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Women's Names in Narnia

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Cobalt Jade
(@cobalt-jade)
NarniaWeb Nut

A few weeks ago I wrote in one of these posts that we don't hear a lot about Human women in Narnia outside of royalty. (I'm not including Calormen because we do get a glimpse of female life there, through Lasaraleen and Aravis.) And of those Human women, no one has a name! I can think of only one, Gwendolen, a schoolgirl from Prince Caspian "liberated" by Bacchus where it seemed almost a cliche to name her Gwendolen. So that got me thinking on my blog, what kind of names did Human females in Narnia have? (By Narnia I mean Narnia-the-country, Archenland, and the Island nations.)

 

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Topic starter Posted : August 22, 2022 12:16 pm
Cleander
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I can think of 3 others, none of which seem to have anything in common with the others: 

- Pruniprismia (aka Mrs. Miraz).

- Nancy (in VODT, when one of the sailors hears that the Dark Island is where dreams come true, he speculates he'd find he was married to his crush Nancy there).

- Swanwhite

I kind of doubt Lewis had worked out naming conventions for these ones. Unless you could maybe argue that Swanwhite is ancient Narnian (being animal-related, which one would expect), Pruniprismia is Telmarine (which doesn't quite make sense alongside the unmistakably Welsh name Gwendolen), and Nancy is Terebinthian (since some of Caspian's sailors are from there, and they may have preserved some of the classic English names passed down from Frank and Helen).

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Posted : August 23, 2022 5:37 am
Cobalt Jade
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Oh, I took into account Prunaprismia and the possibilities of Telmarine women's names. I also went into Swanwhite as a name, and concluded (my headcanon and no one else's) that it may have been part of a fad among the nobility for female names echoing beautiful objects from nature. What's left is, as you said, Gwedolen and Nancy, which are kind of...prosaic for Narnia, especially when the Narnian men, fauns and centaurs, and Talking Beasts all got memorable names. (And of course they were all male.)

I still find it odd that Lewis couldn't come up with an evocative name for even a single female Narnian character. This is isn't meant as criticism, it's strange to me.

This post was modified 2 years ago by Cobalt Jade
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Topic starter Posted : August 23, 2022 1:03 pm
coracle
(@coracle)
NarniaWeb's Auntie Moderator

@cobalt-jade 

We must consider the writer's cultural context. Jack Lewis lives in a male-skewed society, with mostly male colleagues, he grew up reading books about males, and simply didn't think of adding more Narnian girls or women. (The Moores, who actually owned the Kilns, and the girl evacuees, did not have their names used)

He's an Inkling, and his great friend Ron Tolkien writes wonderful books involving hobbits, dwarves, elves, and wizards, almost all of them Male.

The first Queen of Narnia was Helen (Nellie) but she was an English woman. 

There, shining in the sunrise, larger than they had seen him before, shaking his mane (for it had apparently grown again) stood Aslan himself.
"...when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards."

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Posted : August 23, 2022 1:53 pm
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Courtenay
(@courtenay)
NarniaWeb Fanatic Hospitality Committee
Posted by: @cobalt-jade

I still find it odd that Lewis couldn't come up with an evocative name for even a single female Narnian character. This is isn't meant as criticism, it's strange to me.

I was just going to write pretty much what @coracle said. Lewis was born in 1898, studied and taught at Oxford when it was still overwhelmingly a male environment, enjoyed ancient fantasy sagas in which nearly all the central characters — certainly the heroes and the main "doers" — were male, and he died in 1963, before second-wave feminism had made any great inroads into society. 

I was also going to mention (as Coracle has) Lewis's good friend Tolkien, who in 1937 published a children's fantasy novel — The Hobbit — which contains NO FEMALE CHARACTERS WHATSOEVER. This apparently didn't affect its popularity at the time, and it's still rated as an absolute classic 85 years later, regardless. (I first read it as a 7-year-old girl — I'm almost certain it was the very next book Mum and I went onto after we finished all the Chronicles of Narnia! — and I barely even noticed the lack of female characters. I was enjoying the story too much for that!)

So I really don't see anything very strange or surprising about the relative scarcity of female characters within the Narnian world and the lack of interesting names for them. It doesn't seem fair to expect a male author born and raised in the late Victorian / Edwardian era, and who only lived about 13 years past the mid-point of the 20th century, to write with the same mentality, the same kind of sensitivity towards gender representation, that 21st-century readers would expect. It's a different world now from the one Lewis lived in.

What I do find remarkable is that, given that background, Lewis had no hesitation about creating some very strong and memorable girl characters in his lead roles, regularly writing from their point of view and often portraying them as more spiritually sensitive and more level-headed than a lot of his boy characters. (Lucy and Polly are my favourite examples out of his characters from this world, while Aravis is another remarkably strong and positively portrayed female character from the country that is Narnia's sworn enemy.) That was definitely ahead of his time, all things considered.

"Now you are a lioness," said Aslan. "And now all Narnia will be renewed."
(Prince Caspian)

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Posted : August 23, 2022 3:25 pm
Jasmine
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NarniaWeb Guru

As both @coracle and @courtenay just mentioned, Lewis and Tolkien were born during a time when women didn't do as much as they do now.

Tolkien had mostly male characters in his Middle Earth universe, and The Hobbit had no female characters at all (perhaps a given reason why the movie adaption of the Hobbit trilogy added some female characters).

As for women names in Narnia, "Prunaprismia" might suggest "prim" and "proper". Then you have Miss Prizzle. Swanwhite was described as beautiful, even beautiful as a swan, as her name may suggest. "Hwin" is a sound of a horse, whinny. Mrs. Beaver is not given a name, other than Mrs. Beaver. Ramandu's daughter is not even given a name in the book, though the Walden movie adaption named her Liliandil.

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Posted : August 23, 2022 3:48 pm
Courtenay
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Posted by: @the-mad-poet

I kind of doubt Lewis had worked out naming conventions for these ones.

This also reminds me — Lewis simply didn't spend the same amount of time and depth of effort on his world-building as Tolkien did (has any other author in history?!), and that surely includes his choices of names for some of the characters, especially "bit part" ones. "Gwendolen", "Miss Prizzle" and "Nancy" are certainly not the kinds of names you'd expect in a fantasy world that has had only minimal contact with our own world down the centuries. But I would guess that for those very minor roles, Lewis just latched onto whichever names came to him that seemed to fit the characters and what he wants them to stand for.

"Gwendolen" is a name that wasn't too uncommon in Lewis's time (most often shortened to "Gwen", of course), but being Welsh, it sounds slightly exotic yet still familiar enough to English ears. I'm guessing he wanted a name for a Narnian-Telmarine schoolgirl that wouldn't sound too ordinary (unlike, say, Mary or Sally), but also wouldn't sound completely otherworldly. He clearly wants us to empathise with her and identify with her as she gets freed from a horrible school, the likes of which some of his young readers might have gone to!! And "Miss Prizzle", of course, is a comical name for a teacher who is obviously strict and crotchety and not at all nice.

Meanwhile, "Nancy" as the name of a sailor's fiancee isn't entirely original — I'm wondering if Lewis was a fan of G&S! Grin  

But the happiest hour a sailor sees

Is when he's down at an inland town

With his Nancy on his knees, yo ho,

And his arm around her waist!

(from "A Wandering Minstrel I" in The Mikado — the way W.S. Gilbert uses it there, it sounds like it was an accepted sort of generic term for a sailor's girlfriend in Victorian times, but I'm not sure)

Whether or not Lewis got it from there, though, I think he's just grabbing a name that sounds familiar and cosy to our ears, in order to make that little vignette relatable. Would we English-speaking readers get quite the same "awww" warmth if the sailor said "I reckon I'd find I was married to Arianrhod if we landed here"...?? (That's the name of a Welsh goddess, by the way — I just wanted to throw in something that might be a perfectly normal name on another planet, but it sounds completely "way out" to most of us.)

For that matter, the next line in that chapter has another crew member saying "And I'd find Tom alive again" — so in that kind of context, Lewis could be just as unimaginative with names of male Narnians! I should think it's for exactly the same reason: he wants us to warm to these people's daydreams, before the horror of what comes next. Again, if the sailor's dead friend or relative was called something like Aragorn or Legolas, his comment could just sound too strange and otherworldly for readers to immediately relate to.

Do names like that make much sense otherwise in a country that literally IS a different world from ours? Probably not, but there it is. And since all humans (and Talking Beasts and other sentient beings) in Narnia and the surrounding countries speak English anyway — with apparently no changes in dialect over 2,500 years of that world's history — it's not that much greater a suspension of disbelief to accept that they've kept using some earthly English names, I suppose... Giggle  

"Now you are a lioness," said Aslan. "And now all Narnia will be renewed."
(Prince Caspian)

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Posted : August 23, 2022 4:49 pm
Cobalt Jade
(@cobalt-jade)
NarniaWeb Nut

Thanks for the sailor rhyme, Courtenay! That's the second time here on these boards I found out Lewis referenced an old song or rhyme in his works (the first was the "in my lady's chambers" line during the sack of the White Witch's castle in LWW.)

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Topic starter Posted : August 23, 2022 7:55 pm
Courtenay
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NarniaWeb Fanatic Hospitality Committee

@cobalt-jade Well, I don't know if he was directly referencing it or if it was just coincidence! "Upstairs and downstairs and in my lady's chamber" is from a nursery rhyme (I knew it when I was little too), but the "Nancy" reference is in a song from The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan, a light opera that was first performed in London in 1885. It's the most popular G&S play to this day, but I have no idea whether Lewis ever saw it — I don't get the impression he was much of a theatregoer! It could be that "Nancy" at that time was a colloquial nickname for a sailor's lady friend — like how, in England, "Jack Tar" is the traditional generic nickname for a sailor and "Tommy" for a soldier — but I don't have any evidence of that. It would explain why both Gilbert and Lewis used the name in that context, but it could just as easily be coincidence, as I said.

I'm now remembering in one of my reference books — Inside Prince Caspian by Devin Brown — the author points out that Queen Prunaprismia's name may be a reference to Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit, in which a young girl is advised by her snobbish governess to practise saying the words "prunes and prism" in order to give a pretty shape to her lips. Queen Prunaprismia is also implicitly a snobbish and stuffy kind of person (we really don't see much of her in the book), and Lewis frankly hated prunes, so that probably gave an extra nasty edge to the name for him! Grin   Again, unlike Tolkien, who of course invented entire languages and gave his characters names that had meanings in those languages, I get the impression Lewis tended to choose or invent names for effect, rather than on any basis of a consistent underlying language or culture.

"Now you are a lioness," said Aslan. "And now all Narnia will be renewed."
(Prince Caspian)

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Posted : August 24, 2022 4:43 am
Cobalt Jade
(@cobalt-jade)
NarniaWeb Nut

Courtenay, I looked up the term "Nancy" in British Victorian slang on several sites, and look what I found..... 

Whether or not Gilbert & Sullivan had this in mind for the song, is up for question. I mean, they did put a lot of sly social commentary into their songs that likely went over peoples' heads back then as it does today, for different reasons.

As for Lewis, it was likely one of those made-up-on-the-fly things, maybe because he thought that's how a sailor should talk.Or, he just didn't think, only wrote. As a child I always thought that line was odd and wondered if the sailors came from Earth as the Pevensies did.

Back to the names, I've read the "prunes and prisms" theory about the Queen's name as well, it's probably the most likely origin because the name itself is so bizarrely comic, as are Miss Prizzle and Gwendolen, which sound like they also might exist in a Charles Dickens novel like the prunes and prisms line. I have yet to read an official biography of Lewis, so I don't know if he was making fun of Dickens, or inserting a few Easter Eggs for him as a fan. Certainly the town Aslan, Bacchus, and his followers invade and destroy has a Dickens-like feel to it.

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Topic starter Posted : August 24, 2022 11:19 am
Courtenay
(@courtenay)
NarniaWeb Fanatic Hospitality Committee
Posted by: @cobalt-jade

Courtenay, I looked up the term "Nancy" in British Victorian slang on several sites, and look what I found..... 

Yes, I was already very well aware of that meaning. But I don't know if that specific use of it actually dates back to Victorian times and I doubt G&S intended any such connotations in The Mikado. I've read a lot about them and their work (as an almost lifelong fan!) and Gilbert in particular doesn't come across as the sort of person who would have included or allowed any "dirty" jokes, even obscure ones, in his plays (and for that matter, he had a strict policy in his casting choices that men should not play women's roles and women should not play men's roles). Most of his snide social commentary was actually about politics and well-known public figures of the time. But all this is off topic anyway.

Posted by: @cobalt-jade

Back to the names, I've read the "prunes and prisms" theory about the Queen's name as well, it's probably the most likely origin because the name itself is so bizarrely comic, as are Miss Prizzle and Gwendolen, which sound like they also might exist in a Charles Dickens novel like the prunes and prisms line. I have yet to read an official biography of Lewis, so I don't know if he was making fun of Dickens, or inserting a few Easter Eggs for him as a fan. Certainly the town Aslan, Bacchus, and his followers invade and destroy has a Dickens-like feel to it.

I don't know what Lewis thought of Dickens either — I've read a couple of biographies of him (Lewis, that is), but I can't remember Dickens being mentioned as either one of his likes or dislikes! But he definitely loathed prunes. Grin  

"Now you are a lioness," said Aslan. "And now all Narnia will be renewed."
(Prince Caspian)

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Posted : August 24, 2022 3:29 pm
Cobalt Jade
(@cobalt-jade)
NarniaWeb Nut

I had to refer back to Prince Caspian last night for something else, and it's Miss Frizzle. But I swore it was Prizzle.

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Topic starter Posted : August 26, 2022 10:13 am
Courtenay
(@courtenay)
NarniaWeb Fanatic Hospitality Committee

@cobalt-jade It's Prizzle in my copy (1970s Puffin edition)! Maybe that was one of those odd little changes Lewis made for the American editions?

"Now you are a lioness," said Aslan. "And now all Narnia will be renewed."
(Prince Caspian)

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Posted : August 26, 2022 2:14 pm
Col Klink
(@col-klink)
NarniaWeb Junkie
Posted by: @cobalt-jade

Back to the names, I've read the "prunes and prisms" theory about the Queen's name as well, it's probably the most likely origin because the name itself is so bizarrely comic, as are Miss Prizzle and Gwendolen, which sound like they also might exist in a Charles Dickens novel like the prunes and prisms line. I have yet to read an official biography of Lewis, so I don't know if he was making fun of Dickens, or inserting a few Easter Eggs for him as a fan. Certainly the town Aslan, Bacchus, and his followers invade and destroy has a Dickens-like feel to it.

If you're interested, I actually am a Dickens fan (I've been following this reading group for all of Dickens's works All the (Dickensian) Year Round – ✍ "Brighten it, brighten it, brighten it!" ✍ (wreninkpaper.com); it's pretty cool) and I can tell you there aren't any characters with the surname, Prizzle, but there might be a character named Gwendolyn...because it's actually a real name! Don't ask me how there's a real name that just happens to blend in so well with Miraz, Caspian, Glozelle and Sopespian (unlike Tom or Nancy) but there is. (Incidentally, I would describe the scene in Beruna as being more like Roald Dahl than Charles Dickens but, hey, that's a fairly subjective statement to make.)

 

EDIT: Oh, Courtenay already mentioned that about Gwendolyn. Sorry I missed that.

This post was modified 2 years ago 4 times by Col Klink

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Posted : August 26, 2022 2:59 pm
Cobalt Jade
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NarniaWeb Nut

My edition of PC is London: Geoffrey Bles,1964 [fifth printing]

There, it's Miss Frizzle, and Gwendolen. But in the American edition I read as a kid, I think it's Prizzle. Anyway, both names bring Martin Chuzzlewit to mind for me.

IMO Gwendolen does not fit in at all with Prunaprismia, which is the only other human Narnian woman's name in the book. Gwendolen is of Welsh origin. Prunaprismia is something Lewis made up, for comic effect. The mens' names, Miraz, Glozelle, Sopespian, Caspian, while also made-up, fit together linguistically. And actually, with that z sound, so does Frizzle/Prizzle, though, if this was all a real country, it might have been originally been spelled Frizelle or Prizelle and then changed spelling through the centuries as many surnames do.

What Roald Dahl story are thinking of? Was it "Night time of the Gods?"

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Topic starter Posted : August 27, 2022 2:10 pm
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