Spare Oom and War Drobe: Mr Tumnus redraws our map
To a Faun who has never met a human, a spare room and a wardrobe become a distant country and its capital.
In chapter 2 of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lucy tells Mr Tumnus how she got there: through "the wardrobe in the spare room". The Faun, who knows nothing about the human world, hears something else entirely. He wishes he had worked harder at geography as a young Faun, then greets Lucy as a Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom, where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe.
Lucy laughs and insists these are not countries at all, yet Tumnus uses both names again later, when he offers to see her back. The "eternal summer" grows out of one small remark from Lucy: at home, it is summer.
The reversal is a delight. In Narnia, it is our world that sounds like legend: one book on the Faun's shelf is even called Is Man a Myth? The joke depends on English, which makes it a puzzle for translators. How does your French edition handle it?
See also
Sources
- C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), ch. 2 “What Lucy Found There”.
- LitCharts — Chapter 2: What Lucy Found There.