Deplorable Word

Background

In The Magician's Nephew, the children who are the central characters, Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer, come to a lifeless world called Charn. In an ancient, ruined building they awaken a queen called Jadis. She tells them of a worldwide civil war she fought against her sister. All of Jadis's armies were defeated, having been made to fight to the death of the last soldier, and her sister claimed victory. Then Jadis spoke the horrible curse which her sister knew she had discovered but did not think she would use. In speaking the Deplorable Word, Jadis killed every living thing in her world, except herself, to avoid losing the war to her sister.

The children are shocked by this account, but Jadis has no regrets or remorse. The past rulers of her race, who evidently had not always been evil, knew of the Deplorable Word's existence but not the word itself, and had vowed that none of them, nor their descendants, would seek to discover it. Jadis said she had “learned it in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it".

Lewis did not say what the word was, or the price paid to learn it.

Meaning

The book was written in 1955 during the Cold War, ten years after the first atomic weapons were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, and three years after the hydrogen bomb was first detonated. Lewis does not explicitly link the Deplorable Word to any specific weapon of mass destruction, but he alludes to the power of humanity to destroy life. Near the end of the story Lewis has the lion Aslan say to the central characters from the Victorian era:

Several writers have interpreted this warning as an allusion to atomic weapons.

References

References

1. Lewis, Clive Staples. (1970). "The Magician's Nephew". Macmillan Publishing Company.
2. Mony, Neetha. (2003). "Tollers and Jack: A Comparative Look at the Lives and Works of J.R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis".
3. Ford, Paul F.. (2005). "Companion to Narnia, Revised Edition: A Complete Guide to the Magical World of C.S. Lewis's THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA". Zondervan.
4. Lewis, Clive Staples. (1970). "The Magician's Nephew". Macmillan Publishing Company.
5. Walls, Kathryn. (2009). "When Curiosity Gets the Better of Us: The Atomic Bomb in The Magician's Nephew". Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.
6. Hinten, Marvin D.. (Spring 2003). "The Founding of Narnia: Allusions in 'The Magician's Nephew'". The Lamp-Post of the Southern California C.S. Lewis Society.