The Horse and His Boy | Chapter 11: The Unwelcome Fellow Traveler

Chapter Summary:

This chapter begins with Shasta running through the increasingly wooded grassland away from the Hermit and toward King Lune. Shasta finds King Lune and his men in a glade, and Shasta warns him that Prince Rabadash is coming to attack his city. (Even King Lune mistakes Shasta as his son.) King Lune and his men believe Shasta--Shasta is provided with a horse, and they head quickly toward Anvard.

Shasta is on a slow horse, however, and quickly finds himself falling behind. As they approach the mountains, Shasta eventually loses the other men as the fog and night enclose around him. 

Shasta comes to a fork in the road, and hearing voices behind him, chooses the right-hand path. Shasta hears Prince Rabadash and his men at the fork, and the Prince instructs them to murder all men at Anvard, but to attack no Narnians if possible. The Prince and his 200 men then take the left-hand path.

Shasta continues down the right-hand path into a dark, misty forest. He soon realizes that there is something moving along with him off the path to his right. Shasta asks who/what it is, but it gives him only a vague reply, and asks Shasta to tell him his sorrows.

When Shasta gets to his woes about the lions during his adventure, the Large Voice (as the narrator describes it) says that there was only one lion the whole time. The mist clears as the sun begins to rise. Shasta sees before him a lion, emitting a strong light. Shasta falls from his saddle, and falls at the feet of the lion in reverence. The lion disappears before his eyes into the mist.

Reflection:

Another excellent chapter. The part of the chapter that stands out as the strongest and most important is, without a doubt, the lion's speech after he tells Shasta that there was only ever one lion:

"'I was the lion ... I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.' 

'Then it was you who wounded Aravis?' 

'It was I.' 

'But what for?' 

'Child,' said the voice, 'I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own' (p. 191).

Wow! As adult readers, we should probably not be surprised (especially having read The Magician's Nephew and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) that the lion who has appeared multiple times throughout the novel is really only one lion, THE lion. In the quotations above, a lot of our questions are answered, but in an amusing twist, Shasta asks the very question that pops into everyone's mind--but why did this lion wound Aravis? What was the purpose? I suspect that we will find out, but I doubt that Shasta will.

The entire scene is an outstanding out--and brings out some of the strongest images since Aslan's death on the Stone Table in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Here, we can almost imagine a young, lost boy, traveling on a horse through the misty mountainous forest, followed cautiously but carefully by a lion. It is not hard to imagine how their conversation would have looked, and how truly terrifying it must have been to Shasta. 

Perhaps this is the reason for the name of the chapter--The Unwelcome Fellow Traveler. This is, of course, a rather interesting chapter title because if the lion is Aslan, which is pretty obvious by now, then this would not at all be an unwelcome traveler. In fact, I couldn't think of a traveler in Narnia that would should be more welcome than Aslan. Perhaps the traveler is only unwelcome because Shasta does not quite yet know who Aslan is, or why he is indeed a welcome traveler:

"Shasta had lived all his life too far south in Calormen to have heard the tales that were whispered in Tashbaan about a dreadful Narnian demon that appeared in the form of a lion. And of course he knew none of the true stories about Aslan, the great Lion, the son of the Emperor-over-the-Sea, the King above all High Kings in Narnia" (p. 191).

From this passage, we can deduce that if Shasta had had any knowledge of Aslan prior to his adventure, due to his upbringing, this knowledge would have likely been both negative and false. Though it has not much entered my chapter summaries (due to it being largely irrelevant to this point), the inhabitants of Tashbaan and those further south worship the god Tash--and thus have probably misconstrued the name of Aslan. Perhaps this adds some sense to the title of the chapter, which is otherwise confusing to readers who know and love Aslan as a character.