The Horse and His Boy | Chapter 13: The Fight at Anvard

Chapter Summary:

This chapter begins with the march of the Narnian army from Narnia into Archenland, with Shasta and Prince Corin in the back, conversing  about their adventures. We learn from Corin that Queen Susan does not fight in battles, and has remained at Cair Paravel. Anvard comes into view, and the Calormen army can be seen using a battering ram at Anvard's gates.

The Narnian army begins to race toward the Calormen army, which turns to do likewise. As the two lines collide, Shasta gets thrown from his horse. 

As this occurs, the narrator redirects us to the Hermit, who is staring into his magical pool in his garden and narrating the events of the battle to Aravis, Bree, and Hwin. The Hermit describes the battle in detail as he sees it in the pool--including Shasta's fall (but he cannot tell whether Shasta is alive or not). The Hermit describes how the giants and the great cats (leopards, lions, etc.) had a great impact on the battle. Eventually, most of the Calormen army are captured or killed. 

The perspective shifts back to Shasta and the narrator. Shasta can tell that the Narnians and Archenlanders have won. He looks around to see Prince Rabadash hanging from his chain mail coat against the Anvard castle wall, apparently stuck there when he jumped from an upper wall. Edmund is going to kill him, but King Lune has Rabadash brought into the castle instead.

King Lune then embraces Shasta and brings Shasta and Corin together to be viewed by all present, and asks, "Now, gentlemen, look on them both. Has any man any doubts?" (p. 201).

Reflection:

It is again another battle that, I think, is rather glamorized. Sure, we have the fearful moment of Shasta being knocked from his horse onto the ground--and we aren't even sure of his survival (it is even less certain due to the change from Shasta's perspective to the Hermit's perspective, but we'll talk more about that later). But when the battle ends, everyone gets a good laugh at Prince Rabadash, who is dangling in a most unlikely manner from the castle wall--a bit too farcical for the situation, in my opinion. I'm imagining a battlefield covered in wounded and murdered soldiers--of both sides--while King Lune and others applaud Corin and Shasta... The whole scene seems a little absurd; perhaps some of these things could have been reserved for a banquet at a later date. Alas, we are still on the battlefield when it all occurs. Let us hope that everyone has remembered to wipe their swords, as Aslan instructs Peter in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Anyway, now that I've gotten that bit out of the way, this is really an interesting chapter. For perhaps the first time that I can recall in TCON series, there is a change of narrator perspective in this chapter. The perspective remains third-person omniscient, but we move from a narrator who primarily floats over the head of Shasta, to a narrator that gives us the perspective of the Hermit--and then toward the end we move back to Shasta. Let's take a look at the unusual initial transition:

"But it is no use trying to describe the battle from Shasta's point of view; he understood too little of the fight in general and even of his own part in it. The best way I can tell you what really happened is to take you some miles away to where the Hermit of the Southern March sat gazing into the smooth pool beneath the spreading tree, with Bree and Hwin and Aravis beside him" (p. 198). 

This transition occurs immediately after Shasta is pushed from his horse on the battlefield, so the transition makes rather a lot of sense. It is beyond clever that C.S. Lewis realized that from Shasta's point of view, it would be nonsense to describe the battle in progress. Instead of telling us the story himself, the narrator defers instead to the Hermit. As a result, the reader is told the story of the battle not by Shasta or the narrator, but we hear the battle in the same way that Aravis, Bree, and Hwin hear about the battle--in a disjointed, rather confusing manner. Indeed, we don't even know whether Shasta is alive until we read that Shasta picks himself up off the battlefield afterward. But by this time, the narrator has rejoined Shasta--which begs the question, are Aravis, Bree, and Hwin aware that Shasta has survived? We don't really know.

This change in point of view is an interesting and necessary one. It carries us back to the characters that we have left behind with the Hermit, and provides an update on that end of the tale. It also allows the narrator to paint a realistic view of the battle, rather than just describing what Shasta saw--which, I imagine, was probably just the underside of a lot of different creatures. A clever device by a clever author!