On Dufflepuds and Astrolabes

One of the great things about the Chronicles of Narnia is how C. S. Lewis provided so much variety within the series while also keeping a much-loved common thread running through them. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is, in some ways, quite different from all the other books, partly because it draws its inspiration from quite different sources, but it never feels out of place in the series because it also retains characters like Edmund, Lucy, Prince Caspian, and Reepicheep.

So let’s look at some of the places where Lewis got his inspiration from, starting with this great passage:

In þat contree ben folk þat han but o foot & þei gon so blyue þat it is meruaylle And the foot is so large þat it schadewetℏ aƚƚ the body aȝen the sonne Whanne þei wole lye & reste hem.

or, if you really want it in modern English:

In that country there are folk that have but one foot and they go so blithely that it is a marvel, and the foot is so large that it shadows all the body against the sun when they lie down and rest themselves.

This wonderful description comes from Mandeville’s Travels, a book originally written in French in 1356 or 1357 and which claims to describe the travels of Sir John Mandeville, an Englishman born at St Albans. Mandeville describes all sorts of wonders from hippopotamuses to “trees which bear wool, as though they were sheep, from which men make clothes.” I wonder why Lewis didn’t include that little detail inThe Voyage of the Dawn Treader? One answer, of course, might be that he was having so much fun creating the Dufflepuds .

There are other parts of the book where you sense that Lewis was having great fun, for example when the Magician took the travellers into a “room which was full of polished instruments hard to understand - such as Astrolabes, Orreries, Chronoscopes, Poesimeters, Choriambuses and Theodolinds”.

An orrery

Orreries, Chronoscopes, and Astrolabes, about which I have written here, are all perfectly respectable instruments (though the Chronoscope hovers on the edge of myth - a topic, perhaps, for another time) but Poesimeters, Choriambuses and Theodolinds are all jokes.

A Poesimeter, presumably, is an instrument for measuring poetry (and especially the rhythm of poetry). I wonder what it might look like? A Choriambus is a unit of poetic rhythm: long, short, short, long – as in “down in the hole”. So, presumably Chorimabuses are also poetic instruments of some sort. But what about Theodolinds? We might assume they are something like theodolites, surveying instruments you might see when the local council is plotting trouble along your road, but Theodolind was actually Queen of the Lombards in the early 7^th Century, so who knows what Theodolinds looked like. Perhaps Lewis himself had no idea, but I suspect he enjoyed writing that sentence a great deal.

In fact, I suspect that one reason why the Chronicles of Narnia remains so readable is because Lewis had so much fun writing it. It bubbles over with childlike enthusiasms. And The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is no exception. It’s not a systematic book - Lewis takes ideas from all over the place - but it’s a good, old-fashioned adventure story, the sort of story Mark Studdock (from That Hideous Strength) enjoyed as a child and then, out of a misplaced sense of shame, rejected as a ten-year-old.

In other words, we may have started with Mandeville’s Travels but we don’t need to get bogged down with too much source hunting. Instead we need to revel in the writing and revel in the adventure, just like the children in the story, for that way wisdom and pleasure lies.