I've always found the idea interesting that they were descended from pirates of Celtic origins, and that they ended up in the South Pacific and intermarried with the women from some of the islands.  So it would be the offspring of these, ahem, marriages (if that's in fact what they were - you know what I mean) that discovered the portal and ended up in Narnia.  So chances are there is some insane time warp stuff going on.

If Aslan sent the present-day Telmarines back to Earth to start a new life at the same time that he sends the Pevensies back to England, chances are that he also sent them to not only different parts of the world, but also to different periods in time. That would mean that by the time the Pevensies return to England, the Telmarines would have already been in their new home + dead of old age (kinda dark, but fascinating to think about the timeline of it).

Posted by: @princerillianix

I wonder how other people think the Telmarines may be handled? or in fact, how you would handle the Telmarines yourself?

I know I personally always imagined them to be more along the line of Norse Vikings rather than Spanish Pirates (Walden). That's probably the direction I would go with it myself.  

Posted by: @icarus

That's a fun theory, but i've always felt that the description in the book is fits too perfectly with The Mutiny on the Bounty (1789) for it to have been inspired by anything else. I guess though you would have to assume some sort of temporal worm-hole type situation to account for the time delay, but its hardly beyond the realms of fantasy logic.

Well, that was a very interesting Wikipedia rabbit hole to fall down; I'd heard of it before but thought it was a movie. The fact that there were conflicting reports about how some of the mutineers had died on Pitcairn Island leaves the door open for a more fantastical otherworldly interpretation. I love that sort of thing. Since they were mutineers and not pirates, though, it seems that it may have been more of a source of inspiration rather than Lewis directly alluding to the Mutiny on the Bounty. To be fair, though, pirates doesn't exactly indicate commerce raiders either (as described in the Redditor's theory) but commerce raider does seem closer to a pirate comparatively.

I like the idea of Celtic or Viking origins, too, @Glenwit and @Fantasia. AFAIK, Europeans didn't sail the South Sea (Pacific) until the 1500s, but I'd definitely be open to a creative retelling of the Telmarine story. To be completely honest, the pirate/Polynesian heritage of the Telmarines never really seemed to fit with how dull/boring/disciplinary Telmarine culture is. I would miss a Polynesian influence in Narnia, though, even if it's only subtle (e.g. Polynesian motifs in embroidery).

The Bounty idea would make such a cool correlation! Aside from the hints of Polynesian influence though, I'm not sure how much you could really work this into an adaptation. 

I still tend to favor the 12th century crusader look for the Telmarines though... it fits better with the image of the stern, warlike culture of conquest they are supposed to carry, and also looks a bit like the Baynes illustrations, especially Miraz in his armor. 

Earlier in the forum on casting the Sons of Adam, people were mentioning hair color in terms of the Telmarines. There have been people with red hair in almost every human race. It might be interesting to see the Telmarines as a very hodgepodge, mixed-race group where you find various skintones and hair colors. 

Additionally to my earlier post, henna could be why Prunaprismia's hair is red. If the Telmarines were originally from the South China Sea, they could have been a rather diverse group. The Dutch, Spanish, English, Chinese, Indians, and other groups that I don't have specific names for off the top of my head worked and lived in the area. Attached is some info on pirates.

"Pirate History" https://www.infoplease.com/world/conflicts/pirate-history

I thought that the Telmarines being portrayed as Spanish conquistadors in the Walden adaptation was creative. There were pirates in the Mediterranean. I suppose Netflix could do it again, or portrayed the Telmarines differently. Maybe like Norse or something.

Posted by: @fantasia

I know I personally always imagined them to be more along the line of Norse Vikings rather than Spanish Pirates (Walden). That's probably the direction I would go with it myself.  

Did you know that this is what the Logos Theatre, South Carolina, did for this year's production of Prince Caspian?  I was pleased to see them move away from being so much like the Walden production, and photos of their makeups and costumes are very interesting.

Here's a photo of Miraz 

Miraz and some others:

The thing with the Telmarines is that they went through many changes as a society before arriving in Narnia. The original society, I can imagine, was a mash-up of Polynesian beliefs and those of the pirates, who, as a previous poster said, were themselves a mash-up of the many cultures of the South China Sea.

Then, as Telmar thrived in isolation, they would have gone off in other directions after many centuries, according to Lewis' timeline (if you want to adhere to canon.)

Then, there was the famine and the time of wandering for this one group of Telmarines who decided to strike off and find a better land. We don't know how much time it lasted but it could have also changed their culture.

Then, they arrived in Narnia and conquered it without too much of a problem and reigned for around 200 years. Their culture would have changed yet again.

So the Narnian Telmarines at that point were probably a completely different culture and society from their ancestors in Telmar, and the Telmarines who stayed in their land completely different from their founders. So logically they could be anything, as Lewis did not elaborate on them save they had picked up the Medieval way of life that Narnia always had.

I do agree that the regimented Victorian village life Lewis depicts (Miss Prizzle, the pig boys, and all that) doesn't fit at all with whatever the Telmarines were. That was satire on Lewis' part. The filmmakers would be wise to tone it down.

(The only way to explain it would be if some fussy Victorian teacher-bureaucrat got sucked into a portal and wound up with the Telmarines and convinced them of his or her ideas.)

Logos Theatre's costumes and makeup for the Telmarines are so cool, @coracle! Honestly, maybe too cool, given how famously dull the Telmarines are. I do like the Viking-inspired look they seem to be going with.

Posted by: @cobalt-jade

I do agree that the regimented Victorian village life Lewis depicts (Miss Prizzle, the pig boys, and all that) doesn't fit at all with whatever the Telmarines were. That was satire on Lewis' part. The filmmakers would be wise to tone it down.

Hmm, if anything, I think the Polynesian heritage is harder to reconcile with what we see of the Telmarines... stuffy Victorians seem more in line with Telmarine society than the vibrant cultures of the South Seas. Honestly, the fact that they were once pirates, too, and yet came to fear the sea is hard to wrap one's brain around! The images that come to my mind when I think of Polynesians and pirates are so removed from the boring Telmarines that we meet in Prince Caspian. This is one of the reasons why I liked a redditor's fan theory that the pirates were German commerce raiders from WW1; being descended from mercenary German sailors just seems to fit a bit better with the culture we see in the books.

@rose but then there was Moana, wherein the people of Moltonui are afraid to leave their island

Posted by: @lu_valient

@rose but then there was Moana, wherein the people of Moltonui are afraid to leave their island

Yes, but they had been amazing sea-going people earlier (those big canoes are like the ones that NZ's first people came in, hundreds of years ago).  

Lewis explains that the Telmarines of Caspian's day were afraid of ships and seafaring because Aslan was said to come from over the sea. However they claimed not to believe in him, so perhaps they kept the memory of some unspecified threat involved in the sea. Maybe it was handed down from their pirate ancestors that some retribution might be aboard any ships that arrived - they had got away with piracy, probably against ships from various countries.

I've just wasted an hour trying to find evidence online of any other sea being called The Southern Sea, but it keeps going back to the Pacific! So I will have to accept that the pirates were not 19th century but earlier, and were quite brave to be sailing across the relatively unknown Pacific.

Interestingly, Paul Ford's Companion to Narnia wrongly says they married native women in Telmar; in Prince Caspian it says pirates were shipwrecked on the island and married women on there, and a group took their wives and fled after a quarrel... and got to Telmar through a chink between worlds. It was many generations later that they invaded Narnia during a famine (the last chapter of PC has most of the information we have about them).

The island women would not be dark skinned, but brown (like Maori, Hawaiian, Samoan), and I would imagine their descendants ranged from brown to lighter skinned, depending on their genes.