Ahhh, I love The Secret Garden! One of my favourites!

Mine too! The rose-trees in it are actually where that part of my username comes from.

All I'm saying is that I don't believe Lewis was racist--I think he wrote way more progressively by including Aravis and Emeth than could have possibly been expected of him at the time--but there IS a distinction in the books between light and dark skin, and when it comes to numbers, the majority of the people specifically described as having dark skin are bad while the majority of the people specifically described as having light skin are good. True, Jadis is white, Gumpas is white, LotGK is white, I get it. But the thing is, those were isolated villains, exceptions to the "noble Narnian" standard, while the PEOPLE of Calormen, their government, class system, and culture were flawed. The exceptions, Aravis and Emeth, were sensible and good.

I'd say that the people are distinct from their government, and even from their culture to an extent, because their culture was very influenced by their religion and that was a bloody and oppressive state religion. It's very true that we hardly meet any good Calormenes, but I don't think we ever get a good, comprehensive snapshot of Calormen and its people in either HHB or LB.

In HHB, Shasta's running away from his adoptive father and the man who planned to purchase him as a slave, and because of this, Shasta and Bree never mix with Calormenes any more than absolutely necessary to avoid raising suspicion and having Shasta and Bree returned to their masters. I'm sure there would have been some Calormenes along the way that might have helped, but they couldn't take the chance. The only time they really spend much time around other "regular" Calormenes is in Tashbaan, and given that place is the seat of the oppressive government, it doesn't surprise me that it doesn't seem like a very happy, humane place—and that the Narnians would stand out as being very different from the cruel, wealthy Tarkaans and the downtodden lower classes. And then, in LB, the Calormenes we meet are members of a aggressive, incognito invading army; we're lucky that we end up with one among them who is noble-hearted.

So all in all, it ends up reflecting very badly on the culture as a whole, but it has more to do with the plot and structure each story that we get such a dismal view of Calormenes rather than the actual state of the entire Calormene race. I think it would have been good if Lewis had included more "normal" Calormenes if possible, but oftentimes you just don't even meet that many human characters in the Chronicles. There's often not a lot of extraneous material in these books; it wasn't Lewis's writing style.

One other thing that occurs to me is that perhaps if Lewis had spent more time talking about their religion, the reader would pay less attention to the disparity in appearance. It would seem to me that one of the main reasons why Calormen is such a miserable place is due to the violence of their belief system, where they sacrifice people on altars to please their god. It stands to reason that even the "good" Calormenes wouldn't be happy people. The Narnians, on the other hand, have a very different belief system and that is reflected in their attitudes.

Even as a child attending a school with an ethnically diverse population, who honestly never thought about skin colour or race it meant so little to her, felt alarmed by the contrast between dark-skinned Calormenes and light-skinned Narnians.

To be fair, I've never really liked those distinctions either. Logically, I know that it was included to make the reader wonder about Shasta's own origins, but it still makes me a bit uncomfortable when I read it. I do wish Lewis had worded it a bit differently because it's caused a fair amount of controversy that doesn't seem to be very warranted. And I see your point about the general vibe being one that could be interpreted as Orientalism, especially when giving the books a cursory glance.

The comparison between Calormen and the British Empire is extremely interesting, though. I'm not history-focused enough to think of something like that on my own, but now that you mention it, it seems obvious!

Ha, I think that wagga is our resident history buff around these parts, but it's something that stood out to me. I feel like Lewis was probably more inspired by the history of the Ottoman Empire, as wagga pointed out in her post, but all Empires tend to have these things in common, I'm afraid.

Of all the children in the Narnia stories, I most closely resembled Eustace and I got quite upset at age 6 that he and his beliefs were regarded so negatively, including things like pacifism, which I've always believed and which I've always thought was very much in line with Christian values. Admittedly one of my hobbies is battle reenactment but that's only pretending to fight (and yes, it's an excuse to dress up in shiny armour). In VDT, and increasingly in SC and LB, part of Eustace's redemption appeared to be abandoning his pacifist views and learning to fight.

I more or less considered myself a pacifist a few years ago and have since stepped away from that to some degree (I believe that there are times when the use of force is the proper response when acting in defense of yourself or others during times of imminent danger), but Eustace's claim to be a pacifist never bothered me much because a "real" pacifist wouldn't have grabbed Reepicheep by his tail and forcefully swung him around. It seemed to me that he was just using it as an excuse to get out of having to duel Reepicheep. Anyway, I suppose I'm wandering off-topic here, but I think that pacifism and Christianity could be a great discussion for CR&P!

That was a highly fascinating account, Wagga. It's great hearing you talk about history, even better when it's mixed with firsthand experience! I get what you're saying. Much of what Lewis wrote about Calormen was inspired by real life. I certainly don't doubt that. I just think Calormen is hard for people to swallow because the Narnian protagonists are fair-skinned. Narnia itself, where the "white" characters live, is portrayed as a gentle, idyllic place, while Calormen, where the "non-whites" live, is portrayed as intimidating and unforgiving. People pick out that disparity and chalk it up to racism. Calormen may have gone over a bit better if Narnia had had more shortcomings and evils associated with it. But that, of course, wouldn't fit the story.

Hi Phelan Velvet, it is nice to see you again, and I am so glad you liked my story of last year's journey to Istanbul, as the old Christian Byzantine city of Constantinople was renamed after the establishment of the Ottoman Empire. I do agree that today people do have sensitivities to racism they certainly did not have on 25th April, 1915, when the Australians first landed on Gallipoli, in the Dardanelles, and yes that is precisely why you do have a good point, when the newly federated Australia was then shaking off a colonial past of convict beginnings, at the behest of rather snobbish British aristocratic types. (By the way, "a bunch of English toffs" was the way an Australian reviewer saw Caspian and friends in film VDT. So much for Narnia, with its animal population, and its idyllically working class King Frank and Queen Helen being its first monarchs.)

Especially if you agree with me that describing white slavers picking on dark people is just as offensive as dark people picking on white people. The comparison of the British Empire with Calormen is apt, I agree, but as empires go, none of the other empires involved in WW1 were any better, and some were considerably worse. What the British Empire shared with both Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was that the Ottoman Sultan was a religious leader in his own right, just as when UK's King George V was crowned, he also became the Defender of the Faith. Whilst the elderly Austrian Emperor, Franz Joseph, sat on the throne of the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperors, but by then was holy no more.

I fear that C.S.Lewis, who participated in the Flanders conflict, along with Australian and New Zealand troops, may well have phrased his description of Calormenes badly, but I don't know how he could have done it another way, if he was basing Calormen on what he knew and observed of the Ottoman Empire, then called 'The sick man of Europe' for good reason.

Besides as has been pointed out, it wouldn't fit the Narnian story, either in VDT or in HHB. In my copy of VDT I read that the description of dark-skinned Calormenes dressed in robes and turbans was that of a couple of merchants purchasing slaves in Lone Islands, rather than the slave-traders such as Pug, and while it grates, it does refer directly both to the Ottoman Empire as well as to Barbary Corsairs who were in the pay of the Ottomans, and who ravaged the coasts of the British Isles, along the coast of Africa, Holland and elsewhere in Europe, right up to Iceland. As the Wikipedia article I linked to says, "the main purpose of their attacks was to capture Christian slaves for the Ottoman slave trade as well as the general Arabic market in North Africa and the Middle East". Even the Tarkaan Anradin with his crimson beard in HHB is a nod to Hayreddin Barbarossa and Oruç Reis, the Turkish Barbarossa Brothers, who took control of Algiers on behalf of the Ottomans in the early 16th century, until France finally captured Algiers in 1830. And by the way, the Ottomans did prefer Circassian and European girls to stock their harems.

Ha, I think that wagga is our resident history buff around these parts, but it's something that stood out to me. I feel like Lewis was probably more inspired by the history of the Ottoman Empire, as wagga pointed out in her post, but all Empires tend to have these things in common, I'm afraid.

Yes all Empires do have these things in common as you say. Not only relatives in other Imperial households, including that of rivals. Serfs, as in Tsarist Russia, exploited peasants and overly taxed higher classes, supporting a non-taxpaying aristocracy, as in France's Ancien Regime, and exported convicts and their guards, Irish and Scottish unrest and more, as in Britain. Ever since 2014 we have been having these series of commemorations, and thus I decided on that particular commemorative tour, since it included a side trip to France where we visited the battlefields of Pozieres, Villers Bretonnaux, Fromelles etc where my own kinfolk also fought.

Gallipoli was a defeat but the ANZAC troops fought bravely against the Ottoman troops, whose leader Kemal Ataturk established a secular Republic in Turkey. Not before Ottoman wars with Greece and an alleged savage murder of its Armenian minority.