The country of Calormen, located to the southeast of Narnia, appears twice in the seven Chronicles of Narnia books, but not once in the movies. It’s the stage for some of the most exciting parts of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia stories—and also some of the most controversial.
Throughout the only book where characters actually set foot in Calormen, The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis can’t seem to decide how to treat it. He describes it as “one of the wonders of the world” with “orange trees and lemon trees, roof-gardens, balconies, deep archways, pillared colonnades, spires, battlements, minarets, pinnacles…” And yet, the Calormene people “were not the fair-haired men of Narnia: they were dark, bearded men from Calormen, that great and cruel country” who smelled “of garlic and onions, their white eyes flashing dreadfully in their brown faces.”
Finally—and perhaps most ominously for a book series that is transparently a Christian allegory—“they have a god called Tash. They say he has four arms and the head of a vulture.”
***
I first read The Horse and His Boy when I am eight years old, and it quickly becomes my favorite of the Narnia books. I love Calormen. I love that the food there is like the food my family makes; that the men of Calormen wear turbans, like the central figures of my religion; that the main character is a brown-skinned girl—and both a warrior and storyteller, at that; and that her name, Aravis, with its short and simple spelling but decidedly non-Western sound, feels so much more like mine than Susan or Lucy ever did.
At eight years old, I’m too young to grasp that the food is implied to be unsavory, that the turbans belong to salacious, violent men, and that the warrior princess has to leave Calormen forever to become worthy—to become whitewashed.
“Oh the sweet air of Narnia!” Lewis has a character exclaim in The Horse and His Boy. “An hour’s life there is better than a thousand years in Calormen.”
***
Growing up, I make excuses for Lewis and the Calormenes’ smell and dubious morality, and I re-read The Horse and His Boy more times than I can count. I ignore the fact that on the internet, you will sometimes find the etymology of Calormen defined as /colored men/. To me, sometimes, Calormen feels more real than Narnia.
But Disney skips over the book when adapting the Narnia books, making three films focusing only on the four British Pevensie children.
(“I say,” Shasta exclaims in Chapter IV. “This is a wonderful place!”
“I daresay,” said Bree. “But I wish we were safely through it and out at the other side.”)
Instead, Disney makes The Prince of Persia (released in 2010, the same year as the third Narnia film, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader), which features a mostly all-white cast heavily coated in brown makeup. It stars a heavily stylized Jake Gyllenhaal, a presumably more palatable version of my ancestors, with Gemma Arterton as the sexualized “brown” princess with Persian magic.
A live-action Aladdin rumor starts making rounds, and online discourse begins—a slow, turbulent bubbling of concern. We all remember “It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home,” and, now an adult working as a movie reviewer, I write about this issue at length. Suddenly, the underlying contradiction of Calormen becomes impossible for me to ignore. What is Calormen if not just a more vicious Agrabah?
How do you love a book that hates you?
I read page after page about Lewis, trying to get a glimpse of what he really thought; who he really was. I read through Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters almost obsessively, as if they can explain Tash as anything other than a demon, or the Calormenes as anything other than villains—as if Lewis’ universe could ever reconcile Aslan and Tash, his culture and my culture, his vision and mine. As if there is a page somewhere where he explains why he wrote things this way—where he tells me he really loved Calormen all along.
I find Philip Pullman’s opinion of the series, of course, in articles such as “The Dark Side of Narnia” (“There is no doubt in my mind that it is one of the most ugly and poisonous things I’ve ever read.”) but also a surprisingly insightful line in the Calormen wiki—now gone from the page: “…the female protagonist is a Calormene noblewoman who comes to marry a prince of a more European ethnicity; a progressive and bold statement by Lewis in a time when mixed relationships were neither as common nor accepted as they have been in more recent years.”
In his book on The Last Battle, Andrew Howe writes: “Furthermore, nothing of any real significance regarding a strong dislike, or even suspicion, of Islam appears in either volume of The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, which cover 44 years of his life.”
“In our post-9/11 world, [Lewis] would, I am sure, want to reconsider this insensitivity,” Paul F. Ford writes in his Guide to the Magical World of C.S. Lewis, perhaps hopefully.
All weak defenses, but I admit I cling to them.
***
Unable to find a home in film or in existing fiction, the fictionalized East finds a home on fanfiction sites like Archive of Our Own, in the anonymity of screen names.
It spills out—both the love and the frustration.
A user by the name of Transposable_element explores Aravis’ culture shock in the face of Narnian beauty standards. “In Calormen there were many terms describing black hair,” they write, and describe a different sort of beauty in words Lewis never would have thought to use. “Jet (if shiny), coal (if soft), smoky (if brownish). Black with red highlights was called crimson. Black with blue highlights was called indigo, and greatly admired.”
A writer called Flourish goes beyond the oil on bread I once clung to, describing “a proper Calormene supper—chicken baked with onions, sumac, allspice, saffron and pine nuts, over soft flat bread, and kanafeh for afters.”
Elsewhere, sovay writes the name of the Calormene god, Tash, with diacritics— Taš. She says she likes it better that way. In her writing, she takes the vulture-headed god and embraces him, four arms and all.
She writes of “fair-skinned traders or adventurers in the markets…wearing her country’s clothing, always looking around them as though the stalls of dyed cotton and vegetables and copper vessels were some fabulous panoply unrolled for their pleasure, like a play.
She should feel sorry for them, born to a land unknown to Taš. Without his four arms to shield from danger in all directions, she could imagine a people turning instead to the very powers of chaos that beset them, making a cult of their wildness and unpredictability.”
I write 100,000 words and make Aravis an empress who never had to leave her land to be deemed worthy. Who has never felt that desperate urge to classify either Tash or Aslan as false and then worship the other.
Together, we reframe Calormen. We reinvent her.
***
In the story “Not A Tame Lion,” sovay tells of an encounter between a Calormene woman and a Narnian:
“Once… she had watched a brown-haired man in barbarian tunic and hose fold a beggar child’s hand over the glint of a silver crescent with a grave wink, like a street magician pulling a flower from behind her ear, and felt oddly reassured, as if a ghoul had smiled and shown ordinary human teeth.
Then she had watched him rise to his feet and, hearing the prayer-call from the temple at the gong of noon, pull as wry a face as if he had drunk vinegar, sling an arm around the shoulders of his sunburnt countryman, and hurry them both away laughing.”
C.S. Lewis, now dead, cannot defend himself. Cannot comfort me and say that he did not mean it. Cannot write an eighth book where he asserts that Calormenes smell like rosewater.
I think of the Narnian man sovay describes—of the way Susan and Edmund Pevensie might have experienced Calormen, and therefore how Lewis himself might have experienced it. I ask myself how he could have seen so little in a country where I saw so much.
These days, I like to think of Lewis as a kindly, old traveler who jotted down some well-intentioned notes, but like most Western tourists, missed too much of what makes the East beautiful.
Don’t worry, Mr. Lewis. We are filling in the blanks for you.
Nasim Mansuri is a writer, editor, and engineer living in the Boston area. Born to a Middle Eastern and Latin American family, she grew up in Paraguay and has lived in many different countries throughout her early twenties. In her spare time, Nasim writes fanfiction and adores a chubby calico cat. You can find her on Twitter and practically every other platform as @nasimwrites.
Thank you for this article! Calormen also seemed much more interesting than Narnia to me, and The Horse and his boy was also my favorite Narnia story.
If you ever do want to further ruin your opinion of C.S. Lewis, read the first few chapters of The Pilgrim’s Regress. I read those bits when I was probably seven or eight years old, and it was the first time in my life when I knew an author had written something without ever thinking that someone like me might ever read it.
I remember I was most angry when in The Last Battle, Aslan welcomes a Calormenean soldier, saying all true prayers, whoever they were spoken to, went to him, and all false prayers, whoever they were spoken to, went to Tash. I saw Lewis’s good intentions in writing this, perhaps it was really progressive for his time, but to me it spelled conceit. I wanted nothing of his Aslan. I want nothing of his Jesus.
But then, perhaps it never occurred to Lewis that his works might be read by non-Christians. Globalisation has done a great thing: people who once were so far away as to be the stuff of stories are now our neighbours. We no longer treat them as strangers, and we get to hear them tell their own stories.
Just wanted to comment on one thing.
You write that “Disney skips over the book when adapting the Narnia books”. I don’t think that’s accurate.
Disney went with the order of publication, not the chronological order. If the latter had been the case, they’d have had to start with The Magician’s Nephew.
The Horse and His Boy is the fifth Narnia book (in publishing order) and thus would be expected to be filmed after The Silver Chair. Well, it seems that plans even for this fourth moving have now been scrapped.
I would really like to finally see a good Narnia adaptation of all books; we’ll if and when that will happen.
I also think that telling the story in publication order is a good choice.
It makes sense, for a variety of reasons, to start with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
It also makes sense, IMHO, to keep the first four books (in publication order) together, as they form a kind of narrative sequence (with the MCs slowly being exchanged).
The remaining three books are somewhat different, each in their own respect:
– The Horse and His Boy fleshes out this other world, beyond Narnia, and beyond the familiar cast (sure, the Pevensie kids -no longer kids- do show up, but they aren’t the main focus)
– The Magician’s Nephew further adds depth (and a good deal of sense of wonder, I’d argue) by providing a fascinating backstory of how things came to be, and showing the existence of multiverse (to be accessed in the Wood Between the Worlds)
– Finally, The Last Battle caps off the entire saga, bringing together characters from all prior books.
Hmm. Fascinating and enlightening.
I had never considered “Calormen” etymology to refer to color; rather, I read it as temperature – “calor” ==> “hot”.
Thank you for this essay!
Thank you for this essay and your perspective.
I admit these were things I never would have thought of growing up, partly because Narnia and everything in the story was fictional and I always though of it as such.
It is certainly important to reconsider now.
The Horse and His Boy has been my favorite for a while. I loved the uniqueness of the story and location; I loved the horses (I was a horse girl!) and the desert and the very atmospheric landscapes. Plus the secret plots and the race against time.
Prevalence of western beauty standards in a culture super populated by talking animals, dwarves, giants, etc is, well, obviously less of a big deal than representation of close analogues to real world groups. Unless I’ve missed something, there aren’t an awful lot of young Beavers pining for better representation of themselves.
It does speak though, I think, to the fact that Lewis had a fairly specific idea in his head of what “normal,” and “beautiful,” looked like, and wasn’t terribly interested in challenging it.
These days, I like to think of Lewis as a kindly, old traveler who jotted down some well-intentioned notes, but like most Western tourists, missed too much of what makes the East beautiful.
I love this image of Lewis as misapprehending traveler. It makes me want the story which is the interplay between the Baedeker and the real thing.
(This is a beautiful essay.)
The “calor=hot” etymology is Lewis’s explanation, I am nearly sure. I certainly did not think of it myself as I distinctly remember thinking, “That just spoils it.” (Though not as badly as “colored men” would have done!)
Pagan. Aravis claims descent from a god, and tells her father she will perform sacrifices to Zardeenah, Lady of the Night. Calormen could not be more transparently based on the Arabian Nights, but it’s a version of the Arabian Nights in which Islam never happened.
I’m more bothered by the characterisation of Tash in The Last Battle. It’s asking a bit much to say the Calormenes are literally worshipping the Devil without realising it.
(And I don’t think Calormen is a particularly vicious civilisation, by historical standards. If it had been closely based on the Ottoman Empire, for example, they would be launching amphibious slave raids on their northern neighbours, importing black slaves from the south, requiring their Christian subjects to pay a tax in children, imprison the rulers sons in the Gilded Cage, and the first act of any new ruler would be to have his brothers strangled to prevent challenges to the Throne. Lewis’s problem is that as his non-Christian civilisation is also a non-European one it is not obvious whether he is comparing Christian with non-Christian or European with non-European. If only he had been writing for an Ethiopian audience, Calormen might have been to the north and all the Archenlanders and human Narnians black.)
Having read quite a bit of Lewis, I can say with confidence he was not speaking about Islam or critiquing Middle Eastern culture in any way. Lewis and Tolkien wrote extensively in essay form on their hatred of burying their meaning in analogy, or masking their messaging in their stories; they both considered it a very low form of composition. Michael Ward dispels the modern view on the Calormen very clearly and simply. Additionally, Lewis considered Islam a valid form of religion (as opposed to simple idolatry) and spoke well of it, though not elevating it to the level of Christianity or Judaism. It’s clear that Lewis didn’t anticipate how his books would come to be interpreted, but it’s obvious from his other writing that he certainly didn’t intend Calormen as a stand-in for Muslim.
Excellent essay. I appreciate that you don’t expect Lewis to have today’s sensibilities. And The Horse and His Boy is still my favorite of the Narnia books too.
I adored all the books when I was a kid, and never really thought of Calormen as anything more than different. I grew up with Sinbad, Arabian Nights, Kismet and all the other forms of media that depicted Persia and the whole Middle East as a magical, wondrous place full of ancient cities and wild adventure. Calormen seemed to continue that tradition for me. Much as I wanted desperately to visit Narnia, I really wanted to see Calormen, Archenland, and all the other countries mentioned in the books.
A Horse and his Boy was always my favorite of the Narnia books, but the bit where Shasta has British-like Narnian food for the first time after growing up on the cuisine of Calormen always struck me as the most unrealistic thing in the book. You know that after a lifetime of vegetables and healthy oils, the first thing Shasta would have done after a feast of Cheesy Butter Dairy Fats is throw up outside a beaver dam.
As a real life example, when my wife first came to America as a child, she couldn’t eat anything for two months because everything and everyone smelled like milk and rotten meat. poor Shasta and Arabist. They probably thought the talking animals and lack of slavery were pretty cool, but they struggled to find anything decent to eat.
An Englishman complaining about foreign food being “unsavory” is, perhaps, one of the most unwittingly ironic statement that could be made.
I’ve always understood Calormen to be based not on the contemporary or even the medieval Middle East, but on pre-Islamic Babylon and, I suppose, pre-Judean Canaan, with pagan gods that demand human sacrifice. Shasta does think the Narnians’ faces are “nicer” when he encounters them, but it’s not really clear whether that’s a result of their features or their attitude. If someone wrote this story today they’d have to be very careful about how race is handled, because we have become very sensitive about issues of race over the last 60+ years. But the book is not about race, it’s about escape from an oppressive society and finding one’s roots; and that story has wide appeal.
@10, It’s asking a bit much to say the Calormenes are literally worshipping the Devil without realising it: The Narnians in the same story are willing to worship a donkey that never speaks, covered in a hacked-up lion skin. That was what made The Last Battle my least favorite of the series as a child. But if you can accept that, the idea that the Calormenes worship the Devil should be a piece of cake. Perhaps many of them do realize Tash is evil but don’t see an alternative; or have a complex theology that explains the evil away.
@17 I suppose, although Tash must have had to keep up the deception for a lot longer than Shift. Well, that was my least favourite book of the series as well.
Excellently written. I’m glad I’ve already discovered so much of the Calormene-world-building on AO3, there’s some really thoughtful stuff on there (yours included).
Yes, Lewis was of his time, and perhaps a bit too dismissive and careless when he was writing cultures other than pure-Narnia. But at least he’s left us the most amazing sandbox to play in.
I really enjoyed this essay.
I grew up with Narnia, even having TLTW&TW and Prince Caspian read to us at school, but at some point in early adulthood fell out of love with them. Not for the reasons which troubled you–I think I’d be much more attuned to those issues now–but because it all began to seem too preachy and too obviously a Christian allegory (or do I mean a parable?).
It’s interesting that Tolkien could never give the Narnia books the glowing praise that Lewis gave LOTR. Tolkien, though every bit as devout a Christian as Lewis, was much less given to preaching or allegory (or is much more subtle about it!). Pity, then, that LOTR is arguably just as prone to racism and sexism.
I love this piece! Just plain love it! The sense we get of reading with enthusiasm, empathy and growing awareness is luminous.
I think CS Lewis and Tolkien were aware of their own short sightedness. I’ve practiced in book clubs what I’ve heard they did, read more old books (>100 years old) than new books. The reason being that the flaws in their thinking are more obvious to us than contemporary books and we can learn from them.
‘Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. … To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.’ CS Lewis
Where does one access this fan fiction. I have looked but it is not very obvious. Can someone provide some links?
Thank you for this incredible essay. I’m grateful we live in a time when fantasy literature can better reflect the world we live in, and celebrate diverse authors and perspectives. I read this as a deeply thoughtful and generous reflection on Lewis’ work despite it’s shortcomings. To be honest, I’m perplexed by some reader comments that seem to defend Lewis’ intentions. I first read and fell in love with the Chronicles of Narnia as a brown skinned 9 year old Filipina American kid who was just beginning to question the devout Catholic practices of my family. Even at that age I felt torn by a series I loved. I saw myself and my family physically more in Aravis more than Lucy, yet the book ultimately was rooting for those who followed Aslan/Jesus and Narnia/Western Europe, much like the colonial era introduced religion of my parents. I loved how Aravis was depicted as strong, capable, and brave, but ultimately she had to migrate from her community and leave her culture and everyone and everything (and tastier foods) behind. The affirmation of Western beauty standards in Narnia also felt too true to life. “Fair skin” humans were the good, the beautiful, the saved. Whether Lewis meant Calormen as hot temperatures or as skin tone, the association with people of darker complexions, or hotter places, or even of hot temperaments, the term feels racialized. Coincidence perhaps, but it was around the age of reading this that my mom began berating me to stay out of the sun so I wouldn’t get browner, a byproduct of imposed colonial beauty standards. Thank goodness for the greater representation in literature today.
@24 — ArchiveOfOurOwn.org is a vast reservoir of fanfic. I found:
Transposable_element
“North and South” by Flourish.
Let me know if you need help finding more, but those links should show you around a bit.