The Wooden Shield of Mars
Prince Caspian
Above all, take the shield of faith.[1]
Ephesians 6:16
Star Wars is one of the most famous films ever made. Part of its success is its great soundtrack by John Williams. Williams based it on the Mars movement of The Planets Suite, which Gustav Holst composed between 1914 and 1916.
Holst described Mars as “the Bringer of War,” and his Mars music is full of threatening drums and blaring brass. It has a pounding beat and is absolutely deafening. It’s a brilliant, terrifying piece.
When C. S. Lewis heard The Planets Suite, he thought the music for Mars was “brutal and ferocious.”[2] He admired what Holst had done, but he also felt there were other aspects of Mars that were worth thinking about, not just the violent side.
Lewis on Mars
The name Lewis means “famous warrior,” and Lewis had—very appropriately—become interested in Mars at an early age. When he was only about six years old, he began to write a short story called “To Mars and Back.” When he was forty, he finally finished it! By then it had changed a good deal: it was now a full-length novel called Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in his Ransom Trilogy of interplanetary adventures.
The story is set on Mars, which Lewis renames Malacandra. But Lewis doesn’t just use Mars for the setting. He uses “Martianity” (as he called it) throughout the whole tale, “emotionally and atmospherically, as well as logically.”[3]
At the end of the Ransom Trilogy, Mars descends to Earth and makes people martial. One of these people is called Mark, a name meaning “martial, warlike.” Mark becomes not “brutal and ferocious” but strong, disciplined, and courageous.
Another character in the story becomes Martial as he remembers the battles he has fought in. He recalls hearing “the click-click of steel points in wooden shields.”[4]
Wooden shields are key to how Lewis understood the Martial spirit. Shields are obviously connected with Mars because they are weapons, the tools of battle. Less obviously, but no less importantly, they are connected with Mars because they are wooden. Mars had a special relationship with the woods. Why? Well, think of the third month of the year.
The third month is called March because Mars made his influence particularly felt at that time of year, according to pre-Copernican astronomers. That is the month when the woods come back to life after winter and regain their leaves.
This explains the two main themes running through Prince Caspian. On the one hand, it is a war story. On the other hand, it is a story about woods and forests. Aslan, as we shall see, has a central part to play in both strands of the story.
Mars on the March
In Prince Caspian, the four Pevensie children find that they have arrived in Narnia “in the middle of a war.”[5] It is “the great War of Deliverance,”[6] as it is referred to in a later Chronicle, or simply the “Civil War” in Lewis’s “Outline of Narnian History.” The war is being fought “to drive Miraz out of Narnia”[7] and restore the kingdom to Caspian.
Glenstorm the centaur tells Caspian, “I and my sons are ready for war. When is the battle to be joined?” Caspian had not “really been thinking of a war.” Glenstorm tells him, “The time is ripe. I watch the skies. . . . Tarva and Alambil have met in the halls of high heaven.”[8]
This refers to the conjunction of two planets—“Tarva, the Lord of Victory,” and “Alambil, the Lady of Peace.”[9] Caspian has already seen this conjunction with his tutor, Dr. Cornelius, at nighttime from the top of a tower. (These two planets are the first thing moviegoers see in the film version of Prince Caspian—an excellent decision on the part of the director.)
In his book on the literature of the sixteenth century, Lewis quotes an author who wrote, “I know by the course of the planettes that there is a Knyght comynge.”[10] In Prince Caspian, Lewis dramatizes that very thing. Dr. Cornelius tells Caspian that the meeting of these two planets in the night sky “is fortunate and means some great good for the sad realm of Narnia.”[11] It is fortunate because it means that Peter, the knight, is coming, who will help bring victory and restore peace to Narnia.
Caspian remembers this planetary conjunction when Glenstorm, a stargazer, reminds him about it. He realizes it is “quite possible that they might win a war and quite certain that they must wage one.”[12] He therefore summons a council of war. The council authorizes action, and Caspian leads the skirmishing forces as they engage the army of Miraz, Caspian’s murderous uncle who has wrongly seized the Narnian throne.
Once the Pevensies arrive in Narnia, Peter challenges Miraz to “monomachy”[13] (single combat). Miraz is killed, not by Peter as it turns out, but by one of his own men, Glozelle, after which full battle is joined.
In addition to these important military events in the story, numerous other episodes are included in Prince Caspian: the children’s rediscovery of their armor, the rescue of the dwarf from the soldiers, the swordsmanship and archery test, the arrow attack on the children in the wood, the fight with the werewolf and the hag. The cast list consists largely of military figures: armies, warriors, messengers, enemies, captains, sentries, sentinels, knights, and scouts. Caspian’s horse, Destrier, has a special connection to Mars because a destrier is a warhorse or charger. Queen Prunaprismia’s name comes from a Charles Dickens character who is always saying “prunes and prism” and who is called—wait for it!—Mrs. General.[14]
All sorts of different armor and weapons are mentioned in the course of the story: mail shirts, helmets, horns, hauberks, daggers, bows, swords, and shields. Attacks, salutes, and sorties are some of the military actions that take place in a variety of military settings: battlements, strongholds, towers, castles, and camps.
These details suggest that Lewis wanted to create a Martial atmosphere, and in fact, the word martial appears twice in Prince Caspian, the only Chronicle in which it occurs at all. Reepicheep is described as a “martial mouse” and Miraz worries about his “martial policy.”[15]
The influence of Mars is suggested also when we hear that some kind of “magic in the air”[16] has possibly saved Susan’s bowstring from perishing. As Edmund breathes this atmosphere, he finds that “the air of Narnia” brings “all his old battles . . . back to him.”[17] Caspian begins “to harden” as he sleeps “under the stars,”[18] receiving the “hard virtue of Mars.”[19]
But Caspian doesn’t harden into a brutal warrior. He becomes a knight, a particular kind of warrior—disciplined, gallant, self-controlled. Trufflehunter, Trumpkin, and Reepicheep also become knights. In fact, knights appear all over this story! Edmund mentions “knights-errant.”[20] In the ruins of Cair Paravel we see “rich suits of armor, like knights guarding the treasures.”[21] Edmund is “Knight of the Noble Order of the Table,” a “very dangerous knight.”[22] Even the chess piece discovered at the start of the story is a chess-knight.
Lewis loved a poem called the Knight’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400) in part, he said, because “the character and influence of the planets are worked into the Knight’s Tale.”[23] Chaucer hadn’t just put the planetary characters into his cast list; he had woven their effects into the plot. For example, the climax of the poem happens on a Tuesday to show that Mars is especially at work—Tuesday being Mars’s day, as we discussed in chapter 3.
Lewis imitates Chaucer in the way he tells this Narnian story of knighthood. Peter, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Lion, is the model of true knightly behavior. He is strong enough to defeat the treacherous Sopespian but gentle enough to kiss the furry head of the badger. He has physical courage (risking his body in combat) but also takes care to remember seemingly unimportant traditions, such as the Bears’ hereditary right to be marshals (a term that is itself a Martial pun!).
Peter shows true knightly self-control during his single combat with Miraz. When Miraz trips and falls, Peter refuses to attack him while he is down. This annoys Edmund, who is watching from the sidelines. Edmund says: “Oh, bother, bother, bother. Need he be as gentlemanly as all that? I suppose he must. Comes of being a Knight and a High King.”[24]
Lewis is trying to show us the principles of knightly behavior that he had written about in his academic works. He thought the old ideal of knighthood combined “morality up to the highest self-sacrifice and manners down to the smallest gracefulness in etiquette.”[25] Lewis had fought as a soldier in the First World War, but he hated bloodthirstiness. War was sometimes regrettably necessary, he thought, but it should never become an excuse for mindless violence—conducted with a sort of macho, Rambo, slash-and-burn attitude. No, the true warrior should be gentle as well as strong, disciplined as well as fierce.
Military discipline is seen in the way armies move. They don’t just walk, and they certainly do not slouch. They march! They move in step to a rhythm with their backs straight and their heads up. This very unnatural way of walking developed for a reason. It helps soldiers feel in their bones the need for physical self-control. It helps prevent the army from becoming a disorderly rabble.
Prince Caspian contains much marching. Peter says, “On the march.” Trumpkin says, “I’d as soon march as stand here talking.” Aslan’s How is “half a day’s march” from the Fords of Beruna. Edmund is “Count of the Western March.”[26] And this neatly brings us to March in the other sense—the month in springtime when the woods come back to life.
Mars in the Month of March
March is the only month named after a planet. And it is interesting that the only Narnian month we ever hear about in any of the Chronicles is “Greenroof”[27]—the month during which all the events of Prince Caspian take place.
The reason for the connection with March is that Mars was not always and only associated with war, but was also responsible (under God) for bringing growth and greenness to trees and indeed all kinds of vegetation. In this capacity, Mars was known as Mars Silvanus. The word silvan means “related to trees.” That is why Lewis puts silvans as well as dryads and hamadryads (different kinds of tree spirit) into Prince Caspian. The silvan aspect of Mars also features strongly in Out of the Silent Planet, so Lewis obviously thought it was an essential component of the Martial influence.
When the children first arrive in Narnia, they land “in a woody place—such a woody place that branches were sticking into them and there was hardly room to move.” Peter exclaims, “I can’t see a yard in all these trees” for the wood is “thick and tangled,” forcing them to “stoop under branches and climb over branches” and blunder “through great masses of stuff like rhododendrons.”[28]
Caspian and Dr. Cornelius can’t clearly see the conjunction of Tarva and Alambil because a tree is in the way. Caspian comes from a race “who cut down trees wherever they could and were at war with all wild things; and though he himself might be unlike other Telmarines, the trees could not be expected to know this.”[29] Trufflehunter regrets that they cannot “wake the spirits of these trees,” for “once the Trees moved in anger, our enemies would go mad with fright.”[30]
Aslan’s How now stands in the middle of the Great Woods, and Caspian’s army flees there for safety. Lucy tries to wake the trees in chapter 9, but fails. In chapter 10 the children’s progress is hampered by the fir wood, though it provides them with cover when they have to run from the arrows of Miraz’s sentries. Later, Lucy finds the trees awake in the presence of Aslan.
The theme reaches its high point when the awakened trees plunge through Peter’s army to pursue the Telmarines. The two sides of Mars (the military side and the silvan side) now come together:
Have you ever stood at the edge of a great wood on a high ridge when a wild southwester broke over it in full fury on an autumn evening? Imagine that sound. And then imagine that the wood, instead of being fixed to one place, was rushing at you; and was no longer trees but huge people; yet still like trees because their long arms waved like branches and their heads tossed and leaves fell round them in showers.
Appalled by this onslaught, the Telmarines “flung down their weapons, shrieking, ‘The Wood! The Wood! The end of the world!’”[31] They rush to the river, only to find their escape route destroyed: sprouting ivy has pulled down the bridge.
In the final chapter, at night, the trees come forward, throwing off spare strands and fingers, to form a great woodland bonfire. The battle is now over, and Narnia is restored to a “divinely comfortable”[32] state. Tarva, the Lord of Victory, has indeed saluted Alambil, the Lady of Peace.
Back to Bacchus
The war imagery and the woodland imagery show that Lewis deliberately structured Prince Caspian so that it would have Mars as its secret inner meaning, its kappa element, its unifying atmosphere. But if there is any doubt, we should think about Bacchus.
Bacchus, as I mentioned in chapter 1, always seemed to me—as I know he seemed to many other readers—a strange character to meet in Narnia. Why did he turn up and make everyone merry with wine? What was Lewis playing at?
It becomes clear when we see that Bacchus is another aspect of the Martial theme. In ancient Rome, the Festival of Mars began on the first day of March and lasted for over three weeks. Bacchanalian festivities (ceremonies celebrating Bacchus) were part of that festival, taking place on the sixteenth and seventeenth days of the month.
Lewis puts Bacchus into Prince Caspian for the same kind of reason that he put Father Christmas into The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Bacchus is a character who helps personify the planet that provides the secret theme. On the face of things, he doesn’t belong; but when you have grasped “the inward significance of the whole work,”[33] he makes perfect sense.
Hearing the Silent Music of Mars
The most obvious reason Lewis chose to shape Prince Caspian this way is because he thought people needed to be reminded of the Christian ideal of knighthood. In Mere Christianity Lewis writes that “the idea of the knight—the Christian in arms for the defence of a good cause—is one of the great Christian ideas.”[34]
Lewis lived through two world wars, and he saw how necessary it was to stand up to aggressive dictators, particularly Hitler and the evil of Nazi Germany. And he wasn’t the only British person to look to the imagery of Mars when thinking about the war. Winston Churchill, who was prime minister of Great Britain during World War II, once gave a speech in which he said that Nazi power would overrun the whole of Europe unless “by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we rise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden times.”[35]
It is necessary at times, Lewis thought, to take up arms against evil. Sometimes the weapons are literal weapons—swords and shields—and sometimes they are spiritual. In the Bible, the apostle Paul speaks of the Christian life in terms of soldiering. He encourages Timothy to be “a good soldier of Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:3), and he urges people to “put on the whole armor of God” (Ephesians 6:11).
One particular piece of armor is the shield of faith, and it is interesting that Lewis makes special mention of Peter’s shield during the single combat. “Peter’s not using his shield properly,” says Edmund. That’s because Miraz put “the full weight of his shoulder on my shield,” Peter explains, “and the rim of the shield drove into my wrist.” Edmund helps bind up Peter’s wrist, and “the new bout went well” because “Peter now seemed to be able to make some use of his shield.”[36]
Lewis never makes it explicit that Peter’s shield is the shield of faith, but in one of his academic books he draws special attention to the fact that the “knight of faith” has as his greatest weapon “not his sword but his shield”[37] before quoting the passage in Ephesians 6 where the apostle Paul mentions this spiritual weapon.
Paul once preached in Athens at a place called Mars Hill (Acts 17:19-34). In his sermon, he said God is the one in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). And this is what Lewis believed too. Because we exist in God, we sometimes find it hard to recognize Him. Surrounded and upheld by Him, we often overlook Him!
Lewis was trying to convey this overlookable aspect of God’s nature when he structured the Narnia stories out of planetary imagery. The children in Prince Caspian don’t realize that they exist “in Mars”—Mars used as a symbol for God. They don’t understand that the reason they are involved in war is because Mars is in charge. They don’t recognize that the reason the trees come alive is because Mars Silvanus is breathing through the woods. They don’t realize that all sorts of seemingly random details—like the rediscovered chess-knight—are present because the Knight of all knights is having his day.
However, they can see Aslan, and in Aslan they see this Martial spirit personified. They see Mars incarnated, made flesh. Lewis makes this quite clear, I think, in the way he portrays Aslan in Prince Caspian. Aslan is warlike in this story. His great thundering war cry in chapter 11 (“The Lion Roars”) signals that the Narnian lord of hosts is at the heart of this war against the powers of darkness:
Aslan, who seemed larger than before, lifted his head, shook his mane, and roared.
The sound, deep and throbbing at first like an organ beginning on a low note, rose and became louder, and then far louder again, till the earth and air were shaking with it. It rose up from that hill and floated across all Narnia. Down in Miraz’s camp men woke, stared palely in one another’s faces, and grasped their weapons. Down below that in the Great River, now at its coldest hour, the heads and shoulders of the nymphs, and the great weedy-bearded head of the river-god, rose from the water. Beyond it, in every field and wood, the alert ears of rabbits rose from their holes, the sleepy heads of birds came out from under wings, owls hooted, vixens barked, hedgehogs grunted, the trees stirred.[38]
This is Aslan’s most warlike moment in the story. Interestingly, his roar not only prepares everyone for battle, it also makes the trees stir.
As well as representing the military side of Mars, then, Aslan represents the woodland side. He can wake the trees—something Lucy had tried to do but failed because she was on her own. Only when Lucy is with Aslan do the trees come alive and start moving. Aslan is, so to speak, the true Mars Silvanus. In the Bible, “the trees of the field . . . clap their hands” for joy when God’s will is done (Isaiah 55:12). Lewis suggests something similar when all the Narnian trees start worshiping Aslan:
Pale birch-girls were tossing their heads, willow-women pushed back their hair from their brooding faces to gaze on Aslan, the queenly beeches stood still and adored him, shaggy oak-men, lean and melancholy elms, shock-headed hollies (dark themselves, but their wives all bright with berries) and gay rowans, all bowed and rose again, shouting, “Aslan, Aslan!” in their various husky or creaking or wave-like voices.[39]
Just as Aslan embodies the kingly spirit of Jupiter in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so he embodies the spirit of Mars in Prince Caspian. He sums up in his own person the spirit that is spread abroad in the rest of the story—a story of boys hardening into knights and of girls romping in Bacchanalian revelry with the swaying trees and the growing vines.
A Different Kind of Turkish Delight
The very last words of the story are spoken by Edmund: “Bother!” he says. “I’ve left my new torch in Narnia.[40]”
The electric torch that Edmund was given as a birthday present turns out to be quite important at the start of the adventure. The children can’t make sticks burn as torches when they go into the dark treasure chamber of the castle, so they use Edmund’s battery torch instead.
Lewis is having a private joke here. He knew some words in Arabic and related languages. The word aslan, in fact, is the Turkish for “lion.” And the Arabic word for “torch” means not only torch, but also . . . “Mars.”
And if that is an accident, my name is Reepicheep!