Strangely, I received an email from Amazon yesterday asking me to rate my transaction 'Sisters of Sinai'......as I had not received anything from them and was unsure as to the status of my order (see earlier post), I immediately went online and noted that that order appeared to be dead. Somewhat irritated, I logged on to The Book Depository and promptly ordered a copy from them. Hopefully it will arrive before too long - the BD are usually pretty good. Still, I originally ordered it from the BD through the agency of Amazon at £14.39: I am paying £15.64 to get it direct from the BD! If I had known that I would have had to wait, I would have gone directly to the BD in the first place!!! And will do in the future.
Whilst we were away in Venice, I managed to miss a programme on the BBC called 'The Narnia Code'. The other night, I caught up with it on BBC iPlayer (what a useful asset that is!) Whilst the programme was, in effect, a huge plug for Dr Michael Ward's book 'Planet Narnia' (not that I have a problem with that - it's wonderful when someone's PhD research is truly commercially viable), it laid out the intriguing notion that the seven chronicles of Narnia by C.S.Lewis contained symbolism found within medieval cosmological theory. Apparently the idea came to Dr Ward late one night when he was reading one of Lewis's poems containing a couple of lines that referred to the imagined attributes of Jupiter, and it immediately struck him that those lines summed up, in a nutshell, the plot of 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe'.
Excited by his insight, he examined the qualities of the other members of the medieval cosmic hierarchy - the sun, the moon, mercury, venus, mars and saturn - and discovered that the writing contained in the other six Narnia books was indeed richly symbolic of those heavenly bodies. It was all a bit of a tease though: we found out that, for example, 'The Voyage of the Dawn Treader' alluded to 'Sol' - the sun, with its imagery of dawns, dragons and the eastern horizon, and that 'The Silver Chair', where the prince is thought to be a lunatic, is the 'Luna' or 'moon book'. 'Prince Caspian', with its themes of war, is the 'Mars book', who was also imagined to be the deity connected with woods and forests, hence the emphasis on the tree symbolism in that volume. I would have been fascinated to find out more and it was hinted that the theory was fully extrapolated....in the book! Grrr! Something else I'll just have to buy.....
It did occur to me, as it obviously did to the makers of the programme, that Holst's 'Planet' suite (used as a soundtrack) fits quite nicely alongside Dr Ward's theory, but maybe that, too, is tackled in the book.
**update: received an email from the Book Depository telling me that my order couldn't be fulfilled and so they were refunding my money. So why in Sam Hill wasn't the book flagged up as 'out-of-stock' when I placed my order? Oooooh!!!**
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