oh, right, philology

I was having a bout of insomnia the other morning, so I reread The Magician's Nephew, which is soothing and familiar and gorgeous and also has Jadis of Charn, Queen of Queens, and I found myself thinking about how odd and interesting it is that two perfectly random working-class Londoners wind up being the first King and Queen of Narnia. I remember as a child finding that their names chimed strangely with the sort of name I was used to in history and high fantasy, King Frank and Queen Helen, not the kind of noble and unspellable appellation you usually see, it made for a tonal weirdness...

... and then the names I've read for years without ever really thinking about them hit my frontal cortex, and I recalled that names in C. S. Lewis are always chosen carefully. King Frank. As in honest. Sincere. A pun too obvious to notice. And Helen, of course, both because she is the most beautiful woman in that world-- she is, after all, the only human woman in it-- and as a subtle rebuke to Jadis' poisonous beauty. They're perfectly appropriate names, in one case literally straight out of epic, and he did it so subtly that it has taken me thirty years to figure it out.

Shout at him as I often do (and oh, do I), the man could write.