Charn

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Charn is a fictional world in C. S. Lewis's book The Magician's Nephew, one of the Chronicles of Narnia. In the book, two children from Earth journey to Charn, where they find themselves in a very large and completely deserted city. There is no presence of any life in this city, including weeds and insects, which is odd. The river that flowed through Charn is completely dried up, and there is no free water to be found anywhere.

The only living person in Charn at the time of the stories is Jadis, its last Queen. She and her sister fought a long war. Finally, defeated and facing capture and execution, Jadis instead spoke the Deplorable Word which killed all living things under the Sun apart from herself, a possible allusion to the atomic bomb (the name "Charn" is also reminiscent of "charnel house", a place in which anonymous bones are stored). After this she put herself into an enchanted sleep which was broken when Digory Kirke - who had arrived in Charn with Polly Plummer - succumbed to temptation and rang a bell in the hall where Jadis slumbered.

Charn's Sun is red, large, and cold; it also has a solitary companion (either a planet or a white dwarf star). When Digory asks Jadis about the sun's appearance, she asks him to compare it to our world's Sun. When informed that it is yellow, brighter, smaller, and "gives off a good deal more heat", she remarks "Ah, so yours is a younger world". This is a reference to "red giant stars", which are older and colder than our Sun, and, as the name implies, big and red.

Charn was described as being completely destroyed after Jadis and the children left and its entrance from the Wood between the Worlds was closed. Jadis entered Narnia with the other humans from our world and after a thousand years became the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

[edit] Other places

Jadis refers to a number of other places she has conquered, and presumably destroyed. However, it not clear whether these places are cities in the same world as Charn, or are other Worlds in their own right.

"Scum! You shall pay dearly for this when I have conquered your world. Not one stone of your city will be left. I will make it as Charn, as Felinda, as Sorlois, as Bramandin."

[edit] Commentary

Mrs. Beaver speculates in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that Jadis is descended from "Adam's first wife", Lilith, on one side and from giants on the other. Assuming that this is true and not merely a rumour, this is rather confusing, since in the Narnian universe Adam would be presumed to be in our world, and the Witch to be in another. Since Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe first, he had not yet written the "true" origin of the White Witch in The Magician's Nephew, which he wrote later but is chronologically earlier. From what Mrs. Beaver said, Jadis did not have a drop of human blood in her, meaning that she could not have come from Adam. It might be possible that Lilith went to another world (presumably Charn) and gave birth with someone else.

Some believe that Charn stands for the natural progression of human depravity; there is a striking similarity between Jadis's description of the life and death of her city and the text of the prophetic book of Nahum concerning the biblical city of Nineveh. Judging from the expressions of the waxwork images of Jadis' ancestors, it is apparent that while her race started out being kind and wise, they later became corrupt.