Q: Will the White Witch appear in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie? I know she’s not in the book, but she wasn’t in Prince Caspian either, and she made an appearance in that movie! – MAGPIE, Toronto, Canada
Perry Moore: She – and her evil – weave seamlessly into The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. She appears right where you think she would when you read the book – in a surprising way you could never guess that is at the same time true to the core of the book.
Who are these filmmakers to add something like this to the story?
Perry Moore: C.S. Lewis himself, flip-flopped on the origin of the White Witch. In the first book written [The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe], Jadis is said to be the descendant of Lilith (Adam’s first wife) and an ice giant (like a jotun, from Norse Mythology). Then in the prequel to that book, The Magician’s Nephew, which Tilda is dying for us to do next, C.S. Lewis shows that she came from another planet, Charn, in another dimension that you can only reach by going through the ‘world between world’ and the many pools there. Her appearance was originally totally different. Seven feet tall, long red hair, and she waged a war with her sister until she destroyed that world and froze it – neutron bomb, anyone? – by uttering the ‘˜Deplorable Word.’
“We took some creative liberties,” Moore admits, “but they’re hardly transgressions when you consider that Lewis just completely rewrote her origin six books later,” he says.
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