PWJ: S3E15 – TWHF (PT 1, CH 20-21) – “A Myth Retold”

Orual hears a different retelling of her story…

S3E15: “A Myth Retold” (Download)

If you enjoy this episode, you can subscribe manually, or any place where good podcasts can be found (iTunes, Google Play, Podbean, Stitcher, TuneIn and Overcast), as well as on YouTube.

If you’d like to support us and get fantastic gifts, please join us on Patreon.

Time Stamps

01:21 – Drink-of-the-week
02:02 – Quote-of-the-week
07:07 – Chapter 20 Summary
37:28 – Chapter 21 Summary
54:39 – Closing remarks

YouTube Version

After Show Skype Session

This Season, after each episode, Matt and I will be recording a ten-minute Skype conversation:

Show Notes

• I was joined by Matt “Did he look up the Greek names?” Bush.

• Matt was drinking tea and I was finishing off Screwball whisky.

• Matt couldn’t decide on a quote-of-the-week, so we have two:

“For you must know that, like many other gods, she began by being a mortal.”

“It was so with me almost every evening of my life; one little stairway led me from feast or council, all the bustle and skill and glory of queenship, to my own chamber to be alone with myself – that is, with a nothingness.”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 20)

• I read my 150-word summary of Chapter 20:

The King is cremated. Redival is betrothed. Legends of the Queen’s greatness spread. Meanwhile, she repeatedly moves her sleeping quarters in an attempt to escape the sound of the well which reminds her of Psyche’s weeping. She attempts to track down her lost sister, but without success. Batta is executed. Many slaves are freed. The silver mines are improved, bringing prosperity. A library is founded, the legal code is renewed and the Shennit is engineered for trade. The Queen gets to know (and is underwhelmed by) Bardia’s wife, Ansit. The Queen contemplates how much more she gets to share with Bardia. Arnom renovates the Temple and installs a beautiful statue of Ungit/Aphrodite. The Fox writes a history of Glome. In his dotage, he begins calling the Queen by other names. He eventually dies. The chapter ends with the Queen deciding to visit neighbouring lands.

Summary of Chapter 20

• Things move quickly in Glome:

On the next day we burnt the old King. On the day after that we betrothed Redival to Trunia (and the wedding was made a month later). The third day all the strangers rode off and we had the house to ourselves. My real reign began.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 20)

• We now have a significant time jump:

I must now pass quickly over many years (though they made up the longest part of my life) during which the Queen of Glome had more and more part in me and Orual had less and less. I locked Orual up or laid her asleep as best I could somewhere deep down inside me; she lay curled there. It was like being with child, but reversed; the thing I carried in me grew slowly smaller and less alive.

• The Queen talks about how the stories of her own deeds are already being exaggerated and even merged with stories of another warrior queen from long ago. She credits her military success to Bardia and another chap called Penuan. She is honest enough to admit to being frightened during battles.

• She reflects on her reign and identifies two key strengths: The combination of Bardia and the Fox as counsellors seemed to be a perfect combination, with each covering the deficiencies of the other and neither were self-serving. She even realizes that their jabs at each other were more of a game than anything else. To be honest, this is how men are, particularly with each other. We mock because we love. However, she again comments that they didn’t think of her as a woman, but that this led to them being at great ease with her.

• She also credits her veil as one of the secrets of her success. People pay more attention to her voice:

…people began to discover all manner of beauties in my voice…the voice of a spirit, a Siren, Orpheus

Masculine qualities! Siren (Odyssey). Orpheus is a legendary musician, poet, and prophet in Greek mythology

• People ended up discarding the belief that the veil hid the face of an ugly woman. The women thought she has the face of an animal Some thought she had no face at all (hmm…)… The men typically thought she had the face of a true beauty like Psyche which would either drive men to madness or bring upon Glome the wrath of Ungit. It gave her an advantage in negotiations:

The upshot of all this nonsense was that I became something very mysterious and awful. I have seen ambassadors who were brave men in battle turn white like scared children in my Pillar Room when I turned and looked at them (and they couldn’t see whether I was looking or not) and was silent. I have made the most seasoned liars turn red and blurt out the truth with the same weapon

• In an earlier chapter, Orual mistook the sound of the chains of the well with Psyche’s crying. Now as Queen, she repeatedly moves her sleeping quarters in a failed attempt to get away from their sound in the night when the silence grows deep. She later says that she would work in the Pillar Room in the night to distract herself. She describes this part of her as Orual refusing to die. She tells us that she had her people try and find Psyche, but without success. She writes:

She must be dead by now; or caught by someone and sold into slavery. . . .

• We find out that before the end of her first year as Queen, Orual has Batta hanged. I found the English rather hard to parse. Here’s what Lewis says:

I found that she had long been the pest of the whole palace. No trifle could be given to any of the other slaves, and hardly a good bit could come on their trenchers, but Batta must have her share of it; otherwise she’d tell such tales of them as would lead to the whipping post or the mines

I think he means that Batta was extorting the other slaves, under the threat that she’d tell stories about them so that they’d be punished.

• The Queen reduces the number of slaves in the Palace, selling the ones of dubious morality and setting free the better and more competent ones. She even seems to have played the role of “Yente” from Fiddler On The Roof, the role of matchmaker between them…although she sometimes let Eros move where he would and allowed the freed slaves to choose their own spouses. Many of these couples live near the Palace and are fearlessly loyal to the Queen. She tells us that she frees Poobi and seems to spend much time at her home with her husband. I couldn’t help but feel that, in all this, she was both pushing people away, and at the same time, building a replacement family.

• The Queen completely overhauled the management of the mines, using them to generate profit rather than simply as a means of punishment and execution. She treats the slaves better and offers them the ability to regain their freedom. This change of strategy results in much wealth for Glome.

• The Queen gives the Fox much nicer apartments (on the same side of the palace with the squeaky well), also giving him land so that he could have independent wealth. 

She gives him money to start building a library (which is slow-going and expensive  “An obol’s worth for a talent”) – ⅙ drachma’s worth for what cost 6,000 drachma. In the end, they end up with eighteen books:

• An incomplete version of Homer’s Iliad (War and Adventure)
• Andromeda by Euripides (Romance)
• The Bacchae by Euripides (Tragedy)
• A book on animal husbandry
• Some works of Socrates
• A poem in honour of Helen by Hesias Stesichorus
• A book of Heraclitus
• Aristotle’s Metaphysics

The priest learns to read them and, over time, the sons of nobles join him and the Fox.

• The Queen meets Bardia’s wife, Ansit, and is unimpressed.

I had thought she would be of dazzling beauty; but the truth is she was very short, and now, having borne eight children, very fat and unshapely.

The Queen comments that she, having remained a virgin, had kept her figure.

• The Queen tells us that she had really tried to be kind to Ansit, even loving. However, Ansit was very quiet. The Queen joyfully wonders whether Ansit is jealous of her, given that the Queen gets to be with Bardia throughout the day and share in battles and affairs of state.

I have known, I have had, so much of him that she could never dream of. She’s his toy, his recreation, his leisure, his solace. I’m in his man’s life

Meanwhile she thinks Bardia is oblivious:

It’s strange to think how Bardia went to and fro daily between Queen and wife, well assured he did his duty by both (as he did) and without a thought, doubtless, of the pother he made between them. This is what it is to be a man. The one sin the gods never forgive us is that of being born women.

The joy of a man is to be blissfully unaware, apparently! Is this how Joy viewed Jack?

• There are great changes in the House of Ungit, with the new priest keeping the Temple cleaner and more airy. It seems that the Fox has made Arnom sound more like a philosopher than a priest. The big change is that Arnom installed (and the Queen paid for) a beautiful, Greek style, statue of Ungit/Aphrodite in the Temple. It is placed opposite the faceless Ungit stone. As Orual is writing about this, she abruptly changes subject and says that she gave up trying to hide from the well’s chains and instead built thick walls around it. Unfortunately, for some time, this leads to new kinds of tortures:

For a while after that an ugly fancy used to come to me in my dreams, or between sleeping and waking, that I had walled up, gagged with stone, not a well but Psyche (or Orual) herself. But that also passed. I heard Psyche weeping no more. The year after that I defeated Essur.

Is it significant that they defeated Essur? Maybe…

• We then get an update about the Fox. He’s getting old and less involved in affairs of state, instead he writes a history of Glome (I wonder what he wrote about Psyche). He writes it in Greek and in Glome’s own language (very clumsily, according to the Queen). The Queen tells us that his personality undergoes a change, being more concerned with poetry and less concerned with philosophy. He often mistakes the Queen for Psyche (Could this also point to the god’s words: You too shall be Psyche?). He also calls her other names: Crethis (f), Charmides (m) or Glaucon (m). The names of his children? The boys names are associated with the works of Plato and Socrates. The Queen has less-and-less to do with the Fox (harsh, considering she begged him to stay) He eventually dies and is given a great funeral and the tomb is by the pear-trees where the three of them used to spend time with Psyche.

• Other jobs: The Queen remained very busy Revised and published the laws Engineered the Shennit for trade Built a bridge Made cisterns Improved the farm animals

• Brenton Dickieson has a new article released where he compares and contrasts Orual and her father, the King. He discusses their respective “rage issues” How they view the people at court And how they relate to Psyche.

• All this activity means nothing:

I did and I did and I did — and what does it matter what I did? I cared for all these things only as a man cares for a hunt or a game, which fills the mind and seems of some moment while it lasts, but then the beast’s killed or the king’s mated, and now who cares? It was so with me almost every evening of my life; one little stairway led me from feast or council, all the bustle and skill and glory of queenship, to my own chamber to be alone with myself — that is, with a nothingness.

• Warning:

Never confuse who you are with what you do. Everyone that God creates has infinite value and worth simply by existing” – Collected Letters (Vol 1) via Peter Cavner on Slack

• In response to her restlessness, the Queen decides to take a trip, taking with her Ilerdia (I-LER-DIA), Bardia’s son and Alit, Poobi’s daughter. Using the language of childrearing, she says that Glome is now able to run itself. Given our comments about Orual’s motherhood of Psyche, it’s interesting that she’s able to let Glome function without her.

• I read my 150-word summary of Chapter 21:

In early Autumn, the Queen visits her sister and Trunia in Phars. Their second son, Daaran (DAR-AN), is set to inherit the throne. The Queen says that she would like to love him, but has vowed to love no more. The Queen’s retinue travel to Essur. In a forest, the Queen finds a tiny temple which contains a small statue of a woman wearing a black veil. The temple’s priest tells her the story of their patroness, the new goddess, Istra. It soon becomes clear that this is the story of Psyche, but with some important differences. The priest says that Ungit has set Instra tasks to complete before Instra can be reunited with her husband, which is symbolised each Spring and Summer by the statue’s veil being removed. Irate, the Queen storms out of the temple, determined to write a book recounting her own version of events…

Summary of Chapter 21

• So the Queen heads out on her road trip, visiting her sister, Redival, and her husband, Trunia, in Phars. They arrive at harvest time and stay there about a week and a half. Her assessment of her sister was not favourable

I was astonished to see how Redival had grown fat and lost her beauty. She talked, as of old, everlastingly, but all about her children, and asked after no one in Glome except Batta.

I wonder how that conversation went…

• She says that Trunia never listened to his wife, but he and the Queen had much to talk about. Similar to what the Queen said about Bardia We find out that Daaran, Trunia and Redival’s second son, will ascend to the throne of Glome when the Queen dies. We actually found this out in the first lines of the book, back in Chapter 1. The queen writes something quick chilling:

This Daaran was (for the son of so silly a mother) a right-minded boy. I could have loved him if I had let myself and if Redival had been out of the way. But I would never give my heart again to any young creature.

• It’s interesting that she says she’ll not give her heart to any young creature…and then we find out in the next chapter that her entire retinue is full of young folks. A secret desire? Naturally, this put me in mind of the line in The Four Loves where Lewis talks about the dangers of this strategy:

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket–safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

– C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

• Her entourage, while initially scared of her, begin to feel at ease with her. They leave Phars and travel westwards to Essur and spend three nights there. 

He was, I think, not a bad sort of man, but too slavish-courteous to me; for Glome and Phars in alliance had made Essur change her tune

• The Queen meant to go home, but then they heard of a hot spring fifteen miles to the west and she knew that Ilerdia wanted to visit, so they go. During the journey, the Queen decides that she and Bardia will rest when she returns to Glome and “let younger heads be busy, while we sat in the sun and talked of our old battles”.

• They see the Spring (the Queen doesn’t seem very impressed) and then they go to find a place to camp. The Queen hears sound of a temple bell and she goes wandering to find it…

I came out into a mossy place free of trees, and there it was; no bigger than a peasant’s hut but built of pure white stone, with fluted pillars in the Greek style. Behind it I could see a small thatched house where, no doubt, the priest lived. The place itself was quiet enough, but inside the temple there was a far deeper silence and it was very cool. It was clean and empty and there were none of the common temple smells about it, so that I thought it must belong to one of those small peaceful gods who are content with flowers and fruit for sacrifice. Then I saw it must be a goddess, for there was on the altar the image of a woman about two feet high carved in wood, not badly done and all the fairer (to my mind) because there was no painting or gilding but only the natural pale colour of the wood. The thing that marred it was a band or scarf of some black stuff tied round the head of the image so as to hide its face — much like my own veil, but that mine was white. I thought how much better all this was than the house of Ungit, and how unlike.

• The Queen meets the priest:

He was an old man with quiet eyes, perhaps a little simple.

• The priest tells her that the goddess is “Istra”…

…she is a very young goddess. She has only just begun to be a goddess. For you must know that, like many other gods, she began by being a mortal.

• For a little bit of cash, the priest tells the Queen the story of how this girl became a goddess

Once upon a time in a certain land there lived a king and a queen who had three daughters, and the youngest was the most beautiful princess in the whole world. . . .

And so he went on, as such priests do, all in a singsong voice, and using words which he clearly knew by heart. And to me it was as if the old man’s voice, and the temple, and I myself and my journey, were all things in such a story; for he was telling the very history of our Istra, of Psyche herself — how Talapal (that’s the Essurian Ungit) was jealous of her beauty and made her to be offered to a brute on a mountain, and how Talapal’s son Ialim, the most beautiful of the gods, loved her and took her away to his secret palace. He even knew that Ialim had there visited her only in darkness and had forbidden her to see his face. But he had a childish reason for that: “You see, Stranger, he had to be very secret because of his mother Talapal. She would have been very angry with him if she had known he had married the woman she most hated in the world.”

• The Queen wants to know how he knows this story, but all he can do is tell her that it’s the “sacred story”. She then gets angry when he tells the story “wrong”:

He was telling it wrong — hideously and stupidly wrong. First of all, he made it that both Psyche’s sisters had visited her in the secret palace of the god (to think of Redival going there!).

It was as if the gods themselves had first laughed, and then spat, in my face. So this was the shape the story had taken. You may say, the shape the gods had given it. For it must be they who had put it into the old fool’s mind or into the mind of some other dreamer from whom he’d learned it. How could any mortal have known of that palace at all?

I saw all in a moment how the false story would grow and spread and be told all over the earth; and I wondered how many of the other sacred stories are just such twisted falsities as this.

• The priest says that the sisters were jealous:

“Oh, because they were jealous. Her husband and her house were so much finer than theirs.”

• Orual is determined to write a book in response:

That moment I resolved to write this book. For years now my old quarrel with the gods had slept. I had come into Bardia’s way of thinking; I no longer meddled with them… Now, instantly, I knew I was facing them — I with no strength and they with all; I visible to them, they invisible to me; I easily wounded (already so wounded that all my life had been but a hiding and staunching of the wound), they invulnerable; I one, they many. In all these years they had only let me run away from them as far as the cat lets the mouse run. Now, snatch! and the claw on me again. Well, I could speak. I could set down the truth

“Wanders, weeping, weeping, always weeping,” he said. “And falls under the power of Talapal, who hates her. And of course Ialim can’t protect her because Talapal is his mother and he’s afraid of her. So Talapal torments Istra and sets her to all manner of hard labours, things that seem impossible. But when Istra has done them all, then at last Talapal releases her, and she is reunited to Ialim and becomes a goddess. Then we take off her black veil, and I change my black robe for a white one, and we offer — ” “You mean she will some day be reunited to the god; and you will take off her veil then? When is this to happen?” “We take off the veil and I change my robe in the spring.”

• Thanks to our top-tier supports, Kate and Rowdy, as well as all our Patrons!.