(no subject)

[bedlamsbard]

Okay, ducks, riddle me this: 1940, the Pevensies enter Narnia. Lucy's what, ten? And Peter, five years older, is fifteen. 1941, time two, Peter and Susan are too old at approximately sixteen and fifteen. 1942, time three, Edmund and Lucy are too old at fourteen and thirteen, Eustace is, like, twelve or eleven? 1943, Eustace and Jill are around twelve or thirteen? 1949: Peter's twenty-four, Susan's twenty-three, Edmund's twenty-one, Lucy's nineteen, and Eustace and Jill are seventeen or eighteen and the only ones still in school.

And they're not too old?

Aslan is very active throughout VotDT and SC, after having relatively minimal presence throughout LWW and PC. (Excuse me while I randomly combine bookverse and movieverse. It's a thing. Also ignore how fucked my ages probably are. Again.) And again, ye olde Aslan Conspiracy Theory. He did not bring them through in LWW, he did not bring them through in PC, he did bring them through in VotDT and he definitely did bring them through in SC. And yet in LB, Tirian summons them. Aslan did not bring them through. Tirian does. And -- Narnia?

And there's that whole train crash thing. Whatever. Irrelevant.

OH LEWIS WHAT NOW?

(Yes. I think about these things all the friggin' time.)

Comments

[mentalhygiene.livejournal.com]

I always thought Lucy was much younger than 10 in LWW. Maybe 7 or 8. That was always my impression. *shrug* But a lot of my impression is from the BBC movies, where they all look much younger than in the Disney movies.

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to estimate based on what they actually say in the books. She's out of school by 1949 in LB and she's about to start boarding school in PC, so she has to be around ten or eleven in LWW. Maybe 9. There's also an argument based on the British school system for making her as old as 13 in LWW, though I wouldn't go that far. And you can estimate the others off that. (I just fudge around ages until I can get Peter to the point where he can fight in WWII, but that's me. *shrug*)

[mentalhygiene.livejournal.com]

She could be younger than that, she could feasibly be at boarding school at 9 or 10. But, again, I haven't read the books in a very long time, (although I have copies of them with me at the moment, since I'm at home).

I think what's important about bringing children through is faith. I think that what Lewis was after is the idea that children have a much more malleable sense of faith. Lucy can be called to, in LWW, because she has nothing that colors her faith with the impossible. And her faith is impressionable - the more impression you get as a child, then, the more you're affected as you get older. (I think Aslan says something like 'by knowing me a little in this world, you can know me better in yours'. Again, long time.)

I would agree that your reading of Aslan and the books in general is probably somewhat different than a typical readers because you don't have a Christian background (did you ever do the Bible as literature in an English class, out of curiousity?) of any kind, but it's an interesting viewpoint.

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

Nine or ten is probably most likely for LWW.

The only time I have ever read the bible is two books out of it on my reading list from my dad about five or six years ago. One of them was Genesis, and the other one is the book where Jesus smites a fig tree because it has the audacity to not have any figs on it.

...look, the bible clearly never made much of an impression on me aside from the fig tree bit. *cough* Greco-Roman mythology and a little bit of Norse mythology is my biggest religious influence, which is really weird from the kid who has relative who are actual Buddhist priests.

[mentalhygiene.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the smiting of a fig tree but the concept makes me giggle. There's a lot of stuff in western literature in general that is based on concepts in the Bible, saints, stuff like that.

So you're reading it from a different religious standpoint which, as noted, colors how you see the book vs. how someone like me (raised by atheists) vs. a full-time Christian would read it.

I don't comment on this stuff usually mostly because I dislike the Disney movies and because it's been about ten years since I read the books.