The Silver Chair (and Middle English literature)

Lady of the Green Kirtle by LaraInPink

At the risk of overhyping, The Silver Chair is becoming one of my favorite Chronicles of Narnia.  In the multiple times I have read all of the Chronicles, The Silver Chair had not made much of an impression on me until this last year as I’ve read it (very off and sometimes on) to my kids and as we listened to an audio dramatized verson on a road trip.

To sum up the basic plot beginnings: Jill and Eustace are two children from England who wind up in Narnia, a country full of talking animals whose real king is a lion named Aslan and whose stewards are human.  About ten years before Jill and Eustace’s arrival, the Narnian prince disappeared.  All that was known was that he had encountered an amazingly beautiful woman while searching for the giant green serpent that killed his mother the queen.  When many of the brave Narnians who sought the prince also disappeared, the king made searching for the prince forbidden.  Aslan gives Jill and Eustace the task of seeking the prince, who Aslan says is still alive.  Aslan also tells of four signs which he will use to guide them.  Jill and Eustace are accompanied in their adventure by a marsh-wiggle, a talking animal that somewhat resembles a very large frog, named Puddleglum.

The initial reason I began to pay more attention was not a super great one.  C.S. Lewis may be most popularly known as an author but he was a medieval scholar of literature by trade.  When I studied literature, my focus was on Middle English literature and I sometimes encountered Lewis as literary critic.  There is a chapter early in The Silver Chair called the “Parliament of Owls.”  I thought, “Ooh, that sounds like a pun on Chaucer’s ‘Parliament of Fowls,'” and I wondered if there was some sort of connection.  Eh.  Actually, parliament is just the name of a group of owls, like flock and gaggle and murder and why in the world do we have so many names for groups of birds.

To be fair to myself, there is probably a connection to Middle English literature.  One character in The Silver Chair is called the Lady of the Green Kirtle.  I imagine this to be Lewis’s shout-out to the fascinating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  Just one extant copy of the Middle English work of uncertain authorship exists but the poem is so well known because, from a technical standpoint, it artfully combines the alliterative tradition from Germanic poetry with end rhymes found in Romantic poetry.  Content-wise, it takes place in the Arthurian realm, which is always a winner.  A green girdle figures prominently in the plot and one of the main characters is a mysterious lady (or two). How does this relate to The Silver Chair character? You may now start your theses.

Whatever prompted me to take a closer look at The Silver Chair, by the end of the novel I found more compelling reasons to recommend it to followers of Jesus.  I’ll share these way less obscure reasons over the next few days.