Galaxies are one of those things that it’s easy to create a picture of. I remember in the 1970s all an artist needed was an airbrush, one or two pigments, and a fine paintbrush for depicting individual stars. When Photoshop and other painting programs came along, you could do the same thing with digital tools …
I’m going to do something different for this post of WW. I’m going to post AI-created portraits of randomly generated Narnian monarchs using StarryAI. (Starry-Eyed, get it?) These monarchs are intended to be used in Narnian fanfics, but they could be used in any work of fantasy fiction as well. First, Queen Thuma of the …
Now we get to the fun part of this series of posts — the names! Lewis very kindly supplied a number of names for his major and minor faun characters, and they all ended with -us. Dumnus Girbius Mentius Nausus Nimienus Obentinus Orruns Oscuns Tumnus Urnus Voltinus Voluns Going by this, we can assume all …
One thing the world has no shortage of are mythical creatures based on lions, as I showed in this post. This is likely the reason there are no manticores or chimerae in Narnia; they would have stolen Aslan’s thunder! There are even more bizarre lion monsters in the world of heraldry, but that’s for another …
One of the weird things about the Narnia world (not just Narnia the country) is that very few Narnian-born human women are mentioned by name. Of them, the nation of Calormen has three: Aravis, Lasaraleen, and Zardeenah. (Perhaps Zardeenah doesn’t count, because she is a goddess.) The males of Calormen are mentioned a lot more …
Turkish Delight is THE most iconic dessert, and most iconic food, of all the books in the Chronicles of Narnia, and I’ll put it up there with Lembas as the most iconic fantasy food, period. In fact, most people today would have never heard of it if not for The Lion, the Witch, and the …
In contrast to Narnia’s monotheism and its “true” God, Aslan, the desert nation of Calormen was polytheistic. Three gods are mentioned: Tash, Zardeenah, and Azaroth, all referenced in the book The Horse and His Boy, which was written by Lewis after The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but published later. HHB was Lewis’s ode to …
As I wrote in my previous post, Queen Swanwhite is something of an oddity, in Narnian terms. The reader hears about her only through the comments of another character, unlike, say, Ram the Great and King Erlian, two other characters the reader never meets but receive a mention from Lewis-the-narrator with the authorial weight that …
I haven’t heard much about campaign settings based in Narnia, as opposed to those set in Middle-Earth. Something about Narnia resists this, either the religosity, or the set-in-stone nature of the plot. But if someone did, here is some magic that might be used there. Narnian Magic for an RPG Cry of Bacchus: Allows …
I’m going to start off this third Summer of Narnia with this Pauline Baynes illustration from The Horse and His Boy that I just found. I assume it wasn’t included in the American edition of the books, because I don’t remember it from my childhood. It shows the moment when the Narnian entourage, headed by …