The Silver Chair
LC Class PZ8.L48 Si[3] | | |
Preceded by | The Voyage of the Dawn Treader | |
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Followed by | The Horse and His Boy | |
Text | The Silver Chair online |
The Silver Chair is a children's
The novel is set primarily in the world of Narnia, decades after The Voyage of the Dawn Treader there but less than a year later in England.[a] King Caspian X is now an old man, but his son and only heir, Prince Rilian, is missing. Aslan the lion sends two children from England to Narnia on a mission to resolve the mystery: Eustace Scrubb, from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and his classmate, Jill Pole. In England, Eustace and Jill are students at a horrible boarding school, Experiment House.
The Silver Chair is dedicated to Nicholas Hardie, the son of
The Silver Chair was adapted and filmed as a BBC television series of six episodes in 1990.
Plot summary
They encounter a cliff, where Jill shows off by approaching the edge, and Eustace, trying to pull her back, falls over the edge. Aslan appears and saves Eustace by blowing him on a magical wind stream to Narnia. He charges Jill with helping Eustace find
Caspian's Lord Regent
Jill and Eustace are flown to the marshes on the northern edge of Narnia where they meet their guide,
From the castle the three see that in the snowstorm they had blundered through the ruins of a giant city in the valley below, thereby missing Aslan's second Sign. They also see the words "Under Me" engraved on the road, which is the third Sign. Discovering from a cookbook in the kitchen that they are the main course for the Autumn Feast, they make a narrow escape from Harfang. Following the Sign, they take shelter in a cave under the ruined city, where they fall down a long dark slope into Underland.
They are found by an army of underground-dwelling earthmen, who take them aboard a boat across the subterranean Sunless Sea to the city ruled by the Lady of the Green Kirtle. She herself is away, but her protégé, a young man, greets the travellers pleasantly. He explains that he suffers from nightly psychotic episodes, and during these episodes he must, by the Lady's orders, be bound to a silver chair; for if he is released, he will turn into a deadly green
When the young man is tied to his chair, his "ravings" seem instead to indicate desperation to escape an enchanted captivity. After several threats, the youth finally begs the three to release him in the name of Aslan. Recognizing this as the fourth Sign, they hesitantly do so, believing that he could indeed be Prince Rilian. The young man immediately destroys the silver chair. Free from enchantment, he thanks them and declares that he is indeed the vanished Prince Rilian, kept underground by the Lady of the Green Kirtle as part of her plot to conquer Narnia.
The Green Lady returns and tries to bewitch them all into forgetting who they are, but the barefoot Puddleglum stamps out the enchantress's magical fire and breaks her spell. The enraged Lady transforms herself into a green serpent, and Rilian kills her with the help of Eustace and Puddleglum,[5] realizing that the Green Lady was herself the serpent who killed his mother. Rilian leads the travellers to escape from Underland. The gnomes, who had also been magically enslaved by the Lady, are now freed by her death and joyfully return to their home even deeper in the earth: a land called Bism. One of them shows Rilian's party a route to the surface, and Rilian returns to Cair Paravel as King Caspian is returning home. Caspian is reunited with his long-lost son but dies just afterwards. Rilian is then declared King of Narnia amid the weeping crowd.
Aslan appears and congratulates Eustace and Jill on achieving their goal, then returns them to the stream in his country where Jill first met him. The body of King Caspian appears in the stream, and Aslan instructs Eustace to drive a thorn into the lion's paw. Eustace obeys, and Aslan's blood flows over the dead King, who is revived and returned to youth. Aslan promises Eustace and Jill that, while they have to return to their own world for a while, they will one day return to Aslan's Country to stay. He then allows Caspian to accompany Eustace and Jill back to their own world for a brief time, where they drive off the bullies before Caspian returns to Aslan's Country. Experiment House becomes a well-managed school, and Eustace and Jill remain good friends.
Back in Narnia, Rilian buries his father and mourns him. The kingdom goes on to have many happy years, but Puddleglum "often pointed out that bright mornings brought on wet afternoons and that you couldn't expect good times to last."
Main characters
- Jill Pole – A pupil at Experiment House who is found by Eustace Scrubb, crying, after she is bullied by a gang of children.
- Eustace Scrubb – Appeared in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and is a cousin of the four Pevensie siblings from the earlier stories. Became a much nicer person after his brief time as an enchanted dragon in the previous story.
- Puddleglum – A pessimistic Marsh-wiggle who helps Jill and Eustace on their quest. He guides them and keeps them on track. He represents common sense and the voice of reason.
- The Lady of the Green Kirtle – The ruler of Underland, who plans to conquer Narnia with its rightful heir under her spell at her side.
- Prince Rilian– Heir to the Narnian throne, who was captured by the Lady of the Green Kirtle and enslaved in her Underworld.
- Aslan – The Lion who created Narnia; the only character to appear in every book.
- King Caspian– Elderly King of Narnia who appeared in Prince Caspian as a boy and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a young man; in The Silver Chair he is sad because his only son was taken from him 10 years earlier just after the death of his wife from a serpent attack.
- Parliament of Owls, where the history of Rilian is explained, and then by helping to carry them to meet Puddleglum. His speech often rhymes with the onomatopoeic call of owls, "to-whoo!"[6][7] ("There's something magic about you two. I saw you arrive: you flew."[8]).
Commentary
In Chapter IV of the book, an owl speculates that the Lady of the Green Kirtle – the enchantress of the Underworld – may be "one of the same crew" as the
The manner of Rilian's confinement to a chair recalls the imprisonment of Theseus and Pirithous in the Underworld when discovered there by Heracles on his twelfth and final labour, the abduction of Cerberus.
Film, television, or theatrical adaptations
The BBC produced a TV series, which aired in late 1990. It was the fourth and last of the Narnia books that the BBC adapted for television.
On 1 October 2013, The C.S. Lewis Company announced that it had entered into an agreement with The Mark Gordon Company to jointly develop and produce
Notes
- ^ King Caspian X of Narnia is now an old man, but both stories occur in 1942. A manuscript by Lewis, the "Outline of Narnian History", dates major events in the Narnia world and simultaneous events in England. Since his death, it has been published in books about Narnia and it is generally considered valid.
References
- ^ a b c
"Bibliography: The Silver Chair". ISFDB. Retrieved 8 December 2012.
- ^ "Scholastic Catalog – Book Information". Src.scholastic.com. Retrieved 23 June 2014.[permanent dead link]
- ^ a b c
"The silver chair" (first edition). Library of Congress Catalog Record.
"The silver chair" (first US edition). LCC record. Retrieved 2012-12-08. - ^ Nicholls, Peter (2016). "Lewis, C S". The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (3rd ed.). New York: St Martin's Griffin.
- ^ This scene echoes Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I, Canto I, stanzas 17–24.
- ^ "Tu-whit tu-whoo". Dictionary.com. 2012. Retrieved 9 April 2016.
noun. 1. (imitation of the cry of an owl).
- Audubon Societies / D. Appleton & Companies. p. 355.
To-whit! To-whoo!
- ^ Lewis, C. S. (1953). "A Parliament of Owls". The Silver Chair. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. p. 31.
- ^ "Fourth 'Chronicles of Narnia' Movie in Works From Mark Gordon Co". Deadline Hollywood. 1 October 2013. Retrieved 6 October 2014.
- The Wrap. 5 December 2013.
- ^ "How the Narnia Franchise Plans to Reboot with the Silver Chair". Cinemablend.com. 13 January 2016.
- ^ Fleming, Mike Jr. (9 August 2016). "TriStar, Mark Gordon & eOne Revive 'The Chronicles of Narnia' With 'The Silver Chair'". Deadline.com.
- ^ Kroll, Justin (26 April 2017). "'Captain America' Director Joe Johnston Boards 'Narnia' Revival 'The Silver Chair'". Variety. Archived from the original on 18 September 2017. Retrieved 12 November 2017.
Sources
- Downing, David C. (2005). Into the Wardrobe: C. S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles. San Francisco: ISBN 978-0-7879-7890-7.
External links
- The Silver Chair at Faded Page (Canada)
- The Silver Chair in libraries (WorldCat catalog) ——immediately, the full-colour C. S. Lewis centenary edition
- The Silver Chair title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database