EVENTUALLY, Mr. and Mrs. Beaver and the Pevensie children arrive at the stone table to encounter Aslan, and when that happens, centaurs are standing right there beside him. Half-men half-horse hybrids derive from Greece, not Britain, as you know, which is part of the reason that fellow Inkling J.R.R. Tolkien did not feel like paying a visit to Narnia. Tolkien believed Narnia’s world was an inconsistent mishmash of mythological and literary traditions, without any consistent internal logic or history. He found the juxtaposition of figures like Father Christmas and classical deities, as well as the creatures associated with them, to be jarring and unconvincing.
Not that I care to get into a debate with Professor Tolkien, it’s just that he and I must be smoking very different pipe-weed. As much as I’d like to say I’ll have what he’s having, and I would, the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Literature at the University of Oxford apparently had a divergent take on the Middle-Ages from my own observations. Surely, Tolkien and I have been reading the same source texts and stepping into the same cathedrals. Surely, Tolkien was a tenured professor at Merton College in Oxford, the same city of Oxford that I have personally explored as part of my MK investigation. You will tell me you’ll take his observations over my own. Fair enough. I appreciate his pure aesthetic of world building, and he has his points. You should at least know then that my observations happen to line up with Lewis’ own. Centaurs had a place in the Middle-Ages of Britain.
The latest discussion is an UPDATE to ‘The Narnia Reset’. You can read my research on British Centaurs in the PDF below.