A To Z Blogging Challenge 2024 - Villains! - L Is For Lady Of The Green Kirtle and Loki

 The Lady of the Green Kirtle appears in C.S Lewis’s Narnia novel The Silver Chair. We don’t find out where she originally comes from, but she is ruling Underland, enslaving the gnomes who live there. 

At this stage, Prince Caspian, hero of two previous books, Prince Caspian and The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, is King, and an old man. His beloved wife is killed by a giant green snake while in the forest and his son Rilian disappears after going to find out what happened. 

The two child heroes of this novel, Jill and Eustace, are drawn from their boarding school, where both have been bullied, to find Rilian. They are accompanied by Puddleglum, a Marshwiggle, part of a race of pessimistic beings. His people think he is rather too cheerful! 

Along the way, they meet the beautiful Lady and her accompanying knight in black armour, who doesn’t say a word. She advises them to go to a nearby castle of giants, for the Autumn feast. Not nice, Lady of the Green Kirtle. It turns out that they have their own version of To Serve Man - a recipe book. 

Escaping, they end up in the Lady’s realm underground, from which she is planning to invade Narnia, with Rilian - the black knight they saw before - as her general, then become his Queen. Rilian has, in fact, been brainwashed by a spell. He tells the children and Puddleglum that one hour a day he will go crazy and must be tied to a silver chair for everyone else’s sake. They must not release him, whatever he says.

In fact, that one hour a day is when he overcomes his brainwashing. He begs them to release him, in the name of Aslan. As they have been told to do what is asked of them in Aslan’s name, they release him. He destroys the silver chair. The Lady arrives and tries to persuade them that where they are is reality and  Narnia and the sun and sky are imaginary. Puddleglum tells her that even if what she says is true, he would much rather believe in Narnia than her so-called reality. She tries to brainwash them with a green smoke, which Puddleglum stops. When she turns into the giant green snake, Rilian recognises her as his mother’s killer, and uses his sword to kill her. 

The gnomes thank the adventurers for freeing them and go down to their home realm. 

Rilian does have just enough time to see his father before Caspian dies.

There are quite a few fans who think the Lady is Jadis, but C.S. Lewis never said so, or even hinted at it. However, the BBC TV miniseries did have the same actress, Barbara Kellerman, in both roles. 

What do you think?

L is for Loki. In Norse mythology, he is - as Neil Gaiman says in his book Norse Mythology…complicated. Sometimes a villain, sometimes just a trickster - one who fixes the gods’ problems. True, sometimes those are problems he caused in the first place, but not always. 

As far as I know, there weren’t any temples to him or worship. But we don’t know much; Norse myths are written down in the Eddas, by Christians. There are only a few left. You can probably read them in one volume. 

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Loki’s children by his wife, Sigyn, were normal, but his other partner, Angrboda, gave him three scary children, the Fenris wolf, Jormungandr, the world serpent, wrapped around Midgard, and Hel, the goddess of death, who was a beautiful girl on one side of her face, a corpse on the other. Fenris and Jormungandr were destined to fight and kill gods at Ragnarok, the end of the world. 

There is the story of the gods wanting a new wall and hiring a builder whose required payment in the form of the sun, the moon and Freya. Loki suggested they limit the time he had to do the job and that if he missed the deadline he wouldn’t be paid. They thought this was a great idea till it looked as if the builder would make the deadline. Then they yelled at him that it was his fault. You probably know what followed: Loki turned into a mare and lured the builder’s stallion away, slowing the job - and gave birth to Odin’s eight legged horse Sleipnir. The builder turned out to be a giant and Thor returned to Asgard and killed him.

I’d say all of them were villains in this story. At least Loki fixed it.

The story of Sif’s hair is almost as well known. Loki cuts the hair of Thor’s wife Sif for no explained reason. Well, he is a trickster, after all…Thor threatens him and he goes to two groups of Dwarves, challenging them to produce amazing items, including golden hair which will grow like real hair - and Thor’s hammer Mjolnir. He does cheat a bit, because one of the dwarves says he will claim Loki’s head if he wins the competition against the other group. He does win, but Loki must have been reading some Shakespeare because he argues that he didn’t offer his neck, so the dwarf stitches his lips shut.

The thing is, whatever he did to make this happen, he gets the dwarves to produce amazing magical items for other gods, not himself. Complicated… The story of Sif’s hair appears in an episode of the MCU series Loki, in which Sif, who is dark haired, turns up to yell at him that he deserves to be alone and always will be. Well, he does end up alone, but it’s a self sacrifice to save the multiverse. But he admits he did it because he thought it would be funny.

There are some more - humorous - stories, but his ending is sad. He kills the beloved god Baldr, and while the others had never liked him, that’s the last straw. They catch him and tie him up in a cave to be tortured by a snake’s dripping venom. The bonds are made from the guts of his innocent sons. His loyal wife holds a bowl under the snake, but every time the bowl fills up, she has to go and empty it and then we get earthquakes as he writhes in agony. However, at Ragnarok he will escape and fight the gods from a ship made of nails of the dead.

Is he a villain? Sometimes, but not always. 

He is very popular in modern fiction, though. In the original Marvel comics he really is nasty - and ugly. In later ones, he is a likable rogue, the hero of stories like Agent Of Asgard and Loki: The God Who Fell To Earth. In Agent Of Asgard he is being sent on missions to wipe out his previous evil deeds - and is enjoying it. Unfortunately he has taken over the body of Kid Loki, the deed that cannot be forgiven. He ends up as the god of stories instead of lies, but not as in the TV series. Instead, he entertains humans over the centuries.

Joanne Harris, the author of Chocolat, wrote a series of Loki novels. They are a delight. In 

Parke Godwin’s novel The Tower Of Beowulf, Grendel’s mother is a daughter of Loki, and it is she, not Sigyn, who takes care of her father in that cave.

As you almost certainly know by now, the MCU Loki starts as a villain in Thor and ends up, in Season 2 of Loki, as a hero who sacrifices himself for the good of others.

See you on Monday!