Posted by: @varna

 

But if we ignore the disputed timeline, we have no dating of the planting. The books don't say that the ambassadors came a year before the Pevensies went back to England. The books don't say anything about when they went back.

Having just checked PC I have to admit you're right. My own memory of the books was playing tricks on me.

@varna perhaps it was planted in two stages.

Posted by: @coracle

@varna perhaps it was planted in two stages.

Definitely possible.

But we don't know when any of those stages are in relation to when the Pevensies went back to England.

I've always felt that Susan's remembering in HHB of the moles planting the orchard is meant to be a direct tie-in with Peter's comment in PC (p. 24 in the Puffin edition): "Don't you remember — it was the very day before the ambassadors came from the King of Calormen — don't you remember planting the orchard outside the north gate of Cair Paravel?" (Lewis obviously hadn't thought up the title "Tisroc" for the ruler of Calormen at that early stage — this was only the second Narnia book he wrote and I believe it's the very first time the name of Calormen is mentioned in the entire series — but it wouldn't have made sense at that point anyway for the author to throw in an invented word that wouldn't have been familiar to his readers, when it doesn't have any bearing on the rest of this particular story. In the context of the story itself, we could put it down to Peter temporarily forgetting the exact title of the King in question.)

Peter here talks of planting the orchard, not an orchard or one of the orchards, so that doesn't seem to leave any room for there to have been more than one orchard or more than one planting. And there's really no need for there to be more than one, since — as others have pointed out — neither PC nor HHB specifies that the orchard was planted only a year before the Pevensies left Narnia. It's only Lewis's later timeline that gives us that info, which then creates the problem of the Pevensies obviously clearly remembering their own world in HHB, in contradiction to the dreamlike ending of their reign in LWW, where they don't even remember what the lamppost is and have no idea that they're about to re-enter their forgotten childhood lives on Earth.

I really think Lewis himself had mostly forgotten about that dreamlike ending even when he wrote PC, which was published only a year after LWW. When Caspian makes the decision to blow Queen Susan's horn, there's the question of "what form the help will take"; Doctor Cornelius suggests it's most likely to "call Peter the High King and his mighty consorts down from the high past", and of the places where they might appear, he suggests "Lantern Waste, up-river, west of Beaversdam, where the Royal Children first appeared in Narnia, as the records tell." (p. 86, emphasis added)

We don't know for sure if the lamppost is still there or not (as has been recently discussed in another thread here!), but the location of it has a name referring directly to that lamppost — Lantern Waste — and Doctor Cornelius, who knows more about ancient Narnia than probably anyone else at that point, states that it's in the records of Narnia's history that this is "where the Royal Children first appeared in Narnia". We can only assume those records were written in books or on scrolls and somehow hidden away during the centuries of Telmarine occupation, safely preserved by the surviving Old Narnians who were living in hiding all that time. Obviously Doctor Cornelius, the half-Dwarf scholar, knows those records pretty well, whatever they are and however they were kept.

But there it is. We're now told, in the second book, that it's on record in Narnian history that the four Kings and Queens came to Narnia as children and first appeared at the place called Lantern Waste. And yet, at the end of the first book, that's a fact that they themselves don't remember at all. Was it only written down after they left, perhaps by Mr Tumnus, who (as a native Narnian) did remember that detail? Or did they not pay any attention to the writing of historical records during their own reign?? Especially as at the end of HHB, it's made clear that they DO remember arriving through the wardrobe...

My feeling is that Lewis went for the "forgetting virtually everything about Earth after so many years in Narnia" conclusion of LWW to give it a fairy-tale atmosphere — the four Pevensies, as adults, have become so much a part of this fantasy world that they speak and think like characters in a fairy-tale themselves, and have no real recollection of their own world until they suddenly stumble back into it. But that, as we've seen, creates problems for how the rest of the series goes with repeat visits to Narnia, which Lewis presumably hadn't thought about when he wrote the ending of that first book. So he didn't let that kind of "forgetting" happen to any of his characters again, and apparently didn't remember it himself by the time he wrote HHB!

@courtenay it's ironic that he did forget, considering he had a photographic memory! This is a man who reportedly knew what was on every page of every book in his collection!

@coracle Oh yes, that's so right! I remember reading in one of his biographies, how Jack loved getting his students to test him by asking them to pick out any book from his bookshelves and start reading aloud from any random page, and he'd recite all the rest of that page from memory. Apparently no matter what book it was, even if they chose the dustiest and obviously least-recently-read volume they could find, he was spot on right every time!

I hadn't thought of it in this context myself until you mentioned it just now, but yes, that does make it ironic that there are so many discrepancies between the Narnia books that he himself wrote, even sometimes between ones he wrote consecutively... I really don't know how to account for that, unless the story about his photographic memory for books was rather exaggerated! I hope not — especially as I have a feeling it may be in Douglas Gresham's reminiscences of his stepfather — but there it is.

(Whichever book I read that in — I'm afraid I don't have quite as sharp a memory as Lewis myself — it went on to say that Joy, his wife in later years, was at least his match in that regard. Apparently she could pick up any piece of sheet music that she'd never seen before, read through it, then sit down at the piano without it and play the entire piece note-perfect from memory!!)

From what I've heard, Jack & Joy were both endowed with remarkable intelligence and memory.  As you say, it may be what Doug said in a talk or in his own writing.

@coracle Yes, and this is getting even further off topic, but I just love the account (I think it's also from Douglas) of how Jack and Joy played Scrabble. They would combine two full sets of Scrabble tiles so as to have more letters available, and then the only rule different from ordinary Scrabble was that they could use ANY words from ANY languages that have ever existed, real-life or invented. As long as the word could be found in a book somewhere, it was valid!!    

I was always fascinated as a child by how the younger children forgot their swimming and riding technique when they returned to England, only to regain them in Narnia. It fits well with the whole theme of the ancient past returning.

I think that some of the discrepancies above are probably retcons and not necessarily a result of forgetfulness.