Calormenes and Arabians and Lewis, Oh My!

[robsia]

[Bill]

[Larry W.]

I always wondered why Lewis said so much more about Calormen than Archenland. Archenland seems to be very similar to Narnia in its customs and traditions-- perhaps it is like Germany or Switzerland (though I have never travelled in Europe I had always pictured it as like the "old world") . But aside from a few good people like King Lune, we don't know too much about its inhabitants. Also, it was emphasized that Calormen was much bigger in size and often more powerful than Narnia or Archenland. The desert in the south was quite large. At the end of The Last Battle the new Narnia was portrayed as a beautiful, verdant mountainous country. If there was a new Calormen there (it seem that in order to be consistent it should be there) did the desert disappear or shrink in size? Perhaps that landscape would be too harsh to be a part of heaven as Lewis pictured it, but evidently it was important in Emeth's heritage.

Larry W.

[Jallan]

Certainly Calormene is obviously based on the Ottoman empire and the eastern world of Arabian Nights -- a sort of parody of it.

But I can't see this as racism. There isn't a hint that Aravis or the people of Calormene as a whole are inferior as a "race" to the Archenlanders or the later Telmarine Narnians.

Accusing Lewis of cultural chauvanism would be more just, though again, Miraz and his predecessor's were not necessarily any better than the Calormene aristocracy.

A tradition of seeing the Crusades as glorious evensts, especially in romantic historical novels, combined with continual battles against Turks on the fringes of Europe, kept Turks in European and American public consciousness as barbaric, pagan enemies of civilized, Christian Europe and of the purportedly enlightened British empire and its allies.

With this background, the idea of a southern nation hostile to Narnia based on the traditional Saracen enemies of Europe probably arose quite naturally.

However, medieval writers quite slandered their Turkish/Arabic foes as polytheistic worshippers of demons who had numerous graven images, among them gods known as Mohammet, Kahu, Apollin, and Tervagant. Tash and his image may in part come from this tradition, that is, the Calormenes are in part the demon-worshipping Saracens invented by medieval European literary tradition.

In his Calormene culture Lewis presents most strongly exactly those features of Turkish/Arabic and non-Christian peoples that are most likely to run counter to British and American sensibilities.

As to Baal in particular, Ba'al is simply a neutral Hebrew and Phoenician word meaning 'lord, master', often used in a non-religious sense as well as being used of one or another god in particular. That Biblical translations render this word as a name when it refers to a god obscures this usage. There was never any single god named Baal, though the storm god Hadad seems to have been given that title more than any other.

Eagle-headed demons or attendants on gods appear in Babylonian and Assyrian scuptures, but, there was no named eagle-headed god. Of course the Egyptian god Horus had the head of a falcon. In Norse mythologies gods sometimes take on the form of a falcon, but giants instead appear in eagle form, which may have some bearing on Tash's eagle attributes. Lewis probably did not want to make Tash's iconagraphy identical to that of any deity of our world.

It is somewhat confusing that Lewis's Tash is an actual devil of a sort, yet the Calormene Emeth (and surely not him alone) attribute high moral qualities to Tash. This raises the idea of divergent sects and beliefs within the Tash religion which the true Tash, within the Narnian world, was unable to combat.