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Essay on Turkish Language and Themes in The Chronicles of Narnia

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dubsartur:
https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/finding-turkey-in-narnia/

It should maybe have talked about the orient-sterotypes in The Horse and His Boy.

Jubal:
I had a read, it's an interesting piece though analytically I guess it would be more interesting to me if it pushed in one direction (did Lewis and/or other Inklings actually intend their Anatolianisms) or the other (why does the author personally read the Anatolian into the Narnian and what could that spark, create, or tell us). As it is, it sort of raises possibilities without following them up fully.

I did once start on a piece of writing that would incidentally have done something very similar - looking at parallels between Tolkien and Caucasian/Iranian mythos - and I might go back to it sometime. But I'm not wholly sure what the singular comparison would tell us in the absence of any evidence that Tolkien was directly using those elements, so it might be more interesting to use knowledge of those parallels creatively rather than seeking the roots of the relevant texts in them.

Also, yes, I agree it's a bit odd to read through something like this with so little focus on the sharp negativity with which Lewis portrays his walking orientalisms.

dubsartur:
The Calormen are Decadent Ottomans out of central casting, on the other hand I remember hints that the Telmarines came from somewhere vaguely Caucasian-Iranian.  And the early artist gave them heater shields with Romanesque eagle emblems.

I wonder if the answer is that Lewis' exotic east was vaguely Ottoman and Iranian, so both positive elements (Aslan) and negative elements (Calormene) have some Balkan, Ottoman, or Iranian flavour?

Jubal:
Possibly! I can't help feeling that there must be some scholarship on that point and what evidence we have for the influences, but it's an area I've only hung round the edges of academically (I know or have overlapped with some people who do Tolkien studies more seriously, and I'm sure some of them work on Lewis too, but I wouldn't immediately know who to ask on that specific question.)

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