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Dale Nelson's avatar

Readers of Spenser's Faerie Queene, a great favorite of Lewis's, will find a likely origin of his method in the Narnian books. Spenser freely mingles Classical and Northern European mythology and folklore, and elements of Western history. As for the Calormenes, they are "Paynims," idolaters.

Lewis writes enjoyably about Spenser in Selected Literary Essays ("On Reading 'The Faerie Queene'" is a good one to start with), a portion of English Literature in the 16th Century, and, for last, Spenser's Images of Life.

I'm afraid that, where the FQ is taught at all any more, teachers burden the student with bosh about "critical lenses" of postcolonialism, gender issues (Britomart!), etc. and allusions by Spenser to contemporary politics. For most readers these are not good ways to make acquaintance with this poem, which should be read largely for pleasure. Anyway that's what I aimed at when I taught Book I, using the very reader-friendly edition published by Canon Press, Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves. There is wisdom there that doesn't require the tools of today's scholarship to perceive.

Lewis said ideally one would meet the FQ as a young person in a copiously illustrated edition. Get hold of the Dover paperback of Walter Crane's drawings for the FQ and enjoy them as you read Spenser.

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Jenn's avatar

This info is kind of a relief to me, actually. When I moved to London in my 20's to work among "people of the East" (the East End of London, actually, but also originally much much further East), I reread both Narnia, and I remember being stunned at the glimpses of culture I was encountering in real life, especially in the Horse and His Boy. But I was also disquieted that it seemed like most of that cultural/literary borrowing got applied to Narnia's "villains." I'm rather happy for the revelation that some of those Eastern literary devices, etc, were also woven into the Narnian Paradise and other places. (And I did know about the name Aslan. That always helped!)

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