Things you'd never noticed

Peepiceek said:
Also, in PC Reepicheep is described as being "well over a foot high", but in VDT as "about two feet high". Of course, there is no formal contradiction between those two, since both are approximate terms, but the latter definitely sounds taller than the former.
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A further note on this is that in TSC the mice (not Reepicheep of course, but the mice in general) are described as being over two feet high.

I also just noticed this: In Peter's letter to Miraz in PC, he gives the date as being in the month of Greenroof, suggesting that Narnia uses different months from our world, but there's a line in VDT that says, "You get some ugly weather rolling up from the east in January and February. And by your leave, Sir, if I was in command of this ship I'd say to winter here and begin the voyage home in March." And in TSC, the Queen was killed by the serpent "on a May morning".

Peeps
 
Peepiceek said:
A further note on this is that in TSC the mice (not Reepicheep of course, but the mice in general) are described as being over two feet high.

I also just noticed this: In Peter's letter to Miraz in PC, he gives the date as being in the month of Greenroof, suggesting that Narnia uses different months from our world, but there's a line in VDT that says, "You get some ugly weather rolling up from the east in January and February. And by your leave, Sir, if I was in command of this ship I'd say to winter here and begin the voyage home in March." And in TSC, the Queen was killed by the serpent "on a May morning".

Peeps
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Peeps, I am wondering if the Telmarines used "earth time" as opposed to Narnian time because they lived in an unpeopled land before they took over Narnia and tried to do away with any vestiges of Old Narnia when they conquered. Drinian would have grown up under Telmarine rule so he would have learned the months from the Telmarines. Whereas, Peter was using Narnian time as High King of Narnia and an Old Narnian.
 
~Lava~ said:
Peeps, I am wondering if the Telmarines used "earth time" as opposed to Narnian time because they lived in an unpeopled land before they took over Narnia and tried to do away with any vestiges of Old Narnia when they conquered. Drinian would have grown up under Telmarine rule so he would have learned the months from the Telmarines. Whereas, Peter was using Narnian time as High King of Narnia and an Old Narnian.
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Could be, although I would have thought that Caspian would restore the Narnian months if so.
 
Well, they did have a Christmas in the Wintertime before Jadis' rise (obviously an imported holiday from Frank and his wife as there was never a comparable Aslan being born in Narnia story). It would be interesting when the Narnian months were first named and even more, what the months were called in Calormen.

MrBob
 
Names of the months are important propaganda tools, everything from celebrating the "good old days" when a country was great to the "good old boys" who ruled it well. Romans knew this all too well when they went from the 10 month calendar to the 12 month lunar calendar. Two new months named after emperors, and both months 31 day months. They each took a day from February which was despised because it was cold, dark, and a time of religious-motivated self-denial and self-examination which Romans intensely disliked. Even the days of the week have propaganda value in that my forebadgers used names from the old religion...moon-day, tew's-day, wodens-day, thor's-day, and sun-day. When the Romans came in, they made sure one of the Roman gods was mentioned which is why we have Saturn's-day before Sunday. Part of...if you can forgive me for calling it "denazification"...cleaning up Narnia and restoring its fundamental value was in changing something used every day. Namely, the calendar.
 
Don't forget the French Republican Calendar that was created after their revolution. The months were renamed based on the season's weather or seasonal terms. They even changed the days, creating 10 days per week, three weeks per month, replacing Sunday to decrease Catholic influence. Even the time was changed to decimal time with 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, and 100 seconds per minute.

MrBob
 
MrBob, the repeated use of tens was meant to both distance traditionalism and create a method of telling time and dates more easily tracked in base 10 than modulus 7. Don't forget the all important thing...like Mussolini with the Year of the New Order, they took the spotlight off the birth of Jesus as the hingepoint of history and moved it to their own revolution.
 
Peepiceek said:
A further note on this is that in TSC the mice (not Reepicheep of course, but the mice in general) are described as being over two feet high.

I also just noticed this: In Peter's letter to Miraz in PC, he gives the date as being in the month of Greenroof, suggesting that Narnia uses different months from our world, but there's a line in VDT that says, "You get some ugly weather rolling up from the east in January and February. And by your leave, Sir, if I was in command of this ship I'd say to winter here and begin the voyage home in March." And in TSC, the Queen was killed by the serpent "on a May morning".

Peeps
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Well, it could be that later human generations on the Narnian quasi-planet devised month-names which seemed suitable to the new environment, but they remembered that Adam's Earth had had other month-names. In this case, they could have taken to using the older names as figures of speech.
 
I guess from re-reading The Last Battle, I've never noticed how dark and twisted it is, in comparison to the six other books. There's a lot of heavy themes on last days, manipulation, oppression, life and death.
 
EveningStar, thank you for the extra information, but I just didn't feel like getting too far into the discussion of the French calendar in this thread and intended to continue with discussions of Narnia months, but got distracted.

I agree with Copper about how the Narnian months were named, however, I wonder if they were done specifically by the human/naiad, dryad generations or also done by the other talking animals. How would the English months even apply to Narnia unless they had the same number of days in the year.?
 
Great question. Who says if the moon cooperates you can't have twelve 28-day months? Or if the days were longer, maybe 28 hours long rather than 24...you couldn't have fewer days than our earth and yet still have the same amount of hours in a year? Makes my stripes hurt.
 
EveningStar said:
Even the days of the week have propaganda value in that my forebadgers used names from the old religion...moon-day, tew's-day, wodens-day, thor's-day, and sun-day. When the Romans came in, they made sure one of the Roman gods was mentioned which is why we have Saturn's-day before Sunday.
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The seven days corresponding to seven gods (gods of planets) has an interesting history, which I discovered as I started to learn some Asian languages and found that they have the same connection between weekdays and planets that we have in European languages (although the connection with gods is lost). (This connection gets overlooked in English, because we get our day names from the Norsemen and our planet names from the Romans, but compare the French weekday names with planet names, for example.) So I did a bit of digging and discovered that this goes back certainly to the Babylonians, and probably to the Sumerians (and, who knows, maybe they got it from someone else who lived in that area...). From Babylon, the seven day week and its connections with planets went west to Greece, Rome and Northern Europe, and separately east to India, China and the Far East. So, when God made the sun, moon and stars for signs and seasons in Genesis 1, I think he did this for the weekdays too - he made seven weekdays, and seven planets to govern them. ('Planet' means a 'wandering star', because they move with relation to the fixed stars. And hence, the Sun and Moon are planets, while Uranus and Neptune, which are not visible to the naked eye, were not counted.) As to the Romans adding Saturday to the Norse calendar, as I understand it the Norse did not have a god equating to Saturn, and so they borrowed the Roman god to name that day (and maybe that planet). In China, the five visible planets were connected not with gods but with the five elements (as specified in Chinese philosophy): fire, water, wood, metal and earth. And the day names in pre-modern China, as also in modern Korean and Japanese, maintain the connection between the planets and the days (Sunday = Sun, Monday = Moon, Tuesday = Mars, Wednesday = Mercury, Thursday = Jupiter, Friday = Venus, Saturday = Saturn). So the history of the seven day week, rather than being pagan propaganda, is an interesting testimony to God's original design. Of course, pagan societies took the 'signs' and turned them into 'gods' or 'elements'; but they were still using a system created by God and given to Adam :)
 
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