A To Z Blogging Challenge 2024 - Villains! - J Is For Jadis

 

Jadis the White Witch is the main villain in the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. True, she only appears in two novels of the seven, The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe and The Magician’s Nephew, a prequel published later, but she is not forgotten. At one stage there is even a plot to bring her back. The nastiest villain to appear later is the Lady of the Green Kirtle, who has killed King Caspian’s Queen and kidnapped his son, but she only wants to marry the son and become Queen of Narnia. Jadis would laugh her head off at the notion of needing to get married to take power.

Let’s talk about Jadis in chronological order. In The Magician’s Nephew, set in the Victorian era, two children meet in London. Polly already lives there with her parents. Diggory has arrived recently, with his dying mother, to live with her brother Andrew(the magician of the title) and sister Letty, as his father is in India. Aunt Letty is all right, but Uncle Andrew is a crazy, experimenting with  inter-universe travel, using magical rings. He certainly isn’t interested in trying anything so dangerous himself, so uses first Polly, then Diggory.

They arrive in the Wood Between The Worlds, filled with ponds, each pond leading to a different world. As long as they are there, they decide to look around. Unfortunately, the first world they arrive in is the dead world of Charn. Well…not quite dead. 

In a hall filled with statues, Diggory’s curiosity lets him hammer a bell and one of the statues comes to life: Jadis.

Jadis had been a Queen in her time. She had fought her sister for the throne. Just in case, she learned something called the Deplorable Word, which would wipe out all life except her own. Having let her entire army be killed, Jadis faced her sister and… spoke the Deplorable Word, before sitting down and turning herself into a statue till she was woken. As far as she was concerned, it was worth wiping out her entire race if it left her as Queen of the world. When Diggory suggests it might be a bit unfair to the ordinary people who died, she says that as her people, they were bound to do what she wanted - even die for her. 

At this point, the children decide it might be smartest to escape, but she follows them into Victorian London, where she meets Uncle Andrew, decides he is a disappointment and goes out to get herself well equipped for her conquest of this world, starting with helping herself to jewellery and a hansom cab. Her driving through the streets on top of the cab while various Londoners enjoy the spectacle and a jeweller complains about her having stolen his goods is hilarious.

Diggory and Polly do their best to get her back to the Wood Between The Worlds, which they manage to do, but also carry along the cab driver, his horse and Uncle Andrew.

They witness the beginning of Narnia, as it is created by Aslan the Lion. Diggory, who has overheard his aunt say her sister needs a fruit from the Land of Youth to recover, takes it literally and asks Aslan for help. He is sent to fetch an apple from a sort of Garden of Eden, and encounters Jadis, who has taken an apple without permission and has become immortal. She has also become very white.

That scene is the last time we see her till The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe. She has taken over Narnia and made it always winter, never Christmas. There is a prophecy that she will be overcome when “sons of Adam” and “daughters of Eve” arrive, so she has been working hard to make sure it doesn’t happen. The inhabitants of Narnia are now Talking Animals and mythological creatures such as nymphs, river gods, fauns, centaurs and giants. 

You are probably familiar with the story, involving four young evacuees during World War II and Christian allegory, so I won’t go too much more into it. The White Witch gets what is coming to her, after killing Aslan, who is resurrected - this is a Christian novel, after all - and the children grow up in Narnia as Kings and Queens, before finding their way back to their own world and being children again.

Really, a woman who started her career by destroying her own people just so she could call herself Queen doesn’t deserve any sympathy.

But she is a splendid villain! 

Recommended if you enjoy audiobooks is The Magician’s Nephew read delightfully by Kenneth Branagh.