Worldbuilding Wednesday 8/14/24: Let’s Talk About Maugrim (Narnia LX)

If you’re a scholar of The Chronicles of Narnia, you’ll know that the White Witch’s Captain of the Secret Police, a wolf named Maugrim, received a name change when The Lion, the Witch, and Wardrobe was published in the U.S. in 1950. That change was to Fenris Ulf, a name familiar to those who read Norse mythology. It’s that of the giant wolf prophesied to kill Odin, king of the gods, at the end time of Ragnarok.

I had thought for a long time that Macmillan made the change because Maugrim was too obscure or confusing; but it turns out Lewis was the one who did. In all my research I haven’t found out why. Fenris Ulf was the name I heard when I first read LWW (or rather it was read to me) and that is the one that sounds “right.”

A young Skandar Keynes (Edmund) and one of the stunt animals for the Disney version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

But apparently, HarperCollins, who came to hold the rights to the books, eventually disagreed; they rescinded the change in 1994 and since have been using the original British text which includes Maugrim. Which I admit is also an evocative name, sounding like “More-grim” which describes the fierce character, with suggestions that he’ll maul you with his wolf teeth; but doesn’t have the same mythological ring.

A Reddit thread discussing this issue revealed that editions in some other countries, too, received the change to Fenris Ulf. One poster nicely headcanoned the issue by positing that Maugrim was the creature’s name, but Fenris Ulf his title. Sounds good to me.

Of course wolves have always received a bad rep in hairy tales, a rep that only began to be redeemed in Richard and Wendy Pini’s Elfquest comics in which wild elves rode friendly wolves instead of horses. Both elves and wolves had Native American inspired names. The dire wolves of House Stark in A Game of Thrones served a similar function, acting as protectors, and in fact inspired a craze for wolf-dog hybrid pets when the show began airing. That Lewis used them as villains in LWW was a no-brainer. Memories of the Gestapo were still strong post-WWII; plus, the groups of Nazi submarines that harassed European shipping routes were regularly called wolfpacks by the allies. It wouldn’t have been hard to equate the ruthlessness and ferocity of Nazi troops with wolves.

Maugrim shows his Gestapo roots in this sketch by D34tHn0Te

Thus, going by both Maugrim and Fenris Ulf, I think the White Witch’s wolves would have had unpleasant, vaguely Germanic-Scandinavian names that varied with the occasional physical characteristic one.

What happened to the wolves after LWW? They aren’t mentioned again in the Chronicles, aside from the Wer-Wolf in Prince Caspian. I like to think they were pardoned by Aslan and went somewhere else to live, having learned the hard way not to mess in human affairs, and likely gave their offspring less murderous-sounding names after that.

(There’s enough about Maugrim that I could do a whole other post about theatric costuming and artwork depictions.)

Other named wolves in fantasy media have been The Jungle Book’s Akela, Gmork in The Neverending Story, and Moro from the anime Princess Mononoke. The Harry Potter series featured Fenrir Grayback and Remus Lupin, both good-aligned werewolf characters with appropriately wolfy names.

Narnian Wolves c. The Long Winter