Jadis in London.

C

CORIN THUNDERFIST II

Active member
I hope this is in the right place. If not, feel free to put it where it belongs.
I was wondering about Jadis in London, as occurred in The Magician's Nephew. What do you think might have happened, if either Digory and Polly had failed in their attempts to remove her from our world, or they had decided not to get involved? Would she have really been a serious threat, bearing in mind that a) her magic didn't seem to work and b) she had not eaten the magic apple which made her immortal? True, she possessed quite exceptional physical strength, but would that have been sufficient to prevent her eventual arrest and imprisonment? Any thoughts on this?
 
No I think she would eventually have been brought down and imprisoned as an insane person, don't you? She did not seem to have the personality to make people love or follow her by any persuasion other than force or magic, so without either of those available to her, I think she would have been defeated. She probably would have killed a bunch of people in the process, so it was as well Polly and Digs tried to take her away, but I don't think she could have destroyed earth the way she destroyed Charn.
 
I agree with Inkspot. Though if she had killed a few people, it's likely the police may have had to resort to shooting her.

A more interesting question, I think, is what would Narnia have been like without the White Witch? ;)
 
I agree with you and InkSpot. However, would the authorities have actually shot a woman? And, even worse, what if Jadis had found the means to activate her magic, possibly by associating with Satanists and other experts in the occult?

Narnia without Jadis? Well, there would have been no Great Winter, no need for the Pevensies to have come to fulfill a prophecy, as there would have been no prophecy. Maybe, King Frank's line might have continued unbroken, with the effect that when the Telmarines arrived they would have been driven back, as would the Calormenes if they had invaded. On the other hand, with no real threat to face, there is the danger that the Narnians might have become complacent, proud, wicked and forgotten Aslan, rather like Israel did after King Solomon.
 
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I don't think the Narnians would have become complacent, proud or lazy. There would have always been a very small human population and a rather decentralized government based on traditional land usage. That tends to defeat nationalism and fascism from the ground up since individuals identify more with their community than with national politics.

Before the Telmarines came it was practically a tribal community much like the Sioux or Apache with local chieftans (though they might have gone by the title of "Lord" or "Governor") that are loosely united by a common language and culture to a hereditary Great Chief...their King.

The system of feudal peerage you see in books like Prince Caspian was brought in by the invaders much as England was reorganized by the invading Normans into shires and subjected to a new legal system.

In my own stories (I realize this is neither supported nor denied by Lewis) different species like foxes and badgers that live in a community have clans, much as the Indian tribes had clans. The First Fox, the First Badger, the Chief Beaver and all other representatives dealt with internal matters of their species and held their own social events. They would come together at town councils as representatives. This is rather similar to a pow wow. These clans would make it easier to meet socially, help out neighbours in distress or even form groups of similar skills and abilities to fight in wars (such as the Bare Mountain Boys [Badgers] or the Black Diamonds [Otters]). Think here about Reepicheep who was the First Mouse and whose people always fought together in battle. Same principle.

Just a thought, mind you.
 
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I hadn't thought about, if Jadis had remained free on earth, whether she would have found a way to activate her magic; especially with Uncle Andrew around. He had found a way to make the rings that took you into and out of the world -- so it's possible he might have helped her find ways to start new on earth with magical powers. Then she certainly might have been able to do something like what she did to Charn. Interesting thought. Polly and Digory wanted to take her back where she came from, which was a good motivation, but they accidentally to her to Narnia ... where she wasn't able to become as powerful as she had become in her own world, but she did a lot of mischief. What would she have done in ours, where there was already some powerful evil?
 
Jadis got off to a bad start, but I think she would have soon understood that she could get more power by being nice, or at least not so overtly evil, at least at first. One thing Jadis was good at was understanding the deepest secrets of the worlds she lived in and utilizing them to her own advantage.

MrBob
 
MrBob said:
Jadis got off to a bad start, but I think she would have soon understood that she could get more power by being nice, or at least not so overtly evil, at least at first. One thing Jadis was good at was understanding the deepest secrets of the worlds she lived in and utilizing them to her own advantage.

MrBob
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For example, she might have went to Russia and joined the communist movement.
 
Or come to the USA and joined the capitalism movement!
:)

More likely Germany and the Nazi movement ...
 
inkspot said:
Good point! She would have had to wait around on earth for a while, but what if she had managed to hook up with Hitler in his developmental years? It could have been as bad as Charn ...
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I personally doubt it could have been as bad as Charn, because Charn was destroyed by the use of a "deplorable word." Our world has plenty of perfectly horrible words, but I don't know of any that actually could destroy the world simply by being uttered here.
However, I find it perfectly plausible that things could have become even worse than they did if Jadis had joined up with Hitler or Stalin.
 
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In the mid to late 19th century in England there was a powerful subcurrent of interest in the occult. (In fact, that's the time when the "ancient" religion of Wicca was invented by a couple of imaginative Englishmen.) Lewis clearly didn't disbelieve in magic working in the modern world (e.g. Uncle Andrew and the Rings), but clearly Jadis' particular style/brand/power of magic was impotent here. My guess is that if she'd been canny enough to lie low, she could have used her keen intelligence and undeniably charismatic personality to learn "the ropes" of how magic worked in this world and started to rebuid that power. That's what she did in the Narnian universe, after all.
 
PrinceOfTheWest said:
In the mid to late 19th century in England there was a powerful subcurrent of interest in the occult. (In fact, that's the time when the "ancient" religion of Wicca was invented by a couple of imaginative Englishmen.) Lewis clearly didn't disbelieve in magic working in the modern world (e.g. Uncle Andrew and the Rings), but clearly Jadis' particular style/brand/power of magic was impotent here. My guess is that if she'd been canny enough to lie low, she could have used her keen intelligence and undeniably charismatic personality to learn "the ropes" of how magic worked in this world and started to rebuid that power. That's what she did in the Narnian universe, after all.
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I agree. It's pretty obvious that there are indeed types of magic in our world, though not the same as in Charn. But like in Narnia? I'll leave that open to possibilty. :cool:
 
The dust in the box was from the wood between the worlds. That would indicate to me that the magic Andrew used was something shared in common...perhaps common ancestral...to the forces at work in the individual realms of Creation.

So perhaps the different magics are like dialects and Jadis was familiar enough with the grammar and only needed to find the specific vocabulary.

Before you ask, yes I'm speaking figuratively of magic's structure as if it were a language.

I've had enough experiences in wildly disparate computer languages that even if I can't speak them, I know what DO WHILE loops are and understand the significance of IF THEN ELSE. So frequently I can determine the purpose of code that's in a language I don't even speak.

The same must be true about the supernatural pathways and logic of magic.
 
"Dialects" would be one way to think about it. Another might be that the destructive magic used to bend things to individual wills might be tied to a particular person or family or race, and wouldn't work out of that context. Maybe Jadis would have had some sort of power over others from the Charn universe. (Excepting that there weren't any left. Thanks to her.)

One gets the impression throughout the Chronicles that the "magic" of Narnia was innate to the environment itself, while the "magic" of the types of Jadis and the Queen of Underland (and even Tash, for that matter) represented a twisting or perversion of that power, a bending it to a darkened will. Notice that outside the talking beasts and mythical creatures like centaurs and dryads, there isn't really anything specially "magical" about Narnia itself - and even they aren't "magical" in that context, but normal. Aslan at times has to use wondrous means, which you could call "magical", to achieve his ends (e.g. the breath that turned stone to flesh, the roar that awakened the Trees, the claws that undragoned Eustace, etc.), but in Narnia proper the magic just is. Lewis even points this out explicitly when describing the Great Snow Dance at the end of The Silver Chair, which he says was "as full of good magic as the Witch's thrumming had been full of bad magic".

There's an echo of this in The Lord of the Rings, when Galadriel takes Frodo and Sam to view her mirror. She admits to being mystified about their use of the term "magic", which they apply both to the workings of her and her people ("elf-magic") and to "the deceits of the Enemy". What the hobbits consider "magic" is simply the elves speaking to the woods and waters as they always have. The "deceits of the Enemy" is the sort of thing Jadis would get into. I imagine if she'd stayed around our world long enough, she would have figured out how to do it.

The interesting question would be whether she would bother. Looking around our world we can see that there are many ways to bend people to your will other than casting a spell on them. Would she have sought to become a media figure, or a politician? That might have worked as effectively as being a magician.
 
inkspot said:
Or come to the USA and joined the capitalism movement!
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Inkspot, you are not a dishonest person. But any honest person who thinks that even the VERY WORST excesses in a free enterprise system can equal the literally genocidal crimes of twentieth-century Communism, has never learned the things I've learned from numerous survivors of Communist oppression -- Russian, Chinese, Czech and Vietnamese.

Free enterprise, like the Christian faith, can suffer abuses within its ranks. But these are DEPARTURES FROM the original intent. By contrast, any totalitarian government has the intention by INHERENT, ORGANIC NATURE to be oppressive and cruel.

If Jadis had ever entered the business world as we think of it, this would NEVER have been more to her than a stepping stone to her own preferred kind of power. The young Iosif Stalin went into banking, sort of: that is, he ROBBED banks to finance Lenin. Jadis would have had exactly the same view of any business corporation: something to loot for her own use. No board of directors, no concern for customers, no thought of giving anything useful to the world.

 
EveningStar said:
The dust in the box was from the wood between the worlds. That would indicate to me that the magic Andrew used was something shared in common...perhaps common ancestral...to the forces at work in the individual realms of Creation.

So perhaps the different magics are like dialects and Jadis was familiar enough with the grammar and only needed to find the specific vocabulary.

Before you ask, yes I'm speaking figuratively of magic's structure as if it were a language.

I've had enough experiences in wildly disparate computer languages that even if I can't speak them, I know what DO WHILE loops are and understand the significance of IF THEN ELSE. So frequently I can determine the purpose of code that's in a language I don't even speak.

The same must be true about the supernatural pathways and logic of magic.
Click to expand...

PrinceOfTheWest said:
"Dialects" would be one way to think about it. Another might be that the destructive magic used to bend things to individual wills might be tied to a particular person or family or race, and wouldn't work out of that context. Maybe Jadis would have had some sort of power over others from the Charn universe. (Excepting that there weren't any left. Thanks to her.)

One gets the impression throughout the Chronicles that the "magic" of Narnia was innate to the environment itself, while the "magic" of the types of Jadis and the Queen of Underland (and even Tash, for that matter) represented a twisting or perversion of that power, a bending it to a darkened will. Notice that outside the talking beasts and mythical creatures like centaurs and dryads, there isn't really anything specially "magical" about Narnia itself - and even they aren't "magical" in that context, but normal. Aslan at times has to use wondrous means, which you could call "magical", to achieve his ends (e.g. the breath that turned stone to flesh, the roar that awakened the Trees, the claws that undragoned Eustace, etc.), but in Narnia proper the magic just is. Lewis even points this out explicitly when describing the Great Snow Dance at the end of The Silver Chair, which he says was "as full of good magic as the Witch's thrumming had been full of bad magic".

There's an echo of this in The Lord of the Rings, when Galadriel takes Frodo and Sam to view her mirror. She admits to being mystified about their use of the term "magic", which they apply both to the workings of her and her people ("elf-magic") and to "the deceits of the Enemy". What the hobbits consider "magic" is simply the elves speaking to the woods and waters as they always have. The "deceits of the Enemy" is the sort of thing Jadis would get into. I imagine if she'd stayed around our world long enough, she would have figured out how to do it.

The interesting question would be whether she would bother. Looking around our world we can see that there are many ways to bend people to your will other than casting a spell on them. Would she have sought to become a media figure, or a politician? That might have worked as effectively as being a magician.
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PrinceOfTheWest, EveningStar, you both make some very good points, which I'm finding to be quite fascinating to think about. Now, we are talking about magic in the sense of the Chronicles of Narnia, but I'm curious, would either of you consider it possible for there to be similar "magic" in the real world we live in besides God's miraculous power and the satanic powers of the ocult? Personally, I look at it as being possible, but not provable at this time.

Copperfox said:
Inkspot, you are not a dishonest person. But any honest person who thinks that even the VERY WORST excesses in a free enterprise system can equal the literally genocidal crimes of twentieth-century Communism, has never learned the things I've learned from numerous survivors of Communist oppression -- Russian, Chinese, Czech and Vietnamese.

Free enterprise, like the Christian faith, can suffer abuses within its ranks. But these are DEPARTURES FROM the original intent. By contrast, any totalitarian government has the intention by INHERENT, ORGANIC NATURE to be oppressive and cruel.

If Jadis had ever entered the business world as we think of it, this would NEVER have been more to her than a stepping stone to her own preferred kind of power. The young Iosif Stalin went into banking, sort of: that is, he ROBBED banks to finance Lenin. Jadis would have had exactly the same view of any business corporation: something to loot for her own use. No board of directors, no concern for customers, no thought of giving anything useful to the world.

Click to expand...

Thank you, Copperfox, I agree!
 
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