"Come in! Come in! Fortunate favourite of the Queen-- or else not so fortunate." said Fenris to the turncoat Edmund.




There are only three coworkers in the office with my today after this gruelling long week of meetings. I left out on my desk the copy of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe that I'm reading, and I've so far had unsolicited conversations about Turkish Delight, about the masculine and anti-fertility-deity nature of the White Witch, and her origin as a Daughter of Lillith, and how Lucy and Edmund- who introduce Narnia to the world of man- do it through potentially erotic encounters with mystical beings of the opposite sex...



In case you haven't read it, I did manage to find an unpretty version of the LWW text on some Russian website (that has all the books of The Chronicles of Narnia, it seems). However, it is in some awful font with no text wrapping, so I recommend you cut and paste to a more readable format before attempting to read... or better yet, go buy the book and curl up with a lapcat and a cup of tea and read it in a sunbeam.



One of my coworkers hasn't read it, another has read it twice, and the other has read it twenty or more times over the course of his whole life.



Of all the many sites I have cruised today to find more information about the morphology of words invented in the text of Narnia, two have caught my attention the most. One is a compilation of descriptions of meals eaten in The Chronicles and the other is Wizard Words which tries to source terminology invented by J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter books. Horrifying as it is, I haven't read the Harry Potter books, but I saw the movie and was fascinated by the use of Latin in the dialogue-- and now that I'm studying Latin it is interesting to learn how Rowling played with it to create mystical-sounding nonsense words.



The author of this Wizard Words site didn't hestitate to throw in a little political history to spice the mix, either:



Binns

------- Professor of History of Magic at Hogwarts



Leon Trotsky wrote that the Mensheviks, a Russian revolutionary faction, belonged in "the dustbin of history". The phrase has become a cliché. Dustbin is a British word for garbage can. This helps to convey the impression that Professor Binns is dry as dust, and the history he teaches is mostly rubbish.