XPost: rec.arts.books.tolkien, alt.books.cs-lewis, rec.arts.books   
   XPost: rec.arts.books.childrens   
   From: tsbrueni@pop.dcn.davis.ca.us   
      
   Steuard Jensen wrote:   
      
   > Quoth nystulc@cs.com in article   
   > <1136955694.102035.8970@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com>:   
   > > Steuard Jensen wrote:   
   > > > That's one of the things that always feels like an inconsistency   
   > > > in Narnia to me.   
   >   
   > > > /The Silver Chair/ starts out with something of a surprise: when   
   > > > Eustace and Jill look at the crowd watching Caspian sail away, I   
   > > > believe that they see that only about 1 in 5 people in the crowd were   
   > > > human.  That's quite a reversal of the massive human majority   
   > > > suggested by /Prince Caspian/; I guess a whole lot of the Telmarines   
   > > > must have decided to leave Narnia, and that the Talking Beasts must   
   > > > have been breeding like rabbits (Talking Rabbits?).   
   >   
   > > Why is that a surprise?  It is made clear that, though Narnia is   
   > > properly ruled by human monarch, it is primarily a land of   
   > > non-humans.  At the end of Prince Caspian, this order is restored,   
   > > and most of the Telmarines are given a new home elsewhere by Aslan.   
   >   
   > The surprise is as much that there were so many Talking Beasts again   
   > as that there were so few humans.  In the space of a single human   
   > lifetime, they'd gone from "practically extinct" to "enormous   
   > crowds".  I find that odd, if not impossible.   
   >   
   > As for the humans, /Prince Caspian/ tells us that when the Telmarines   
   > were given the choice to live with the Talking Beasts or to leave,   
   > "Some of them, chiefly the young ones" were happy to stay, while "most   
   > of the older men" wanted to leave.  Even then, they were suspicious:   
   > "more than half of them turned up" to be sent away, but that wording   
   > implies that something close to half of them stayed anyway.  So I   
   > conclude that maybe 1/3 of the older Telmarines and the vast majority   
   > of the younger ones decided to stay in Narnia.  That's a big   
   > population drop, but given the demographics they'd probably be close   
   > to their prior population within a generation.   
   >   
   > So somehow, the nearly-full population of Telmarines who had hardly   
   > even believed in the Talking Beasts anymore (because they'd become so   
   > rare and hidden) were in the space of a generation outnumbered 5:1.   
   > That's weird.   
      
   Maybe the Talking Beasts have shorter life spans and therefore faster   
   reproductive cycles than humans.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)