, the only thing the water could be is Caldron Pool, but there’s no waterfall and no river, the text says they flew over both, not around them. No map shows a lake in that area either.
Of course the artist just might have been filling in troublesome blank space. But if I was child or young adult who had this edition and and was prone to geographic conjecturing, I would think for sure that body of water was Narnia’s western sea and its unseen, unknown, west coast. And that Fledge is flying so high that Polly and Digory have caught sight of it.
So, it’s possible this illustration is why so many fan maps and wikis reference a western sea even though Lewis never mentioned it. (Read my analysis of The Western Wild for more about this mystery.)
