Narnian names
Let’s consider some of the names Lewis chose for his Narnian characters. Some of them, like Puzzle and Shift in The Last Battle, look obvious. Puzzle is often puzzled by the situations in which he finds himself and Shift is clearly shifty. He is “given to deceiving or misleading others; deceitful, dishonest; unreliable. Also: inclined to conceal feelings, intentions, or information; evasive,” to quote the Oxford English Dictionary.
But the OED has other definitions of shift:
A fraudulent or evasive trick, scheme, or method used to achieve a goal; a stratagem. Also: a deliberately false or misleading argument, statement, etc.; an evasion; a subterfuge; a piece of sophistry.
Change or substitution of one thing for another.
These senses of the word are almost completely forgotten, but, as so often in the Chronicles, the nuances of the name suggest far greater depth to the character than appears at first glance. Shift is shifty, but he also engages in fraudulent schemes, gives deliberately misleading statements, and changes one animal (Shift) for another (Aslan).
A similar example can be seen in The Magician’s Nephew, where we hear about Mrs Lefay. Why Lefay? Again, the OED comes to our aid. It provides various meanings for “fay,” including:
· fairy
· hostile, unfriendly; a deadly enemy; the Devil
· feeble, timid; sickly, weak
· disordered in mind like one about to die; possessing or displaying magical, fairylike, or unearthly qualities.
Here again, Lewis captures the many meanings of the word in his character. Mrs Lefay “was one of the last mortals in this country who had fairy blood in her,” according to the admittedly unreliable Uncle Andrew. She was also, like Uncle Andrew, clearly hostile and unfriendly but, at the same time, feeble and weak. The character, though only glanced at in the book, is far richer than an initial reading might suggest, and much of the depth is provided by the choice of name.
It is, therefore, something of a surprise to discover that some of the Narnian names could have been other than they are. This is especially true of the names of the books themselves. Here are some of the titles Lewis considered:
For Prince Caspian – Drawn into Narnia; A Horn in Narnia
For The Horse and His Boy – To Narnia and the North; The Horse and the Boy; The Desert Road to Narnia; Cor of Archenland; The Horse Stole the Boy; Over the Border; The Horse Bree
For The Silver Chair – Night under Narnia; The Wild Waste Lands; Gnomes under Narnia; News under Narnia
For The Last Battle – The Last Chronicle of Narnia
Clearly, book titles and character names are not the same thing. Authors have to hang onto their working titles much more lightly than they hang onto the names of their characters. Publishers - as I have discovered myself - have much stronger feelings about book titles than the names of characters in those books. (Two of my three novels have titles that changed shortly before publication.) And it is true that some of Lewis’s alternative titles might have worked: The Last Chronicle of Narnia and To Narnia and the North, for example (though I would definitely have drawn the line at Gnomes under Narnia!)
But character names are different. Shift needs to be Shift. Mrs Lefay, in a sense, has to be Mrs Lefay. And Aslan… well, I think I’ll discuss Aslan another time.