Thus speaks Mr. Tumnus, everybody's favourite cosily allegorical paedophile. I mean… obviously, right? Okay, maybe I'm just cynical. Anyway, quite apart from the deeply sinister mood conjured by a sinister bachelor enticing a child home for tea, I find myself unsettled by another detail here. Sardines. Sardines… in Narnia. Let us consider what this means... 1. Sardines come from the sea. I think it's safe to say that Mr. Tumnus doesn't live in walking distance of a fishing village, what with him being in the middle of a forest and everything. If Mr. Tumnus has sardines, they've probably been tinned, and if they've been tinned, they must have been caught on a large-scale and tinned en masse. Ergo there is a canning factory near to the Narnian coast. 2. If there is a canning factory there must be a distribution network with heavy vehicles that can cope with heavy snow. 3. If these sardines are distributed, and given that Mr. Tumnus is very obviously on his way home from shopping when Lucy meets him, then there must also be shops. 4. Possibly even a supermarket. Or even a Narnian Shopping Centre. 5. We may therefore deduce that the White Witch's regime in Narnia is a good deal more progressive - even capitalist - than has previously been allowed. Aslan's puppet government also follows a patriarchal model, ending the emergent feminism of the White Witch's regime. 6. We might also wonder at the notion that Narnia has been under snow for a hundred years or whatever. If this is indeed correct, then food will be somewhat scarce, since Narnia appears to have been a primarily agrarian landscape. You could reasonably expect cannibalism to have become commonplace by the time of Lucy's arrival - except obviously food supplies come in from elsewhere. Clearly then, the enforced winter conditions were imposed by Jadis so as to ensure that everybody had to go to the Narnian shopping centre for supplies. Clearly Jadis is a major investor in this shopping centre, and also in the fishing industry. We may also wonder, therefore, as to the impact of the war fought by the itinerant medieval hippies against Saruman etc. In killing Saruman, our 'heroes' have strangled at birth the closest thing to an industrial revolution that Middle Earth has. Therefore, the development of civilisation on Middle Earth was grieviously put back by 'our heroes' and so generations will remain stuck in a mire of backward traditionalism with associated high morbidity rates. Noticeably, having stunted the development of Middle Earth, Gandalf and the Elves scarper. This sounds to me like typical Imperialism.
"Oh, come on! It's not every day I get to make a new friend! And there's a... roaring fire! And toast and cakes! And maybe... we'll even break into the sardines."
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