Treachery in Prince Caspian
One way of understanding the Chronicles of Narnia is to see them in the context of their times. There is no doubt that Lewis’s wartime experiences (in France during World War I and in Oxford during World War II) had a great impact on him. It is perhaps with this twentieth-century background in mind that we should consider the many references to treachery in the Narnia books.
In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for example, the treachery of Edmund - “You have a traitor there, Aslan,” said the Witch - and Aslan’s response to it shape the book.
In The Horse and His Boy, by contrast, Shasta is more concerned about being mistaken for a traitor:
He thought a good deal about the Narnians and especially about Corin. He wondered what had happened when they discovered that the boy who had been lying on the sofa and hearing all their secret plans wasn’t really Corin at all. It was very unpleasant to think of all those nice people imagining him a traitor.
But it is perhaps in Prince Caspian that Lewis deals most interestingly with the topic. Miraz is quick to fling accusations of treachery at his followers - “I’ll not be shamed because some witchcraft or treason has frozen your bloods” - not least because he is a traitor and usurper himself. As a result, the true king, Caspian, and his true friend, Dr Cornelius, soon find themselves condemned as traitors. For Dr Cornelius, this accusation is particularly hard to bear because he knows that it isn’t only Miraz who accuses him of this shameful crime:
I am one of those, only a half-Dwarf, and if any of my kindred, the true Dwarfs, are still alive anywhere in the world, doubtless they would despise me and call me a traitor. But never in all these years have we forgotten our own people and all the other happy creatures of Narnia, and the long-lost days of freedom.
Treachery is so embedded in the book that even Caspian’s horse ends up being accused of treachery: “You are already betrayed and Miraz is on the move,” Dr Cornelius tells the prince when he tracks him down in the woods.
“Betrayed!” said Caspian. “And by whom?”
“Another renegade Dwarf, no doubt,” said Nikabrik.
“By your horse Destrier,” said Doctor Cornelius. “The poor brute knew no better. When you were knocked off, of course, he went dawdling back to his stable in the castle. Then the secret of your flight was known.”
Now, clearly we could take this too far. Prince Caspian is not an allegory of World War II, nor was C. S. Lewis setting out to write about the problems of his own era, but neither was he stuck away in a romanticised, premodern realm of the imagination. He was a man of his time who realised as much as anyone what that meant, which is why he can still speak to our own age and, I have no doubt, to many generations yet to come.