Interview with Michael Ward, Part 2

June 11, 2008 Posted by Roger Overton

Let's look especially at Prince Caspian, since at least the movie is
fresh in many people's minds right now. You claim that in Prince Caspian
Lewis chose to use imagery from the planet Mars. Can you briefly highlight some
of the reasons why you believe Prince Caspian is the Martial book of the
series?

Here are seven brief reasons. There are many more, and I
go into these in detail in 'Planet Narnia':

1) Mars is the god
of war and Prince Caspian is
a war story. The four Pevensie children find that they have arrived in Narnia
‘in the middle of a war’. The war in question is ‘the Great War of
Deliverance’, as it is referred to in a later Chronicle, or simply the ‘Civil
War’ in Lewis’s ‘Outline of Narnian History’. It is ‘a real war to drive Miraz
out of Narnia’ and restore the kingdom to Caspian. At the start of the story he
is a mere boy, hardly aware of the Martial spirit which is already abroad. When
Glenstorm tells Caspian: ‘I and my sons are ready for war. When is the battle
to be joined?’, Caspian replies that he had ‘not been thinking of a war’.
Glenstorm asks why it is, then, that he goes ‘clad in mail and girt with
sword’; he informs him that the omens are good: the planets foretell success.
Nerved for the conflict, Caspian thinks it ‘quite possible that they might win
a war and quite certain that they must wage one’, so he convenes a ‘Council of
War’. The Council authorizes action and Caspian leads the skirmishing forces as
they engage the usurper’s army. Once the Pevensies arrive, Peter challenges
Miraz to ‘monomachy’. Miraz is killed, not by Peter as it turns out, but by one
of his own side, after which ‘full battle’ is joined.

2) Mars makes you ‘martial’, and the very word ‘martial’ appears
twice in “Prince Caspian”, the only one of the seven Chronicles in which it
occurs at all. Reepicheep is described as a ‘martial mouse’ and Miraz frets
over his ‘martial policy’.

3) In his study of
sixteenth-century literature, Lewis quotes Sir John Bourchier: ‘I know by the
course of the planettes that there is a Knyght comynge’. In Prince Caspian he dramatises that
sentence. Glenstorm tells Caspian, ‘The time is ripe. I watch the skies . . .
Tarva and Alambil have met in the halls of high heaven’. Tarva, the Lord of
Victory, ‘salutes’ Alambil, the Lady of Peace, in a conjunction witnessed by
Caspian and his tutor, Dr. Cornelius, who declares: ‘Their meeting is fortunate
and means some great good for the sad realm of Narnia’. The conjunction tells
us that there is, indeed, ‘a knight coming’, – namely Peter, who will fight the
tyrant Miraz and right the wrongs under which Narnia suffers

4) Knightliness is one of the key, recurring images throughout
the story: we hear of ‘knights-errant’; in the ruins of Cair Paravel we see
‘rich suits of armour, like knights guarding the treasures’; Peter is ‘Knight
of the Most Noble Order of the Lion’; Edmund is ‘Knight of the Noble Order of
the Table’, a ‘very dangerous knight’; Caspian is knighted and then, in turn,
knights Trufflehunter, Trumpkin and Reepicheep; even the chess piece discovered
at the start of the story is a ‘chess-knight’. This War of Deliverance is a
good, medieval, knightly conflict, formalised by the art of heraldry and the
rules of chivalry; hence the shining armour, the banners, the ornamented
shields, the elevated language of Peter’s challenge.

Peter is the model knight, able to hew the treacherous and
murderous Sopespian in pieces (slashing his legs from under him and walloping
off his head with the backswing of the same stroke), but gentle enough to kiss
the furry head of the badger. He has physical courage (risking his body in the
single combat) but also pays attention to forgotten and seemingly unimportant
traditions (the Bears’ hereditary right to be Marshals). He is sensitive to his
army’s morale (cheering up Wimbleweather by appointing him to the parley);
adroit in decision-making (his handling of the bumptious Reepicheep is
diplomatic); and self-effacing towards Caspian (‘I haven’t come to take your
place, you know, but to put you into it’). He demonstrates the summit of
knightliness in refusing to attack Miraz when he is down; this to the
frustration of Edmund: ‘Oh, bother, bother, bother. Need he be as gentlemanly
as all that? I suppose he must. Comes of being a Knight and a High King’. This
is that knightly behaviour, which Lewis wrote about elsewhere, ‘in which
morality up to the highest self-sacrifice and manners down to the smallest
gracefulness in etiquette were inextricably blended by the medieval ideal’. For
more about this tradition of knighthood, take a look at Lewis’s essay, “The
Necessity of Chivalry”.

5) The Martial
temperament is one of ‘sturdy hardiness’, according to Lewis’s book, The Discarded Image, and the Martial
visage is ‘hard and happy’, according to his poem, ‘The Planets’. This ‘hard
virtue of Mars’ (to quote his poem, ‘The Adam at Night’) appears frequently
throughout Prince Caspian:
Peter looks ‘hard’ at Lucy; the soldiers escorting Trumpkin have faces that are
‘bearded and hard’; we meet three badgers called the ‘Hardbiters’; when the
children are lost in the woods they find that retracing their steps was ‘hard
work, but oddly enough everyone felt more cheerful’; Aslan tells Lucy ‘it is
hard for you [to wake the others] . . . it has been hard for us all’; Peter’s
army at the end of the battle are found ‘breathing hard . . . with stern and
glad faces’. More significantly, certain characters visibly become Martial as
the story progresses: Caspian begins ‘to harden’ as he sleeps ‘under the
stars’; the children, ‘jingling in their mail’, begin to look and feel more
like Narnians and less like schoolchildren; the ‘hard’ ground and ‘the air of
Narnia’ work on Edmund so that ‘all his old battles came back to him’; he and
Peter have become ‘more like men than boys’ by the time they march to Aslan’s
How. The iron has entered their soul, as is to be expected, for these
characters are responsive to the Martial ‘influnce’, to that same ‘magic in the
air’ that has saved Susan’s bowstring from perishing.

6) In addition to
being the god of war (Mars Gradivus), Mars was a god of trees and forests. He
was known in this capacity as ‘Mars Silvanus’. This explains why trees have
such an important part to play in Prince
Caspian. Lewis puts ‘Silvans’ into his cast of characters in this
story; they never again appear in any other Narnia Chronicle. Caspian and Dr.
Cornelius cannot clearly see the conjunction of Tarva and Alambil because of
the interposition of a tree; Cornelius repeatedly mentions waking the trees;
Caspian is brought to Trufflehunter’s cave by the intervention of a falling
tree; Trufflehunter laments that they cannot ‘wake the spirits of these trees’
for ‘once the Trees moved in anger, our enemies would go mad with fright’;
Aslan’s How now stands in the middle of ‘the Great Woods’ and there Caspian’s
army must flee; Lucy tries to wake the trees in Chapter 9, but fails; in
Chapter 10 the children’s progress is hampered by the fir wood, but it provides
them with cover when they have to run from the arrows of Miraz’s sentries;
later in Chapter 10 Lucy, at night-time, finds the trees awake in the presence
of Aslan; in Chapter 11 the trees stir at the sound of his roar and then join
in the riotous procession of Bacchus and Silenus.

7) The month of
March, when the trees come back to life after winter, is called March because
it is named after Mars in his capacity as Mars Silvanus. It is the only month
of the year that is named after one of the planets. Interestingly, the only
Narnian month ever named in the Chronicles is ‘Greenroof’, during which all the
events of Prince Caspian take
place. In ancient Rome,
the festival of Mars (the Feriae Marti) began on the first day of March and
Bacchanalian festivities followed on the sixteenth and seventeenth, just after
the Ides of March (the fifteenth) on which, famously, Julius Caesar was
assassinated by being stabbed by his own disloyal Romans. Given the Bacchanalian
revelry recorded in this story (in chapters 11 and 14), and given the fact that
Miraz is betrayed and stabbed in the back by one of his own men, the
connections with Mars grow ever more evident. There are many more reasons
why Prince Caspian is
a Martial story, and I explain some of these things in my book, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in
the Imagination of C.S. Lewis