Charn

Charn is a fictional world in C. S. Lewis's book The Magician's Nephew, one of the Chronicles of Narnia.

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The only living person in Charn at the time of the story 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). 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.

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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, and smaller, she remarks "Ah, so yours is a younger world". This is a possible reference to "red giant stars", which are older and colder than our Sun, and, as the name implies, big and red.

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Charn was 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.

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Jadis is said to have been descended from "Adam's first wife", Lilith, on one side and from giants on the other. 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. It could be that there was a connection between Charn and our world at one time. It might also refer to an analogous version of Lilith that existed in Charn, independently of Earth.

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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. Likewise, 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.

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C. S. Lewis: Clive Staples Lewis (November 29, 1898 – November 22, 1963), commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis, was a Irish author and scholar, born into a Protestant family in Belfast, though mostly resident in England. Lewis is known for his work on medieval literature and for his Christian apologetics a...

The Magician's Nephew: The Magician's Nephew is a fantasy novel for children by C. S. Lewis. Although not the first in The Chronicles of Narnia series, it is the first in the internal chronology....

Narnia: :For the town, see Narnia (town) — for the band, see Narnia (band)....