Into the Wardrobe

One might make the same remarks about trees being prominent in both Tolkien's and Lewis' works also.

I think it was one of the interviews on the LOTR dvds that talked about the horses of the Rohirrim. The Rohirrim supposedly represent the British people before the Norman Invasion. Apparently, if the British had had cavalry, they might have been able to repel the invaders. Tolkien was very anti-French, and wished the invasion had never happened, so he made his "British" Rohirrim horsepeople.

It also occurs to me that horses sort of represented an older way of life that was fading away. Not just the recent past for these gentlemen, but of the older, more chivalrous times that they loved writing and dreaming about. Horses represent everything that industrialization removed or changed. Then again, it's 2 in the morning and I may just be babbling.

C. S. Lewis seemed to like the Houynyhms, pronounced "Whhhhyyyynnnmmms," like a horse whinnying, from Book Four of Gulliver's Travels. Someone wrote a scholarly article on how the Hrossa are like the Houynyhms. But I think there is a little bit of Houynyhm in Bree as well.

In his poetry, you find admiration for horses. In "The Prodigality of Firdausi," the Islamic poets talk about "the beauty of women of horses." And in a poem called "On A Picture by Chirico," horses are his subjects (he mentions the Houynyhms in this poem). And I can't forget the change of the red lizard into a white horse in The Great Divorce.

I think he thought horses were beautiful.

The Lewis estate will probably want some money for this, but here is a poem he wrote on horses:

On A Picture by Chirico

Two sovereign horses standing on the sand. There are no men,
The men have died, the houses fallen fallen. A thousand year's war
Conclude in grass and graves, and bones and waves on a bare shore
Are rolled in a cold evening when there is rain in the air.

Now they have come to the end of land. They meet for the first time
In early, bitter March the falling arches of the sea, vast
And vacant in the sunlight, where once the ships passed.
They halt, sniffing the salt in the air, and whinny with their lips.

These are not like the horses we have ridden; that old look
of half-indignant melancholy and delicate alarm's gone.
Thus perhaps looked the breeding-pair in Eden when a day shone
First upon tossing manes and glossy flanks at play.

They are called. Change overhangs them. Their neighing is half speech.
Death-sharp across great seas, a seminal breeze from the far side
calls to their new-crowned race to leave the places where Man died--
The offer, is it? the prophecy, of a Houyhnhnm's Land?

He sees horses populating the earth after the human race has destroyed itself through war. Chirico was an Italian painter (taught Salvadore Dali how to paint). I'll post later (got to go now) some of his horse paintings.

I'm not sure whether this will make much/any sense... I think in some way, horses unite many things which human beings appreciate about animals such as power, beauty, profitableness etc. Horses seem to be very special animals and probably have been for ages.

What a beautiful horse!!
He was so good with his studies of anatomy, muscles etc...