The Magician’s Nephew: Chapter 5 “The Deplorable Word”
C.S. Lewis Read-Along, Vol. 6, Issue 6
The ringing bell wakes up Jadis, the Queen of Charn. She reveals to the children that she destroyed her own world with the Deplorable World to keep her sister from the throne.
Digory is learning from his mistakes, but Jadis will refuse. The elevation of self automatically leads to the dismissal of others, but that ultimately leads to the downfall of self.
Chapter 5 “The Deplorable Word”
Immediately after the note from the bell ended, “the woman whom Digory thought was so beautiful” rose from her chair. The narrator says she was taller than a normal person and even taller than the children had thought. Her attire and facial expressions revealed she was a “great queen.”
While she doesn’t reveal her name until later in the chapter, we are introduced to the person of Jadis, the last queen of Charn.
Lewis likely first encountered the name in the fifteenth-century French poem “Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis” by François Villon from Le Grand Testament.1 Jadis comes from the French word for “times of yore,” which could be a reference to Charn’s past. But the Charn queen is his second literary character to be given the name “Jadis.” In his unfinished poem, “The Quest of Bleheris,” Lewis named a young man “Wan Jadis.”2
In Companion to Narnia, Paul Ford says that Lewis “strove mightily to show how the White Witch and Jadis are one [in The Magician’s Nephew], but left loose ends and unanswered questions.” One of the primary questions concerns her origin.
In The Magician’s Nephew, Jadis is the last in a long line of queens and kings on Charn. She appears human, though taller and more magically attuned than those of Earth. In Mr. Beaver’s description of the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, however, he gives a different background.
