40+ for sure.

That's probably partly due to Barbara Kellerman (38) growing up, and more recently Tilda Swinton (44) cementing the idea for that sort of age bracket in my head.

But I think there is also the fact that political leaders and rulers tend to be over 40 in the real world... and even then they are considered "young" if they are under 50.

Yes it's kind of different for hereditary monarchs but I still think that the notion of real world authority figures being over 40 probably meshed in my brain sometime during childhood.

Same goes for things like Headmasters at a school growing up... The nice friendly teacher is usually 25-35, but the big scary headmaster is usually 40-50+

In our world for the last hundred years, we have seen non-elected rulers aged anything from 20s to 80s.
(20thC British monarchs were 60, 45, 40, 25 when crowned, but they weren't military/political leaders)
Women leaders who fought battles were rare, and not usually royal.
They are a thing of fantasy and ancient history.

But in Charn, the royal line may have been quite different. Girls may have been trained in fighting, and been part of armies. Lewis didn't write about this (and what Jadis told Digory and Polly was somewhat biased!). Ageing and youth may have been different too: she might have been queen for many years, but still had an unlined face and fit body.

I believe she has to be at least in her early 30s, with a mature strong will and the ability to carry it out. Men see her as a beautiful mature woman.
Aunt Letty refers to her as "young person"(slightly derogatory) and addresses her as "young woman". Letty is probably in her late 40s/early 50s (has a brother aged 60+, and a sister whose son is 12). 
Uncle Andrew is ridiculous to think Jadis would fancy him, either through his magic or his personality, and certainly not his looks. Even if she was in her 50s he would be totally wrong!

Whoever plays Jadis, must show a mature, well-seasoned and dominating ruler and magic user.

The first Narnia book I ever encountered was LWW, and I don't recall I gave any thought to "how old" the White Witch was supposed to be — probably because I was under 5 years old at the time myself, so all grown-ups were "old" to me! (I recall my oldest cousin turned 21 at about that same time, and that definitely seemed very old and tremendously grown up as far as I was concerned.)

It was a couple of years later that I first read MN, and I don't know what I assumed about Jadis's age in that story either. The BBC adaptations were first shown in Australia soon after, but Barbara Kellerman had far too much makeup on for me to have any idea of her age, even if I'd tried to guess! In any case, they obviously never seriously considered adapting MN, and I don't think Kellerman would have been very good as Jadis / the White Witch in her earlier form anyway. She hammed it up so much in LWW that I think she could easily have come across as even more ludicrous in MN, which is not the kind of vibe you really want for the woman who can (and did) destroy every living thing in her world with a single word.

I mentioned in the other thread that there are several instances in MN, during the London scene and just after, where people refer to Jadis as "young", so reading it now, I assume from there that she is young enough — or at least looks young enough — for onlookers to assume that about her. I agree with @col-klink, mid-20s to early 30s feels about right. 

That said, she could easily be older than that in reality but at the same time appear younger than she is. Since she's not human, it's possible that she doesn't age at the same rate that people in our world do, even before she eats the apple and becomes immortal. But I still get the overriding impression from MN that she definitely looks young, along with being dazzlingly beautiful. LWW (which of course Lewis wrote first) doesn't give us any impression of her age whatsoever.

Mind you, I'm not terribly fussed about how old the actress playing her will be in the upcoming Netflix adaptation of MN, so long as she does a good job!

I always pictured her as a grouchy middle aged lady. She had to be at least 40 years old to be that. Of course she had to be strong enough to carry out her evil deeds, but Lewis pictured her as not being too old and even rather attractive for a witch.  She would not have looked like the old hags that are often portrayed in stories about witches.

Time is a curious thing. It flies like a dream when we are enjoying ourselves and drags like an eternity when miserable, grief-stricken or when dreading the consequences of something about to happen. 

How long was Jadis in suspended animation in Charn? She would have likely been at least 30 when that battle with her sister that Jadis talked about, took place. When the Sun for places like Charn, Felinda, Bramandin & Sorlois was dying, it could have been thousands of years for all we know. But in the end, if she stayed where she was, if Digory & Polly had not turned up, Jadis would have died anyway. Yes, she was all made up to look beautiful & probably used magic as well as makeup to enhance her looks. 

But then, she got into the "Land of Youth", which might have had some effect on her, especially when she ate that apple. I see Jadis as frozen - and I mean frozen, like Siberian permafrost or a deep freeze - at the age of about 35. She endures for a time then there was the 100 years of Winter without Christmas she inflicted on Narnia. All of which suggests that she could have been around for thousands of years, like a bad penny, stuck in archaeological digs. 

@narnian: I always pictured her as a grouchy middle-aged lady. She had to be at least 40 years old to be that. Of course, she had to be strong enough to carry out her evil deeds, but Lewis pictured her as not being to old and even rather attractive for a witch.  She would not have looked like the old hags that are often portrayed in stories about witches.

But was Jadis really alive at all? Or just like Twilight's "undead"? I notice that though C.S. Lewis' Narnia has a hag and a werewolf (ahem ), he doesn't have any vampires.

I always pictured her as a grouchy middle-aged lady. She had to be at least 40 years old to be that.

Too many women in the world, aged at least 40, which is really rather young, & who would therefore be highly offended to be called "a grouchy middle-aged lady", methinks. Wait until one gets to be eighty - if one is so lucky to live that long. You are only as young as you feel.  

@waggawerewolf27 

It is true that Barbara Kellerman exaggerated the White Witch’s character in the BBC series. But I think the witch was at least angry. They did get that part right. As for her being like a vampire, she might have been at least have been something similar since witches do not die easily. Aslan did finally defeat her and that was supposed to be the end of her life. The female curmudgeon was not too far off the mark except that she was younger than most women who are like that. That was something like Lewis created her.  I can’t picture her as being happy except when she was causing others pain. Tilda Swinton did get her character right for the most part in the Walden films, although I think she could have been nastier. I don’t think she was completely without emotion and in fact anger was part of her evil character.

Posted by: @narnian78

I always pictured her as a grouchy middle aged lady. She had to be at least 40 years old to be that.

Posted by: @waggawerewolf27

Too many women in the world, aged at least 40, which is really rather young, & who would therefore be highly offended to be called "a grouchy middle-aged lady", methinks.

Er, yeah, as a woman who's (a bit) over 40, I think I'm entitled to say there's a controversial statement if ever I heard one!!!  

Of course she had to be strong enough to carry out her evil deeds, but Lewis pictured her as not being to old and even rather attractive for a witch.

"Rather attractive"... er, actually, "dazzlingly beautiful" and "never in all his life known a woman so beautiful" are the remarks Lewis gives us from Digory's perspective. There are other comments on her beauty repeatedly throughout the chapters where she plays a major role. (Although we're also told that Polly, who quite clearly sees through the Witch's outward appearance to her evil nature immediately, "always said she couldn't see anything specially beautiful about her.")

Seriously, I'm not quite sure where anyone is getting the "over 40" vibes for Jadis. We only have vague indications in the book, to be fair, but they all point towards her looking quite young. I doubt she appears anything like a teenager — she's toweringly tall and obviously radiates power and (over-) confidence — but going by all we're told about her, I really don't think she can look much older than 30. As I keep saying, she could be older than that, but she apparently doesn't look it.

@courtenay 

I think the White Witch looked more beautiful to the people that she tempted. Edmund saw her differently than the other Pevensies, and Uncle Andrew was enamored with her beauty as Jadis. The others who did not like her saw her as a horrible witch.  So how young or old she looked might depend on the person. The same was true with her beauty. But her physical appearance and her exact age are not as important as her character. They only conveyed something of what she was like.

I don’t know if there’s any specific age I picture the White Witch being. I don’t think CS Lewis ever specified her age (it may have not been that important to the plot, anyways). 

There’s no knowing how long she lived in Charn, but maybe the enchanted sleep she put herself in for about a thousand years (if it was) allowed her to stay the same age. Or could it be that the world of Charn had a different lifespan than our world does? It’s hard to say.

She most likely would have been young or possibly adult with a youthful appearance. I’ve actually seen some actors and actresses in movies that look younger than they really are. But that’s kind of beside the point. So it’s possible the White Witch may have been an adult with youthful appearance. 

It's not something I've really thought about before and now I'm really pondering over it. I suppose Barbera was about the look and age I accepted her as, that being my introduction to Narnia. Though as a young child, she would have looked older to me than what she was in reality. Hearing she was only 38 when in that role, in my adult mind it really is not all that old.

Supposing I thought of her about 40ish with all that makeup on, it made me always see her -- without dwelling on it -- as certainly over 30. I do understand why some might place Jadis at late-20s in appearance, yet I also think she should look more like she's been around for some time, seen some things, etc! She's kept her youthful look after all those years frozen in Charn, but with all her power she presumably held, I feel Jadis needs to be that bit older. There's some history there.

I think I would also throw into the debate here, that witches in folklore and in general, are traditionally depicted as being old.

In many cases, I'd say it's almost part of the definition - "old witch" or "wicked old witch" are phrases in themselves.

Therefore, regardless of exactly how she is described in the text, I'd say my default point of imagination as a young child was that witches are old 

Posted by: @icarus

I think I would also throw into the debate here, that witches in folklore and in general, are traditionally depicted as being old.

In many cases, I'd say it's almost part of the definition - "old witch" or "wicked old witch" are phrases in themselves.

Therefore, regardless of exactly how she is described in the text, I'd say my default point of imagination as a young child was that witches are old 

I think it depends largely on what kinds of stories one was brought up on. There were definitely "wicked old witches" in stories I remember from my childhood, but there was also the classic film of The Wizard of Oz, in which Glinda the good witch is a beautiful youngish fairy-like lady and "only bad witches are ugly" (and even the Wicked Witch of the West, while unmistakably bright green, doesn't look overly "old"). I'd seen that movie many times before I first read The Magician's Nephew as a 7-year-old.

Interestingly, in L. Frank Baum's original book, there are two good witches in Oz, and Dorothy initially meets the Witch of the North, who is old but gentle and kind; it's only near the end of the story that we're introduced to Glinda, who in the book is actually the Witch of the South, and we're told:

She was both beautiful and young to their eyes. Her hair was a rich red in color and fell in flowing ringlets over her shoulders. Her dress was pure white but her eyes were blue, and they looked kindly upon the little girl.

My mum read that book to me before I'd ever seen the film and even before we read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (I'm guessing my very positive response to Oz had something to do with Mum deciding to try out Narnia on me, probably later that same year). So by the time I encountered Narnia's wickedest female villain, first as the White Witch in LWW and a couple of years later as Jadis in MN, I was definitely familiar with the idea that a witch could be a beautiful and at-least-young-looking woman, not exclusively an old or ugly one.

There's also the fact that everyone who grew up reading Harry Potter as a kid — those born in the 1990s onwards — will have had it impressed on them that "witch" is simply the feminine version of "wizard" (it's not, really, but let's leave linguistic and cultural arguments out of this), and that all the young female students at Hogwarts are referred to as witches, without it being a pejorative term at all, and definitely not something that implies old age (or ugliness!) in that universe.

So perhaps today's young viewers of the new Narnia film will have no trouble whatsoever thinking of Jadis as young (or appearing young), if that's the way Gerwig chooses to portray her. We still have no real idea of who's going to take the role or what she will actually look like, either as Jadis or as the White Witch (assuming Netflix gets around to doing LWW as well).

 

There's also the fact that everyone who grew up reading Harry Potter as a kid — those born in the 1990s onwards — will have had it impressed on them that "witch" is simply the feminine version of "wizard" (it's not, really, but let's leave linguistic and cultural arguments out of this), and that all the young female students at Hogwarts are referred to as witches, without it being a pejorative term at all, and definitely not something that implies old age (or ugliness!) in that universe.

There was also The Worst Witch books and TV series (one in the late '90's and a more recent adaption) where as in Harry Potter  a lot of the witches were of school age. So for most people who grew up in that era the word 'witch' would not necessarily imply being old or ugly. 

Posted by: @hermit

There was also The Worst Witch books and TV series (one in the late '90's and a more recent adaption) where as in Harry Potter  a lot of the witches were of school age. So for most people who grew up in that era the word 'witch' would not necessarily imply being old or ugly. 

Oh yes, of course — I forgot those, simply because although they were around when I was still at school and I'd definitely heard of them, I was a bit "old" for them by then and didn't take notice of them. They were also less of a widespread cultural phenomenon than the Harry Potter books and films, but that's definitely another good example.