Category: Fantasy

Worldbuilding Wednesday 9/18/24: The Best of Twittersnips (Maritime Magic)

Are you or your adventurers embarking on an ocean voyage? Here’s some magic to help you out.   Maritime Magic Magic Items Clover of the Sea: A rare ocean plant that looks like an oversized, dark green, 4-leafed clover. It grows in sandy, shallow inlets and is used as a component in luck spells. Figurehead …

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Farewell to the 2024 Summer of Narnia

It ended sooner than I wanted. However there is lots of leftover material for next year’s three-month extravaganza! I’ll close with this delicious AI-generated version of The White Witch’s bento box. Made of polished and ornamented silver, it contains plenty of raw fish (tuna and salmon filets), hardboiled eggs, roe, oysters, pickled garlic, and nuts …

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Narnia French Editions, 1952 – 1953

Many first edition Narnia books published in other countries had unique, enchanting artwork that was never repeated for further printings. These covers for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (shortened to The Lion and the White Witch) and Prince Caspian have a light, airy, featherweight feel that seems more appropriate for a book of …

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Witte Heks

That’s Dutch for “White Witch.” The theater production below was staged in the Netherlands. Obviously, it was a childrens theater project, going by the youth of the extras who are playing the reindeer and dwarves. Interestingly the witch has black hair as in Pauline Baynes’ depictions. And here’s yet another Scandinavian version of The Lion, …

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Hvid Heks

That’s Norwegian for “White Witch.” And she’s the showstopper character in this very oddly staged Norwegian version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, even though she’s not exactly white. Actually, none of the winter scenes are. Click to see full size version, you really have to! Here she’s using a variant of the …

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A Typical City of Calormen

I’ve been saving up artwork of desert landscapes, cities, and caravans, but they all tended to blend together. Typical of concept art. So, I really did blend them together.

Tash Has Fallen

This wasn’t labeled as Narnian art, but it so clearly is! Somehow Tash has made it into our world but taken a tumble, now he’s clogging up the commuter rail system. I hope he’s dead and not just stunned.

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 …

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Narnian Months of the Year

The Narnian calendar system was never elaborated on by C. S. Lewis. We do know there’s a Christmas, a Midwinter snowball dance, and Summer Bacchanals, which, though are not mentioned as taking place on the summer solstice, are similar enough to Beltane that they likely might. There’s also the name of one month  — Greenroof …

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Narnia Evergreen Library Editions, 1965

These Evergreen Library hardcover versions of The Chronicles came out in 1965. All seven books had been released by this point, but for this series, only these five were published. The cover artist was Giorgio de Gaspari. I’d never seen this artwork before and was struck by how different it was from post-1970s depictions. For …

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