Sunday, May 14, 2017

The Matter of Aravis -- Conception

It started, I think, almost a year and a half ago.  I certainly don't remember any inkling of this idea before Ana Mardoll said in a post:
It's not that The Horse and His Boy could have been a better story with another author; it's that there's like four better stories in here and all of them would have required Lewis to let go of his virulent sexism and racism in order to get within throwing distance of any of them.
The underlining is something I added to draw attention to the key part of what set off the line of thinking.

Certainly that comment from Ana is what led to me writing:
I would like to put forth the possibility that they're all how it really happened and the problems of the work we have result from the fact that it combines the disparate narratives of various Women and their Horse allies from various points in Narnian (world, not country, who the hell names their country the same word as the word for the whole word?) history because a certain racist and sexist person couldn't believe that more than one brown Girl could possibly have had adventures of note with Talking Horses.

Or indeed that more than one brown girl could have had adventures of note period.

If we could disentangle the various narratives we might be able to piece together the many adventures of Mares and Girls that were had in those lands, with at least one of the Girls being named Aravis.
I never stopped thinking along those lines.  Closer to a year ago, I wrote:
I would like to revive my idea that this is an amalgamation of several stories because our dear narrator couldn't cope with how many female heroes on talking horses there were in wardrobe-world history, much less female people of note.

At least one of them was named Aravis, others might have had similar names, and by the time of the Rillian story we see such shades of in this bizarre forced together text it was just a case of:

Runaway Girl on a talking horse who doesn't want to reveal her real name: I'm Aravis.
Person who knows the stories of old: Oh, ha, ha. And I suppose that's Hwin you're riding.
Runaway Girl on a talking horse: However did you know?
What is the Rillian story?  Go and read Ana's post that started this all.

Anyway, the reason that I bring all of that up now is because I've finally gotten something that takes that interpretation into account written, and I wanted to let people know where it was coming from first.

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