In The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Jadis the White Witch bribes Edmund Pevensie with the confection known as Turkish delight. So…where did Jadis manage to obtain Turkish delight in f*cking Narnia? It’s hard enough finding authentic Turkish delight in Canada, and at least that’s in the same universe as Turkey.
When confronted with the appearance of seemingly anomalistic phenomena in secondary fantasy words—food, technology, even figures of speech—objects and concepts that at first glance should have no place in these fantasy worlds, there are a number of possible explanations to which readers can turn.
The easiest course is simply not to worry about it. After all, you’re looking for entertainment. Unless you’re like me, you might not wonder how it is a world utterly unconnected to ours somehow has the phrase “Bob’s your uncle” while lacking a Lord Salisbury (if you believe that origin for the phrase) or a Florrie Forde (if you lean in that direction). Not caring has the advantage of being a huge time saver, because English is rich in words and phrases with very specific histories that secondary universes would not have. If the book is in English, it encodes a whole world and history that is NOT the secondary universe.
Another time saver is to assume that the author, hurried and facing a deadline, messed up. Maybe they didn’t have a chance to reread and wonder if using a turn of phrase inspired by firearms (shoot the messenger, a flash in the pan) made any sense in a world without gunpowder.
It could also be that the author knew the word wasn’t right but it was the closest existing choice and preferable to making up yet another SFF word. Writers do make up words; many SFF books end with a glossary of made-up words. But… at a certain point the reader will bail rather than learn a new language. So, authors opt for some word from our world on the grounds that while it is not quite correct, the reader at least knows what it is. After all, there’s no reason to think any of the people in secondary fantasy universes speak English (or any other terrestrial language). Books sold to Anglophones are in English because (Tolkien fans aside) few readers want to master an entirely new language to read about how XXX did YYY that stopped (or alternatively, caused) ZZZ… with dragons.
Or one can retcon the whole matter by assuming that the gods who created the alternate reality are plagiarists. After all, it’s easiest when creating a new world to just tweak an existing one. This might explain the many alternate realities featuring humanoid species: Look just like humans, act like humans, can mate with humans! But as you know, Bob and Bobette, humans are a species native to Earth with a fossil lineage that goes back hundreds of millions of years. We come from a very specific time and place. Yet, in worlds seemingly unconnected to ours, humans are commonplace. Could it be that a surprisingly large number of gods, having turned their weeklong projects into frantic all-nighters, opted to simply crib a useful species from our world? I don’t think it can be ruled out.
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Where the Drowned Girls Go
In many cases there is a much more straightforward explanation, which is that our world and the various secondary fantasy worlds are connected. If the works of Clarke, Norton, and Clayton are to be believed, Earth and other worlds are practically littered with interdimensional gates through which the unwary can stumble—gates that cunning merchants might even now be using to convey firearms to Amber. Indeed, A. K. Larkwood’s The Unspoken Name has as part of its background a vast system of interdimensional gates which allow all sorts of bad life choices for those seeking power. The Unspoken Name does not dwell overmuch on the merchants conveying goods along these interdimensional Silk Roads, but I am sure they must exist.
In fact, it is this last possibility that must explain Jadis’ Turkish delight. It is manifestly possible to travel from Earth to Narnia and back. The Pevensies managed it, and as one learns in The Magician’s Nephew, Jadis managed to visit London, although she found the city not to her liking. Perhaps Jadis encountered Turkish delight in England while she was there and brought back a sample; perhaps some later visitor from our realm introduced it to Narnia. Mystery solved and best of all, it has facilitated overthinking of the matter!
No doubt you have your own preferred explanations and favorite examples of this phenomenon. As ever, comments are below.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and the Aurora finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
Aslan is the “Turkish Delight.” Aslan is Turkish for Lion. The whole thing is a pun meant to point to Aslan, the Christ figure of the book.
Readers want new, but they don’t want hard in fantasy and science fiction. They don’t want to learn a new word for horse or coffee, but they do enjoy a new word for the weird animals attacking people when they are near caves because that’s important information. People equate as well. The author talks about a beast of burden with six legs, but we see an oxen in our heads. That’s what we do.
I had a fun talk with Hal Clement about MISSION OF GRAVITY, and I admitted that I saw his heavy gravity aliens as squished caterpillars in my head. He said that many readers have told him that. Equating is what humans do.
I always assumed Jadis just used magic to *poof* make whatever thing a person might want. Her abilities and limitations, at least in the first book, are kind of undefined beyond “she thinks she’s as powerful as Aslan but she’s very wrong about that.” The way I imagine it, if she had captured me as a child (or adult) she’d have had a tray of dark-chocolate caramels with sea salt. Or a big bowl of sour patch kids. A Room of Requirement situation, but instead it’s a Thing Hidden In My Cloak of Whatever Might Tempt Someone To Betray Their Family
@1, Fascinating and I did not know that.
However, in context then, what is happening is Jadis is seducing Edmund with a false god, or false messiah. One that has benefits but no responsibilities (like actually needing to have faith or follow pesky rules). But that still leaves the question, how did Turkish delight (and the Turk language) get into Narnia so the witch could play that trick. And the answer has to be, I suppose, because Aslan did it, which means Aslan (as many gods do) goes out of his way to create situations where people can be tempted away from True Belief. Which is kind of a dick move by the gods, in my opinion.
Pevensies: Edmund, you betrayed us for candy? WTF, Edmund?
Aslan: Well actually, the candy was a metaphor, and I allowed the candy to be in Narnia so Edmund could be tested.
Edmund: Wait, you planned for me to be betray my brother and sisters? WTF Aslan?
Brian wrote:
TIL I learned that “Aslan” is Turkish for lion. And that Arslan is another spelling of that word.
So is anybody else seeing the novel Arslan in a new light? Has anyone written C. S. Lewis/M. J. Engh cross-over fanfic with Aslan versus Arslan?
I used to read lots of fantasy novels about beings who were clearly humans in a secondary world with horses, cats, dogs and so on, with no connection to Earth, and I must admit I have never noticed these kinds of anomalies. (It’s not an anachronism, which means “out of time” or “without time” I expect. What would the “out of world” or “not of this world” version be?)
I suppose they must have been there, I just didn’t notice or care.
(Although, at least for shoot the messenger, that would equally apply to bows and other ranged weapons.)
And of course there are “Poh-Tay-Toes” and “Pipeweed” in Lord of the Rings, New World plants in Europe, millennia before they were “recently” reintroduced. One could simply ascribe Tolkien’s fondness for both for their inclusion, or as a cultural indicator of class. Potatoes were definitely “peasant” food in the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in England, cuisine of more down to earth folks than the hoity-toity people of the big city.
There’s debate over whether or not pipeweed is Tobacco or Marijuana. I myself prefer the latter, as the idea of a hobbits toking up the place with their doobies and bongs to be more enjoyable than all of them addicted to nicotine.
Edmund asked for Turkish Delight. The witch poured a drop from a small flask onto the snow, and when it hit, the drop turned into Turkish Delight. I don’t see any reason why the magic couldn’t have been based on what was in his thoughts, rather than his words. Thereafter, the Witch and the Dwarf would have known what Turkish Delight was… not that it appeared in the story again. When Edmund asked for more of it in the Witch’s castle, he was given stale bread.
Real Turkish Delight isn’t hard to find around here; there are several grocery stores that carry middle-Eastern products. “Big Turk” candy bars are all over the place, but they probably don’t count as real Turkish Delight.
“Magical Turkish Delight”, described as terribly addictive etc., has long suggested opioids to me.
Father Christmas is a different kind of anomaly in Narnia, given that they have had no Christ, especially as Aslan is a Christ figure.
With regards to language, I sometimes imagine that the novel I am reading is a translation of the story so that it will make sense to a 21st century, English reading Terran. The people in the secondary world are usually using a different language with different idioms and such, but the author translates those so that they will make sense to me. The author chooses how much of the world to translate, and how much to explicitly explain, either in narrative, or via those ever useful glossaries and appendices.
@7: JRRT states that pipe-weed is ‘a variety probably of Nicotiana‘ – but have you read Bored of the Rings?…
In A WRINKLE IN TIME, when the children confront IT on Camazotz, they are given food that tastes to Meg and Calvin as if it’s a delicious banquet but to Charles Wallace like sand, and it’s explained that they’re basically eating nutritional sand but IT enters your brain and makes you think that you’re tasting a delicious banquet (but Charles Wallace can keep IT out, and thus can’t enjoy the food. This idea is rare enough that I’m not sure it quite counts as a trope, but CS Lewis uses an inverse of it in THE LAST BATTLE, when everyone else is eating delicious food and enjoying the sunshine, but the obstinate dwarves believe themselves to be trapped in a dank stable, subsisting on moldy hay.
Anyway: the most critical thing about the Turkish Delight is its addictiveness. What comes out of that bottle is Metaphorical Heroin, which magically takes a form pleasing to the user.
I’m confused as to why one would single out turkish delight when so many other words in the English language are derived from Earth place names or people. The months August and July. The Turkey. An ottoman. Hamburgers. Sandwiches.
If you go down that road, there’s no stopping. Why do they even speak English? Why are there even humans in secondary worlds?
So you either have to explain everything, or just accept that a secondary world is arbitrary by design.
@10, Why yes! I was totally frustrated that the back cover blurb between Frito Bugger and an elf maid never occurred in the actual novel, thus introducing the concept of “Scene in the trailer, but cut from the movie” trope that happens all the time!
@9, that’s what I usually do as well. Problems usually only come up for me if there are puns or reference to specific words and it’s explicitly in our universe – for instance, in Codex Alera, there’s a discussion of lie as in untruth vs lie as in repose. The series is set ~2000 years after a Roman legion, its camp followers, and the Germani they were fighting were transported to another world. I suppose it’s technically possible for their language to have evolved into English…
“Surely Bjorn Stronginthearm is my uncle”
@8- Nothing simpler. Father Christmas originated, or at least was named, in the Pevensie’s world (or another where Christ manifested under that name) but the same magical powers that enable him to visit entire worlds in a single night allow him to travel between worlds. Had Polly and Diggory made their trip at a slightly different time, they might have seen first his reindeer, then him, emerging, cracking through the thin layer of ice on one of the pools in the Wood Between Worlds, and bidding them a hearty greeting before plunging into another.
In Narnia, therefore, “Christmas,” is simply understood as “The day when Father Christmas arrives to give us gifts,” which, in times not dominated by the White Witch, also probably roughly coincides with midwinter.
@14: The two senses of the word come from Proto-Germanic (and, before that, Proto-Indo-European) roots with very close pronunciations, so as referee I’d allow it.
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as “explain everything or accept that it’s arbitrary”. I think most of us have some vague sense of translation – that English is telling a story about a reality that isn’t English. And many have our points where earthisms will knock us out of the story. Maybe one person will accept cats but object to china (especially if the technology level seems incongruent), another will think “china” a reasonable gloss to explain they are using the good pottery but be irritated when the elves apparently know what the Trojan horse was. (Others won’t be bothered until Trojan turns out to be a reference to a prophylactic.) If we’re really talking fantasy, I feel there should be enough disparate references to give the flavour of a not-here culture with some depth to it. I prefer references that are at the level of a dead metaphor: a figure of speech that has been used to the point that it no longer evokes the original imagery and instead just means what it had been a metaphor for, so no clarity is lost if you don’t get the reference.
In science fiction, there’s another option: have all the characters be noted enthusiasts for long-ago 20th-21st century American-British culture. That sort of lampshading (dead metaphor yet?) particularly annoys me, but it seems to have become less common (still see it, though!)
UWaterloo’s CKMS had, if I recall correctly, a radio play in which it was explained for imperial convenience the universal empire arranges for every planet to eventually manifest an instance of the universal language and on Earth that’s English. The written universal language is nothing like written English, though.
I’m also sensitive to words and phrases that are of relatively recent vintage, AKA “OK” and “Alright”. Both of those are probably no older than the 19th century. After reading more than a few biographies and travelogues from the mid-19th century, novels of recent vintage set in those times really stand out when the characters speak. They talk in late 20th century fashion, either too informal, or far too formal, and don’t place enough weight on one’s class when speaking to a person of a different class. And that’s just in America. Authors, if you’re going to do a historical novel, then read source material from that time period, okay?
Poul Anderson set a novel in a universe in which all of Shakespeare’s anachronisms were historically accurate…
@22- Ah yes, thereby establishing an English Civil War with railway lines, and a tendency for the upper classes to speak in iambic pentameter, as I recall.
Either Middle-earth is a true secondary world, in which case it doesn’t matter what the plants are, or it’s the past of ours, in which case Numenoreans could have brought tobacco and potatoes (which then died out before the ‘real’ historical period) and also you should be bothered more by the world having been flat and the map not matching up at all.
The Magician’s Nephew is a fixup retcon, but accepting it, the founding humans of Narnia were two English people from the late 1800s. Thus Father Christmas.
@8 The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe takes place at the height of rationing during WWII on the Earth side, so Turkish Delight would be a very rare luxury at the time in England.
Aslan is Lion in Turkish?
So when A. E. Van Vogt wrote about A Slan long before C. S. Lewis wrote about Aslan, was he lion?
Comments #3 and #8 sum up what I was thinking here too–it’s largely just a desire made manifest in magic.
Not that it’s not entertaining to consider the other options, like cross-world imports. :-}
Well, she’s a Witch, so . . . .
I can’t remember what author first put forward this idea, but basically what we are reading is a translation of events that happened in that world. Obviously they’re not speaking English or other Earth languages in that fantasy world. That basically covers any manner of sin of including modern idioms.
Jeff Smith’s fabulous fantasy comic Bone. Definitely not set on Earth, but Fone Bone has a treasured copy of Moby Dick.
Possibly cross-universe contamination due to the shop that wasn’t there yesterday.
Everyone else learns English to read fantasy in the original language (because that way you don’t need footnotes that explain English puns that don’t work in your language).
Books/movies that take place in our world but assume everyone speaks English are even worse. I remember a silly marial arts movie where an “ancient Tibetan prophecy” is a pun in English (that is why the movie doesn’t really make sense in German, although that is much closer to English than Tibetan).
In a SF series every old book seems to be Shakespeare or other English classics, there are no later books or authors from other cultures (although the only religion mentioned is descended from Islam).
Ayla has a silly “etymology” for father, when every introduction to linguistics explains the real etymology and no one in stone age Europe spoke modern English.
And I think Tash is Turkish for stone.
I always wanted to introduce Phil the Elephant into Narnia. (Fil is Turkish and Arabic for elephant)
@8
If Edmund had thought of StayPuft marshmallows, he would have been tempted by them….
Eleanor Morton on Narnia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBKwFb9_k1Q
@20 Okay is okay for 19th Century speakers, and likewise “all right” is alright although it hadn’t yet merged into one word in spelling. Both were used a little differently in conversation than we use them now, but were around at the time. Okay is actually older than alright, at least in print, dating back to an 1830s East Coast US trend for humourous spellings and abbreviations (“Oll korekt”). Any time after about 1840 you could say “Looks okay” and mean “Looks correct/Seems right” and expect someone from the East Coast to understand you. But the use of “okay” to mean “I approve” or “I’ll do that” doesn’t come along until closer to the end of the century.
Weirdly, at least in print the oldest uses of alright seem to be “Alrighty”, as in references to God the All-Right. But conversationally, “all right” as in “I agree/okay” seems to date back to the late 19th Century.
Source: I read too many 19th Century novels and newspapers.
In Jo Walton’s Thessaly series, a character in Enlightenment France has a series of clues written in English. The god Apollo, who is the narrator at this point, says he can speak it, with an aside to the reader (You’re reading this. You already know I speak English.).
The Vorkosigan books are set a thousand years in the future and there’s not a lot of present-day cultural references in them. One I missed for a while is someone referring to Miles as “the Eighth Dwarf, Pushy”. The Seven Dwarves didn’t get the -y names until the Disney cartoon in 1937.
As for true anachronisms, I can accept the humans in the Battlestar Galactica reboot speaking English. But when they use the actual phrase “esprit de corps” I have to wonder where they learned French.
Has anyone ever written a variant where Jadis had no problems getting her magic to work in our world and took over as Empress? You’d think it would be a natural for someone like Neil Gaiman or Kim Newman!
Re the Turkish Delight, I always assumed that the Calmorenes brought it to Narnia, but magical manifestation makes more sense.
After the intro about turkish delight, I thought we were going to segue into sewing machines.
To made fantasy readable and on some level “credible”, adapting language for modern readership is necessary, but elves using words such as OK or “kinda” always jolts me out of the story world I have been enjoying. 20th century American slang has no place in the Victorian and medieval based settings common in fantasy writing.
@2,
The Way of Kings by Sanderson was the first time my mind was set free. When I read it, I was able to imagine landscapes and creatures entirely outside my own experience (both real and fantasy). Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell was similar. It’s not true for me of all his novels, but I still find his world of Roshar amazing. And, I believe he achieved this without excessively long descriptions (looking at you, R. Jordan).
Actually, speaking of Robert Jordan and connected worlds, isn’t Randland not our own Earth? I seem to recall that he said this, and there’s a scene in which a character has visions of alternative realitiesincluding our own.. So all of Wheel of Time takes place within our own universe. But I do not recall any turkish delight.
Shrek using the phrase: “Hold the phone!”
@36: Except Shakespeare, of course.
@37: Your request makes me think of Stirling’s _Drakon_. SF, but one alt-world villainess taking over the Earth.
Didn’t “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” by Ursula LeGuin address this as well?
This reminds me one fantasy novel I recall where the main character, upon visiting the ocean for the first time, muses that the castle is on the shore of a “bay”, though it was nothing like the sound a hound made. That completely threw me out of the story, as I yelled “Why are they speaking ENGLISH?”
It strikes me as odd that we don’t have a record of someone (likely, American) writing to Lewis and asking him outright why he chose such a gross, rose-flavored candy as Edmund’s great desire.
The simplest solution, to me, is a version of the Wrinkle in Time one proposed above: The witch was using her magic to make Edmund believe that whatever he was eating was Turkish delight, since she didn’t know what that was and didn’t care, but she could influence his mind so he thought he was getting what he expected to get. Later on, when she had him where she wanted him, she didn’t bother with the illusion and he could tell he was eating stale bread.
I can handle a lot of anachronisms and out-of-place objects in fantasy on the translation principle: what we are reading is a translation of a story into terms more accessible for us. Samwise Gamgee’s actual name (according to the appendices) was Banazir Galpsi, but that doesn’t sound yokel enough, so Tolkien “translated” it.
There’s a point, though, when my suspension of disbelief is too challenged and I start to think that the author just isn’t aware of how contingent our language and culture are, or how they’ve developed, and has made something universal that is extremely particular. Often, that happens for me when a name out of the Bible turns up in a fantasy world (even more, in an alternate fantasy version of our world) where Christianity and Judaism are explicitly not present. But something like an alien judge using a gavel – something that even real Earth judges seldom do outside movies and TV – will give me the same problem.
Edmund is described as sticky after he has eaten, so the Turkish delight is real. The Narnia books are, among other things, about the importance and truth of stories, and I think CS Lewis meant us to see that Edmund could have known better, accepting candy from a witch. Peter makes a decision to follow the robin because he doesn’t know a story in which robins are evil.
I think I learned in some philosophy class that only one difference with the actual world makes a possible/ parallel world. There can be a world in which witches and Turkish delight coexist.
@46- Biblical names are another one of those cases where I think each writer and reader has to draw a line, which will ultimately be somewhat arbitrary. The spread of Christianity was definitely responsible for injecting a major deposit of Hebrew derived names throughout Europe, but it certainly didn’t take me out of Game of Thrones for Jon Snow to have a name that traces back to Hebrew.
As with a lot of these things, if you’re using real-world names, those pretty much all come from specific interactions and developments of cultures and languages.
@9 that has always been my approach too. For example, Star Wars characters don’t actually speak English, they’ve only been dubbed in English for modern audiences. There are of course limits to this, as some of the more egregious examples here have pointed out, but in general etymology is too connected to our own histories and belief structures to be extricated, and if you start getting hung up on things you’ll never emerge from the thicket.