Jadis, The White Witch

Portrayed By

• Emma Mackey
• Tilda Swinton
• Barbara Kellerman
• Sheila Hancock
• Beth Porter

Related Music

• Turkish Delight – David Crowder Band
• The White Witch – Harry Gregson-Williams
• The Stone Table – Harry Gregson-Williams
• Dear Mr. Tumnus – Jason Wade
• Wardrobe to Witch – Michael J. Lewis

Book portrayal

Jadis is one of Lewis’s great villains, terrible both in splendor and in coldness. The Magician’s Nephew shows her first as the last queen of Charn, a world already ruined by her hunger for power. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe then shows what that hunger looks like once it takes hold of Narnia: fear, false enchantment, and a winter that will not break.

She is more than a stock wicked queen. Jadis is proud, intelligent, seductive when it suits her, and terrifyingly certain that power is its own justification. Lewis makes her evil feel ancient and glamorous before he makes it ugly.

Adaptation portrayals

Screen versions usually lean into Jadis’s regal glamour and icy menace. The core is the same across versions, though some adaptations make her more overtly seductive or politically calculating than the books need to.