Thank you for your lovely post,
AslanistheBest.
PhelanVelvel wrote: It could just be what Lewis fancied, I suppose. I know that in HHB it's a way to show that Shasta is an outsider and stuff, but the way it was done, the way Anradin calls the Narnians "beautiful but accursed" (as if their particular features, whiteness and blondness, make them beautiful and Anradin is jealous), just stuck out to me as somewhat prejudiced. Why didn't he just call them accursed, or even insult their white skin?
Anradin was the guy who dyed his beard crimson, a particularly unsuitable shade of red for human use. I could get away with a blue-rinse, being of that age group, but if I went down the road with hair coloured green or purple I'd look a bit unusual, too. I doubt that Anradin would comment about white skin unless the white skin was really out of the ordinary, as with the White Witch. On the other hand, C.S.Lewis does comment about the Duke of Galma's daughter having freckles and a squint and also about Caspian's Aunt Prunaprismia who had ginger hair. Not to mention a ginger cat that misbehaves in
Last Battle.
Varnafinde wrote:The emphasizing of the Narnians' fair hair in Calormen I guess is done to point out their Northernness as much as anything else. I'm Norwegian, and we're supposed to be blonde Vikings, aren't we?* The Northern "barbarians", as the Calormenes often named the Narnians, would be seen a bit similar
Yes you are absolutely right. And those Vikings were considered barbarians when post Roman Britain became "England", back before 1066, Hastings and the battle of Stamford Bridge, weren't they?
But I'd better get back to the books.
What made the Narnians beautiful, in my opinion, was living naturally and without too much worry. That is also why the Calormenes regarded them as 'accursed', since, like many first peoples, they did not have the 'advantages' of a highly bureaucratic, militaristic, competitive and hierarchical sort of society like Calormen.
Oddly enough, in 1788 and subsequently, Watkin Tench, a British officer who explored the Sydney area, was wont to say similar things in his diary about the local Dharuk people. For instance, he said he saw no evidence that they had laws or religious beliefs, and yet Aboriginal groups like the Dharuks most definitely did have laws and religious beliefs. Instead of using pen and paper, they shared that sort of information around by dreamtime stories and rock paintings. Apparently the Dharuk idea of tribal lands, land use and fishing permits were starkly different from those of the white people who settled in 1788. And so Aboriginal and British people got off to a bad start when British people thought it was okay to poach game without so much as an if you please to native elders, and without sharing the proceeds with the Dharuks, which was their tribal law.
That is one reason why I think that if C.S.Lewis had made Calormene society a highly Europeanised culture, HHB would be somewhat more uncomfortable reading than it seems to have been to modern day literary critics.
PhelanVelvel wrote:And even as a child I could not help noticing that Nikabrik and Griffle, both black-haired dwarfs, end up being traitors! I'm telling you, he has it out for us dark-haired people! Between that, and wolves being enemies in LWW as well as the mention of a traitor wolf in The Last Battle, this dark-haired wolf therian felt very bewildered!
I was watching a program about Wales, which has a strong and long-standing connection with mining, especially of coal. It interested us, since that is also my husband's Scottish family background. Not unlike those Narnian dwarves. There was also a similar breakdown between the more extremist 'black' coal-mining Welsh and the more rural 'red' Welsh. The so-called 'black' dwarves said they were well-treated under the White Witch who would find them very useful indeed. Any state would. Hence her preference for these undeniably hard-working dwarves. After the White Witch was overthrown they were no different from any other dwarves. Are we told what sort of dwarves Rogin, Duffle and Bricklethumb were in HHB? When Caspian met Nikabrik the latter was embittered by years of ill-treatment, hiding from the Telmarines and Miraz, in particular.
And so, when his hopes in Caspian didn't materialise immediately, he turned to the sort of people who hung about with the White Witch, seeing her as a real power. Caspian, Dr Cornelius, himself a half-dwarf, and Trumpkin were horrified by this, as unlike Nikabrik, they could see that exchanging Miraz's tyranny for that of the White Witch was no solution. That is like changing one bully for another.
Griffle was not necessarily a bad dwarf, either. He was well aware he had been lied to, and so he was so afraid of being taken in that he could no longer appreciate what was good and what wasn't. You might say the 'black' and 'red' dwarves represent two different shades of opinion: Black and white versus well-read and informed.
Seems to me reminiscent of something you see today, sometimes people of one race wanting to emulate characteristics of another, even if there is some contempt by the emulator toward the emulated
.
The sort of contempt you mention is probably typical of racism, I agree. Racism has been around for centuries in many societies whenever there has been conflict and rivalry, plus people who are vain and arrogant for one reason or another, and however such an opinion is justified. Darwin visited Australia in 1835, in his great voyage in the Beagle. His findings explain a good deal about why Australia has such a hugely different flora and fauna from anywhere else. Some rejected the implications of his findings when he published them, but that did not stop those people engaging in slavery, or treating badly those people whom they regarded their inferiors. It took people like William Wilberforce in UK and Abraham Lincoln in USA for slavery to be abolished, for instance.
Others thought that Darwin was 'onto' something, and so some people engaged in science and medicine in the late 19th century thought it was okay to seek out characteristics that 'proved' how less 'evolved' people from Asia or Africa were. Thus medicine and science as practised by some colonial powers became tainted with prejudice, despite the undoubted gains made against disease. Such unethical behaviour also heralded the atrocities of WW2 under the Nazis and explains the dislike shown to such colonial powers, especially after the war. I also think that at the time of WW2 that even people on the Allied side of WW2 did not really appreciate what exactly they were fighting for, apart from everyone's survival, until events like the trial of Eichmann in 1962, or the USA civil rights movement in 1964 and subsequently, opened their eyes.
HHB is my favourite Narnian story. I do not accept that C.S.Lewis was intending to be racist in his depiction of Calormen, whatever any of his critics say. I don't think it is racist to dislike HHB characters like Anradin, Arsheesh or the Tisroc. Or Shift, Rishda and Ginger in LB.