The first two Narnia films made were Wardrobe and Prince Caspian. And now a new deal has been struck to remake the series, starting with those same two films. I wonder why. I suppose Wardrobe is the most iconic of the stories so that deserves to go first, and then you need to make the other film with all four Pevensies before they age out.
I’ve been thinking more about this question of how we ought to judge a book. Most of the modern criticisms I hear are pedantic and - what’s worse - completely miss the point of what makes for a good story. I remember one reviewer panning a novel because it described a character’s eyes as “Almond-shaped,” which was seen as racist stereotyping. But this tells me absolutely nothing about the quality of the story or whether I will walk away from it slimed by racism or edified by love for my fellow man.
My guess is that it’s a combination of things. Pedantic criticism is easy because you can literally apply a checklist. It doesn’t require individual thought or self-reflection, which makes things easier on influencers who are trying to review 30 books a month for their TikTok. It also lets you tout your political correctness credentials, to prove you are a right-thinker.
Ultimately, thoughtful criticism is hard so people will always look for shortcuts.
I call it checklist criticism: the principle that a work is good if it ticks all the boxes. It's found everywhere, alas. Protestant fiction, ironically enough, is one of the worst offenders.
True. And I'm not sure that Catholic fiction is much better. But we will not successfully counter the ideologically based criticism of the secular world with ideologically based criticism of our own. Ideologues are afraid of the truth and so seek to exclude it at every turn. But we should not be afraid of the truth or of truth telling.
One of the ancient conventions of Children's literature, at least in the days when the books were about families rather than individuals, was to fit in more siblings into the middle period of childhood that nature reasonably permits. That is, between something like the ages of 8 and 12. Before about 8, children are not articulate, mobile, or independent enough to go on adventures -- or, more importantly, to want to read about children having adventures. After 12 their lives are dominated by the things of pubescence. In The Story of the Treasure Seekers, E. Nesbit fit eight siblings into that magic mid-childhood period. In Five Children and It, she fit five. In Wardrobe, Lewis fits four, which is just barely plausible. But Lucy is, in fact, far too sophisticated to be eight. Children read up, and so the art is to make the child in a story both the age of the reader but with the sophistication and ability of someone older.
But movies cannot pull off this trick. Georgie Henley was 10 when the Wardrobe film came out. Anna Popplewell was 17. In other words, the actors had aged out before the movie was even made, and it is hard to imagine how it could have been cast otherwise without both looking ridiculous and creating serious acting problems. Some things are just unfilmable.
As for the new series of films being directed by Greta Gerwig, well, one shudders to think. But the inherent unfilmability of the books meant that the first series of films was, mercifully, incomplete, and one can only hope this proves true of the second.
And yes, criticism today is almost entirely ideological in nature, and simplistically so. Essentially it is a checklist of shibboleths spoken and shibboleths violated.
It's been a while since I read any Narnia book, but I remember liking the Last Battle the most. Revelation is one of my favorite books, after all. A friend told me she read it to her grandchildren after one of their (other) grandmothers had died, and it helped them. Objective? No. A measure of genuine quality? Yes.
But, forgive me for taking a somewhat postmodern stance, but "objective" is difficult when the capacity for even consuming art is different between people.
I listen to a lot of J-Pop, and often Vocaloid, that brand of J-Pop sung by robots. And yes, if you listen to the robots long enough, you start preferring them to human voices. But let us consider just J-Pop for the moment.
In my attempts to share my favored music with my family, I've run into the specific problem that I know some Japanese, but they know none at all. Consider the following song, JITTER DOLL. (Or don't, if it's not to your taste.)
The lyrics mean nothing to someone who knows nothing of the language. In fact, they're apparently about an android trying to understand human suffering, ultimately concluding that the circuit noise humans call God will save the world. I say apparently, because the lyrics are ambiguous, and if you don't understand enough Japanese to understand the ambiguities, a mere translation cannot help you.
So is it even possible to measure the quality of this song in an objective way? One can certainly judge the instrumental if it is a fancy genre of music (no) or a banger (yes) but the spirit, despairing yet ultimately hopeful, is lost on those who don't speak Japanese.
And perhaps the lyrics aren't THAT important, but then consider Gregorian chant. If it was just nonsense Latin, it would be neither praise of God nor have any spiritual effect in listening to it. Certainly, you can set English to Gregorian chant, and Byzantine chant is frequently sung in the vernacular. Indeed, the words need not be understood for worship to be worship. But they must have meaning in their original language.
Which brings us back to the start. To truly appreciate a work, you have to understand it, and aside from classical music (and even then) there are few truly universal works of art. Does that mean the quest for an objective metric is in vain? I don't know.
I do know, however, you can set polyphony to robots.
Yes, if you were to rank the Narnia books on a scale of theological meaning, Last Battle could easily be ranked first. Its a philosophical novel, which makes it less good as a children's story, but arguable the best of the series in terms of philosophical content. Obviously it would compete with Wardrobe for that spot, but there is such an admix of paganism and English honor culture in Wardrobe that it is quite dubious theologically. And yes, the theological message of Last Battle could well be comforting in the right circumstances.
And no, JITTER DOLL is not to my taste, which was formed before electronic music really existed. Is it possible to measure the quality of that song in an objective way? In part, yes. For instance, there have been studies done comparing the melodic and harmonic complexity of pop songs over the last half century, and they show a steady decline into something simple and largely invariant. So, objective measurement is possible. The question is, is the thing it is measuring quality?
And I suppose that depends on what you think art is for. Does it exist to satiate or to reveal? If to satiate, then the corporate direction of art, music, literature, food, drink, etc. towards the simplest thing that reliably satiates represents an increase in quality. And in this regard we should note that if the aim is to reliably satiate regularly recurring appetites, then pornography is an obvious artistic avenue for the culture. And this clearly accounts for the schoolgirl fetish that runs through jpop, kpop, and anime.
If you think the purpose of art is to reveal, however, then art will demand much more from both the artist and the art lover. It will require stirring ourselves out of the rut of satiating art and pursuing something else. It will require making ourselves dissatisfied with what has be sating us, and going in search of something else that can show us a good that we have not seem before.
But unless that good which we seek is an objective quality whose worth goes beyond mere satiation, then our quest will end in nothing more than a new form of satiation. Which is to say that I don't have to be able to define the exact metric of artistic quality to believe that there is objective artistic good, or to strive to find it.
Before I read your article, here was my ranking of the "best":
The Horse and His Boy
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Prince Caspian
The Silver Chair
The Magician’s Nephew
The Last Battle
After I've read your article, I'd rank them this way:
The Horse and His Boy
The Silver Chair
Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Prince Caspian
The Magician’s Nephew
The Last Battle
Like you, I let my personal instincts influence my decision, and I put THAHB to the top, and it's personal taste that keeps VOTDT above TLTWATW for me--I think TLTWATW is the better book.
But an interesting article and not at all what I expected by the halfway mark. Interesting musings from an interesting starting point.
2. I haven't read the Narnia books in many years, though I devoured them over and over again as a child. Being of an Eastern faith, I had no idea of the Christian allegory. I'll be very curious to see how they read to me as an adult.
3. I might be an aberration, but I've actually left the music I loved as a teenager behind (as far as Western music is concerned). When I hear it now, I enjoy the nostalgia, but it's the music I came to in my twenties and thirties and even forties that sticks with me. That also goes for taste: I'm always finding I can expand mine if I'm willing to be uncomfortable for a little while or try things that I wouldn't have thought I might like. It doesn't always work, but it often does.
4. Finally, a resounding yes to this: To which the best answer I can think of is that it is better to be made happy by truthful things than by untruthful things, even if both the quality and quantity of happiness are the same. And yes, the truthful things are often more subtle and complex than the untruthful things. (I can't get that section to be italicized--argh!)
The thing that really dictates my musical taste is something weird in my brain that cannot abide anything percussive. Thus I tend to like forms that don't include a drum kit -- folk, baroque, bluegrass. This probably accounts from my not being much of a fan of the music of the period I grew up in, the 60s and 70s. All kind of circumstance, I think, can affect what forms of art (or food, or anything else) that our brains become habituated to.
Many people in the West miss the Christian allegory in the Narnia books as well, and some of them are horrified when they are told about it. I'm actually a bit surprised that Christian readers don't get more concerned about the pagan elements in Wardrobe, thought. After all, the god who dies and is reborn, thus bringing about the end of winter, is one that occurs over and over in many pagan mythologies, as is the God who appears on Earth disguised in animal form.
Perhaps it is those pagan elements that prevent people from immediately seeing the crucifixion allegory in Wardrobe.
I personally enjoyed The Magician's Nephew and would have rated it much higher. Maybe 5 or 4?
I personally liked the explanation of the creation of the world. It was absurdly creative like the lamppost explanation.
Maybe I enjoy whimsy a tad more. I will say that using Tolkien to say it wasn't allegorical enough is probably ill advised because I think Tolkien said he hated allegories and would argue against you.
If I had a disagreement with your rankings overall it would be that I think whimsy should count for something. I dont think it should be a negative especially in a children's book. Maybe that's the comedian in me. I find straight allegories to be boring which I think Tolkien might agree with me on.
Yes, anyone who enjoys worldbuilding for its own sake is going to enjoy The Magician's Nephew more than I do, and will rank Nephew higher as a consequence.
On Tolkien and allegory, my understanding of Tolkien's objection to Wardrobe was that it mixed so many different mythologies, which meant the worldbuilding was inconsistent. The appearance of Father Christmas in a land otherwise largely based on Greek myth is a good example of this. I care less about this than I think Tolkien did, but I do see it as part of the relative untidiness of Wardrobe compared to other books in the series.
As far as allegory is concerned, I think Lewis and Tolkien were being rather technical in their rejection of the term allegory. As literary scholars, they would be. Lewis's distinction that Wardrobe is a "supposal" of what Christ might be like in another land is, I think, a valid one. If it were an allegory, the fact that there is no incarnation in Narnia, and that Aslan is more a theophany than an incarnate creature, would make it a bad allegory. But as a supposal, it plays by its own rules. That's fine as far as it goes. There is a legitimate question to be asked, I suppose, about whether a reader might learn an incorrect Christology from Narnia because they do treat it as an allegory. But that question did not affect my ranking. It was the untidiness of the story that caused me to rank Wardrobe where I did.
As for whimsy, it counts a great deal for me, which is why I ranked Dawn Treader ahead of Silver Chair and The Horse and His Boy. So I'm not sure how I managed to give the impression that I was opposed to it. The opposite is the case.
Yes!! Dawn Treader has always been my favourite. The dark island section is one of the best scary scenes in children's literature. My sister ranked them recently in a YouTube video and put Dawn Treader second to last and Horse and his Boy first so we had a healthy disagreement about that.
Regarding "Magician's Nephew", as someone on the Tolkien side of the Lewis/Tolkien worldbuilding divide, I enjoy it for its own sake. I think it's a good children's story in itself. However, it's out of place in the Narnian series as a whole. We never see the Wood or any of the other worlds ever again; the Rings only show up as a minor plot point in "Last Battle". Lewis has tidied up a few points of his worldbuilding by introducing tons of new untold stories, in a book with a very different tone and setting than the rest of the series.
So, even if someone values worldbuilding and tidying up loose ends, I wouldn't recommend they start with "Magician's Nephew."
But regarding starting points... For myself, I started with "Horse and His Boy." I was in a phase of liking horses, so my parents decided I'd like that book, and they were right. Even looking back, I really feel it works. We meet the Pevensies knowing nothing about them, but Shasta doesn't either. We know next to nothing about Narnia, but Shasta doesn't either. We learn it as he does, and it works.
That's a good point. The Horse and His Boy is probably the most standalone of all of them, other than Wardrobe.
And yes, even in Nephew, when he was trying to clean up some of the worldbuilding after the fact, he was still worldbuilding on the fly, as he always did. I seem to remember reading somewhere that Wardrobe started with him getting a picture in his head of a faun and a lamppost in a wood. And very clearly he just added stuff in as he went, all the way through the series, and very little from one book ever showed up in another. He threw the parliament of owls into Prince Caspian for the sake of the pun and we never here from it again. All of which is just fine with me, but not what the modern fantasy reader seems to prefer.
The first two Narnia films made were Wardrobe and Prince Caspian. And now a new deal has been struck to remake the series, starting with those same two films. I wonder why. I suppose Wardrobe is the most iconic of the stories so that deserves to go first, and then you need to make the other film with all four Pevensies before they age out.
I’ve been thinking more about this question of how we ought to judge a book. Most of the modern criticisms I hear are pedantic and - what’s worse - completely miss the point of what makes for a good story. I remember one reviewer panning a novel because it described a character’s eyes as “Almond-shaped,” which was seen as racist stereotyping. But this tells me absolutely nothing about the quality of the story or whether I will walk away from it slimed by racism or edified by love for my fellow man.
My guess is that it’s a combination of things. Pedantic criticism is easy because you can literally apply a checklist. It doesn’t require individual thought or self-reflection, which makes things easier on influencers who are trying to review 30 books a month for their TikTok. It also lets you tout your political correctness credentials, to prove you are a right-thinker.
Ultimately, thoughtful criticism is hard so people will always look for shortcuts.
I call it checklist criticism: the principle that a work is good if it ticks all the boxes. It's found everywhere, alas. Protestant fiction, ironically enough, is one of the worst offenders.
True. And I'm not sure that Catholic fiction is much better. But we will not successfully counter the ideologically based criticism of the secular world with ideologically based criticism of our own. Ideologues are afraid of the truth and so seek to exclude it at every turn. But we should not be afraid of the truth or of truth telling.
One of the ancient conventions of Children's literature, at least in the days when the books were about families rather than individuals, was to fit in more siblings into the middle period of childhood that nature reasonably permits. That is, between something like the ages of 8 and 12. Before about 8, children are not articulate, mobile, or independent enough to go on adventures -- or, more importantly, to want to read about children having adventures. After 12 their lives are dominated by the things of pubescence. In The Story of the Treasure Seekers, E. Nesbit fit eight siblings into that magic mid-childhood period. In Five Children and It, she fit five. In Wardrobe, Lewis fits four, which is just barely plausible. But Lucy is, in fact, far too sophisticated to be eight. Children read up, and so the art is to make the child in a story both the age of the reader but with the sophistication and ability of someone older.
But movies cannot pull off this trick. Georgie Henley was 10 when the Wardrobe film came out. Anna Popplewell was 17. In other words, the actors had aged out before the movie was even made, and it is hard to imagine how it could have been cast otherwise without both looking ridiculous and creating serious acting problems. Some things are just unfilmable.
As for the new series of films being directed by Greta Gerwig, well, one shudders to think. But the inherent unfilmability of the books meant that the first series of films was, mercifully, incomplete, and one can only hope this proves true of the second.
And yes, criticism today is almost entirely ideological in nature, and simplistically so. Essentially it is a checklist of shibboleths spoken and shibboleths violated.
It's been a while since I read any Narnia book, but I remember liking the Last Battle the most. Revelation is one of my favorite books, after all. A friend told me she read it to her grandchildren after one of their (other) grandmothers had died, and it helped them. Objective? No. A measure of genuine quality? Yes.
But, forgive me for taking a somewhat postmodern stance, but "objective" is difficult when the capacity for even consuming art is different between people.
I listen to a lot of J-Pop, and often Vocaloid, that brand of J-Pop sung by robots. And yes, if you listen to the robots long enough, you start preferring them to human voices. But let us consider just J-Pop for the moment.
In my attempts to share my favored music with my family, I've run into the specific problem that I know some Japanese, but they know none at all. Consider the following song, JITTER DOLL. (Or don't, if it's not to your taste.)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tHYDGMt15dE&pp=ygULaml0dGVyIGRvbGw%3D
The lyrics mean nothing to someone who knows nothing of the language. In fact, they're apparently about an android trying to understand human suffering, ultimately concluding that the circuit noise humans call God will save the world. I say apparently, because the lyrics are ambiguous, and if you don't understand enough Japanese to understand the ambiguities, a mere translation cannot help you.
So is it even possible to measure the quality of this song in an objective way? One can certainly judge the instrumental if it is a fancy genre of music (no) or a banger (yes) but the spirit, despairing yet ultimately hopeful, is lost on those who don't speak Japanese.
And perhaps the lyrics aren't THAT important, but then consider Gregorian chant. If it was just nonsense Latin, it would be neither praise of God nor have any spiritual effect in listening to it. Certainly, you can set English to Gregorian chant, and Byzantine chant is frequently sung in the vernacular. Indeed, the words need not be understood for worship to be worship. But they must have meaning in their original language.
Which brings us back to the start. To truly appreciate a work, you have to understand it, and aside from classical music (and even then) there are few truly universal works of art. Does that mean the quest for an objective metric is in vain? I don't know.
I do know, however, you can set polyphony to robots.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6ND-FOHtjqU&pp=ygUVTWlzZXJlcmUgbWVpIHZvY2Fsb2lk
Yes, if you were to rank the Narnia books on a scale of theological meaning, Last Battle could easily be ranked first. Its a philosophical novel, which makes it less good as a children's story, but arguable the best of the series in terms of philosophical content. Obviously it would compete with Wardrobe for that spot, but there is such an admix of paganism and English honor culture in Wardrobe that it is quite dubious theologically. And yes, the theological message of Last Battle could well be comforting in the right circumstances.
And no, JITTER DOLL is not to my taste, which was formed before electronic music really existed. Is it possible to measure the quality of that song in an objective way? In part, yes. For instance, there have been studies done comparing the melodic and harmonic complexity of pop songs over the last half century, and they show a steady decline into something simple and largely invariant. So, objective measurement is possible. The question is, is the thing it is measuring quality?
And I suppose that depends on what you think art is for. Does it exist to satiate or to reveal? If to satiate, then the corporate direction of art, music, literature, food, drink, etc. towards the simplest thing that reliably satiates represents an increase in quality. And in this regard we should note that if the aim is to reliably satiate regularly recurring appetites, then pornography is an obvious artistic avenue for the culture. And this clearly accounts for the schoolgirl fetish that runs through jpop, kpop, and anime.
If you think the purpose of art is to reveal, however, then art will demand much more from both the artist and the art lover. It will require stirring ourselves out of the rut of satiating art and pursuing something else. It will require making ourselves dissatisfied with what has be sating us, and going in search of something else that can show us a good that we have not seem before.
But unless that good which we seek is an objective quality whose worth goes beyond mere satiation, then our quest will end in nothing more than a new form of satiation. Which is to say that I don't have to be able to define the exact metric of artistic quality to believe that there is objective artistic good, or to strive to find it.
Before I read your article, here was my ranking of the "best":
The Horse and His Boy
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Prince Caspian
The Silver Chair
The Magician’s Nephew
The Last Battle
After I've read your article, I'd rank them this way:
The Horse and His Boy
The Silver Chair
Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Prince Caspian
The Magician’s Nephew
The Last Battle
Like you, I let my personal instincts influence my decision, and I put THAHB to the top, and it's personal taste that keeps VOTDT above TLTWATW for me--I think TLTWATW is the better book.
But an interesting article and not at all what I expected by the halfway mark. Interesting musings from an interesting starting point.
A few things in response:
1. I thought you might enjoy learning about this song by Phish, titled "Prince Caspian": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvWxvNYVF9A.
2. I haven't read the Narnia books in many years, though I devoured them over and over again as a child. Being of an Eastern faith, I had no idea of the Christian allegory. I'll be very curious to see how they read to me as an adult.
3. I might be an aberration, but I've actually left the music I loved as a teenager behind (as far as Western music is concerned). When I hear it now, I enjoy the nostalgia, but it's the music I came to in my twenties and thirties and even forties that sticks with me. That also goes for taste: I'm always finding I can expand mine if I'm willing to be uncomfortable for a little while or try things that I wouldn't have thought I might like. It doesn't always work, but it often does.
4. Finally, a resounding yes to this: To which the best answer I can think of is that it is better to be made happy by truthful things than by untruthful things, even if both the quality and quantity of happiness are the same. And yes, the truthful things are often more subtle and complex than the untruthful things. (I can't get that section to be italicized--argh!)
Thank you for another great post!
The thing that really dictates my musical taste is something weird in my brain that cannot abide anything percussive. Thus I tend to like forms that don't include a drum kit -- folk, baroque, bluegrass. This probably accounts from my not being much of a fan of the music of the period I grew up in, the 60s and 70s. All kind of circumstance, I think, can affect what forms of art (or food, or anything else) that our brains become habituated to.
Many people in the West miss the Christian allegory in the Narnia books as well, and some of them are horrified when they are told about it. I'm actually a bit surprised that Christian readers don't get more concerned about the pagan elements in Wardrobe, thought. After all, the god who dies and is reborn, thus bringing about the end of winter, is one that occurs over and over in many pagan mythologies, as is the God who appears on Earth disguised in animal form.
Perhaps it is those pagan elements that prevent people from immediately seeing the crucifixion allegory in Wardrobe.
I personally enjoyed The Magician's Nephew and would have rated it much higher. Maybe 5 or 4?
I personally liked the explanation of the creation of the world. It was absurdly creative like the lamppost explanation.
Maybe I enjoy whimsy a tad more. I will say that using Tolkien to say it wasn't allegorical enough is probably ill advised because I think Tolkien said he hated allegories and would argue against you.
If I had a disagreement with your rankings overall it would be that I think whimsy should count for something. I dont think it should be a negative especially in a children's book. Maybe that's the comedian in me. I find straight allegories to be boring which I think Tolkien might agree with me on.
Yes, anyone who enjoys worldbuilding for its own sake is going to enjoy The Magician's Nephew more than I do, and will rank Nephew higher as a consequence.
On Tolkien and allegory, my understanding of Tolkien's objection to Wardrobe was that it mixed so many different mythologies, which meant the worldbuilding was inconsistent. The appearance of Father Christmas in a land otherwise largely based on Greek myth is a good example of this. I care less about this than I think Tolkien did, but I do see it as part of the relative untidiness of Wardrobe compared to other books in the series.
As far as allegory is concerned, I think Lewis and Tolkien were being rather technical in their rejection of the term allegory. As literary scholars, they would be. Lewis's distinction that Wardrobe is a "supposal" of what Christ might be like in another land is, I think, a valid one. If it were an allegory, the fact that there is no incarnation in Narnia, and that Aslan is more a theophany than an incarnate creature, would make it a bad allegory. But as a supposal, it plays by its own rules. That's fine as far as it goes. There is a legitimate question to be asked, I suppose, about whether a reader might learn an incorrect Christology from Narnia because they do treat it as an allegory. But that question did not affect my ranking. It was the untidiness of the story that caused me to rank Wardrobe where I did.
As for whimsy, it counts a great deal for me, which is why I ranked Dawn Treader ahead of Silver Chair and The Horse and His Boy. So I'm not sure how I managed to give the impression that I was opposed to it. The opposite is the case.
Ah ok sounds good
Yes!! Dawn Treader has always been my favourite. The dark island section is one of the best scary scenes in children's literature. My sister ranked them recently in a YouTube video and put Dawn Treader second to last and Horse and his Boy first so we had a healthy disagreement about that.
Cool. Care to share a link to the video?
https://youtu.be/R90tQviRUA0?feature=shared
Very interesting thoughts; thank you!
Regarding "Magician's Nephew", as someone on the Tolkien side of the Lewis/Tolkien worldbuilding divide, I enjoy it for its own sake. I think it's a good children's story in itself. However, it's out of place in the Narnian series as a whole. We never see the Wood or any of the other worlds ever again; the Rings only show up as a minor plot point in "Last Battle". Lewis has tidied up a few points of his worldbuilding by introducing tons of new untold stories, in a book with a very different tone and setting than the rest of the series.
So, even if someone values worldbuilding and tidying up loose ends, I wouldn't recommend they start with "Magician's Nephew."
But regarding starting points... For myself, I started with "Horse and His Boy." I was in a phase of liking horses, so my parents decided I'd like that book, and they were right. Even looking back, I really feel it works. We meet the Pevensies knowing nothing about them, but Shasta doesn't either. We know next to nothing about Narnia, but Shasta doesn't either. We learn it as he does, and it works.
That's a good point. The Horse and His Boy is probably the most standalone of all of them, other than Wardrobe.
And yes, even in Nephew, when he was trying to clean up some of the worldbuilding after the fact, he was still worldbuilding on the fly, as he always did. I seem to remember reading somewhere that Wardrobe started with him getting a picture in his head of a faun and a lamppost in a wood. And very clearly he just added stuff in as he went, all the way through the series, and very little from one book ever showed up in another. He threw the parliament of owls into Prince Caspian for the sake of the pun and we never here from it again. All of which is just fine with me, but not what the modern fantasy reader seems to prefer.