Peepiceek
Well-known member
They are in fact mentioned in VDT, in reference to the Lone Islands (and Eustace thinks he might take the dragon's treasure and go and live there). I don't deny that the Calormenes could have been playing a role in Narnia between LWW and PC, but at the moment I'm not seeing a coherent storyline that has them doing so. But, hey, this thread is not only for my ideas - if you can see a storyline that has them playing a significant part, please post itCopperfox said:As far as I know, the Calormenes were not featured in PC, VDT or TSC because he hadn't thought of them yet. But since he finally did get around to imagining them, it is possible, in fact necessary, to think about what they might have been doing just off stage.
Meanwhile, my own ideas are flowing in a different direction. One of the reasons I took so long to get round to starting this thread was because I thought there was too little material to work from to build an interesting discussion. However, the more I think about it, there more I realise there is quite a lot of relevant material containing clues to work from.
Today, I started to think about the lords that Miraz had killed, imprisoned or exiled because they might have taken Caspian's part. The only one we really come across in any kind of detail is Bern. He seems to be a very fair-minded man. He is at least vehemently opposed to the slave trade, and does not appear to be raising any objections to Caspian's reconciliation between the Telmarines and the Old Narnians. (In fairness, we cannot draw too much of an argument from silence, since the only Old Narnian in Caspian's company was Reepicheep, and there is no record of the interaction between Bern and Reepicheep. Bern may not have been fully aware of all the changes Caspian had made in Narnia. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that he had some awareness, and that he was not wholly opposed to those changes.)
Then, we also have Doctor Cornelius saying that many Telmarines privately wish for a return to the old days, as well as the fact that Caspian's mother was good to him.
The next clue (again, something of an argument from silence, but a reasonable assumption) is that Miraz seems to have been able to usurp the throne without instigating a civil war or serious conflict. Doctor Cornelius seems to suggest that the fact that Miraz murdered Caspian IX was something of an open secret. If so, if Caspian IX's supporters had any kind of power, they would have been able to prevent Miraz's accession, or at the very least to raise a violent rebellion against it.
Consequently, the following sequence of events occurred to me. Possibly, Caspian IX was inclining towards a rather different policy from that of his father, perhaps leaning in the direction of seeking to restore something of old Narnia and reconcile the Telmarines with it. Caspian IX had a circle of friends rather different to that of his father, and showed signs that he was likely to promote those lords to positions of power, edging out those who had been dominant under Caspian VIII. Miraz, both because of an opposition to his brother's plans for Narnia and through a personal ambition to take the throne himself, sided with his father's allies, persuading them that he was a better king than his brother, and thereby ensuring that his brother was not long on the throne but was quickly ousted. The lords who supported Caspian IX were not yet strong enough to resist this move, and were taken by surprise by Miraz's boldness.
I'm also wondering about the issue of timescale. In VDT we learn that the seven lords' ship (well, there were only four lords by that time) had put into Coriakin's island seven years before Caspian arrived. Assuming that they sailed at the same rate as Caspian, that would suggest that they had left Narnia only four years before Caspian's accession to the throne. Of course, they may not have sailed at the same speed as Caspian did, having no particular destination or mission, and thereby lingered longer in some of the intervening places, or sailed around the ocean more than Caspian did. However, if that were the case, it is surprising that all seven lords lay on the same path that Caspian took in the Dawn Treader. One would have expected them to be more scattered.
One other point that may or may not have any relevance to anything, but Doctor Cornelius says that the castle Caspian grows up in was built by his great-great-grandfather, presumably Caspian VI, assuming an unbroken line of Caspians. (That said, I'm increasingly skeptical of an unbroken line of Caspians. Looking at the history of English kings, I don't think we have ever gone more than three generations of father-to-son succession without some kind of disruption to the line. I want to do a bit more research on other ruling dynasties to see whether the pattern is similar there, and then will report back here with my conclusions.) Anyway, I wonder where the Telmarine kings ruled from before that, and why the new castle was built.
A final question for the moment. I am thinking a lot about Trufflehunter's comment about Narnia never being right except when a son of Adam was king. To me, this seems to imply that there have been a number of periods when there were human kings, as well as a number of periods where there were not. We know that there was a significant period following TMN when there were human kings, as well as a time under Jadis where there was not. (In my reconstruction of Jadis's rise to power, I suggested that the line of human kings had died out a couple of centuries before Jadis took power, though that is speculation, of course.) What do we think Trufflehunter's comment means for the time between the Pevensies leaving and the Telmarine invasion? Does it imply that there were times of human rule? Does it imply there were times without human rule? Does it imply anything about how many of each there were during that time?
Peeps