Always Dinner and Never Breakfast: How to Tell You’re in Narnia

You pass through a magical portal and are confronted in the woods by a deceitful horned creature who offers you sardines on toast. You accept. After the creature admits he meant to have you murdered, you meet him several days later for lunch.

A total stranger entices you with an unlimited supply of Turkish Delight, if only you’ll leave your home planet and become her adopted son. Naturally, you accept.

You falsely accused your sister of madness when she told you about the magic portal, but now you’re standing in the woods with her and it’s awkward. Her lunch date has been dragged off to prison by a werewolf. You feel you want some dinner.

You are invited to supper by an over-sized beaver, who catches live fish and then skins and fries them while his wife boils and butters potatoes and bakes a marmalade roll. This ought to disturb you. Beavers are herbivores. The teeth aren’t designed for trapping prey but gnawing fibrous plants; they exclusively eat bark, roots, and aquatic weeds It could be that this creature isn’t really a beaver. You’re in another world, after all. Nothing is as it seems. It ought to occur to you to wonder what other kinds of flesh this rodent has been nibbling, but it doesn’t because the fish is yummy.

You also never think to question how talking beavers in a land of eternal winter have butter and potatoes to go with their fish. If it occurs to you for a moment, you suppose that the White Witch must have been giving her subjects rations by the same magic trick that produced Turkish Delight, but why would she be nice enough to give them butter? She’s evil; she could have produced a lifetime supply of Beanie Weenies or something. Maybe the beavers are also in the pay of the White Witch. It’s a distinct possibility you ought to have looked out for, but the marmalade roll is so delicious.

You’ve been magically transported to a ruined castle and recruited to raid the enemy camp by a dwarf who doesn’t believe in you. Soon afterwards, you’re attacked and nearly mauled by a bear you’re afraid might be a talking creature with a soul and a personality, but the dwarf shoots it. Then he roasts it for supper. He is an excellent cook.

You’ve just raided an underground tomb to save a group of holed-up revolutionaries from a werewolf and a hag. Now you’d like buttered eggs and coffee, but there’s nothing but leftover bear meat.

The trees have awakened and are dancing about the grove, eating snacks made of dark loam. You can’t help but taste one to see if it’s chocolate. It isn’t.

The invisible magician who deliberately deformed every creature on his island offers you lunch, which you immediately accept. There’s a lemon squash for dessert.

In the past day or so you’ve accidentally pushed your best friend off a cliff, met the great Lion Aslan, and been blown on the wind to the castle of Cair Paravel. And what luck! You’re just in time for dinner.

On your magical quest, you’ve come across a lady who tells you to run to a castle full of giants for the Autumn Feast. You do not ask any questions but high-tail it there right away so as not to be late.

You are being carried off to meet the wicked queen in an underground boat piloted by depressed gnomes. The cakes they provide are flabby and flavorless.

The female equestrian who just joined your desperate escape from slavery has rather nice things to eat in her saddle bag.

You’ve just ridden a horse across the desert from the evil land of Calormen overnight. Yesterday you ate lobster with pilaf and wine in the Tarkaan’s palace. Today you’re eating brown toast with butter on it. This is much better; in fact, you think it’s the most delicious food you’ve ever had in your life.

Your uncle has just taken the homicidal giant queen out to lunch. It did not go well.

You are riding on the back of a winged horse to discover a garden at the outskirts of a newly created world, and you feel that someone should have arranged for your meals. Thankfully, there’s a toffee tree.

What’s going to cure your mother’s terminal Victorian illness? You know as well as I do. Plain  food, that’s what! An apple should do the trick. Make the apple tree into a wardrobe; you can thank me later.

Mary Pezzulo writes the Steel Magnificat weblog for Patheos. Her previous article was The Homeless Can’t Come In Out of the Cold.

The picture of the lamp in St Andrew’s churchyard, Bebington, Wirral, was taken by Ej Culley and is used under a Creative Commons 4.0 license. It’s been cropped.