Till we have faces. A myth Retold

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Orual: He spoke it as kindly and heartily as could be; as if a man dashed a gallon of cold water in your broth and never doubted you'd like it all the better. The next day, the fight takes place and people from different Kingdoms gathered to see it happen. Trunia offers to marry Orual but she refuses and tells him that he can marry Redival if he wants to. The king dies in that same morning but almost no one notices the event as they are more concerned with Orual and the fight.

The novel starts with the narrator, an old woman who claims that she must speak against the Gods. She is an old woman and she no longer cares if something happens to her as a result. Then the narrator presents herself as being Oural, the daughter of the King that rules over Glome. Oural is hated by the god of the Grey Mountain but she does not reveal why. Happens to Orual in real life. Over the years, her people forget what she looks like behind her veil and now believe that she's either so beautiful or so hideous that to gaze on her face would drive you mad (or, alternatively, that she doesn't have a face.) When she tears off her veil in front of Bardia's wife after he dies, Bardia's wife is stunned to realize that the Queen is none of these things: she's merely an ugly, ordinary woman. Orual intends to attend Psyche’s sacrifice, but instead she falls into a delirium that lasts for days. When she wakes, she finds that all of Glome’s problems have ended. Orual and the Fox think it’s a coincidence. Orual decides she must go to the Mountain to bury whatever’s left of Psyche. While she’s wandering the palace in her grief, the captain of the guard, Bardia, convinces her to let him teach her swordsmanship as a distraction. Orual tries to mend her soul, but finds it impossible. She has a vision that she has to gather wool from giant sheep, but they trample her. Then she has one that she’s walking through the desert in search of water from the land of the dead. An eagle then brings her to a giant courtroom filled with ghosts, where she must read her complaint against the gods. However, the scroll she reads instead exposes her own jealousy of the gods and possessiveness of Psyche. She sees herself truly for the first time and realizes that the gods don’t interact with humans because humans don’t even understand themselves. Human Sacrifice: Istra, for drawing worship away from Ungit/Aphrodite. Turns out she's not really dead, and married to the god of the Gray Mountain, Eros/Cupid.

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Green-Eyed Monster: Ungit demands Istra be sacrificed for being more beautiful than her. Orual herself was one of these, as she realizes at the end. Overly Narrow Superlative: When listing her achievements as queen, Orual takes pride in having built the library of Glome, "what was, for a barbarous land, a noble library—eighteen works in all." When the night comes, Orual sees lights flashing and then hears an unearthly voice screaming at Pshyche. When Orual gets ready to cross the river, she sees a man in front of her, a man more beautiful than every man she ever saw in her life. The God tells Orual that Pshyche will have to remain in exile for the rest of her days and that she will be punished as well. On the way home, Orual thinks about her sister and about the possible punishment she will have to suffer as well as a result.

External Retcon: Orual writes her book to set the record straight after hearing a priest's false story about Psyche. Eventually, Orual retcons her own story when she comes to realize her true motivations were selfish. (Of course, Till We Have Faces functions as this in real life as well.) Dark Fantasy: The work can be considered a low fantasy, taking place in a fictional barbarian society that exists alongside real world history, where war, sacrifice, brutality, and distant merciless gods are part of everyday life. Blasphemous Boast: Used indirectly, when the Fox claims that Istra is "prettier than Aphrodite herself". Orual is concerned that the gods will punish him for this compliment, but the Fox dismisses her concern as foolish superstition. Turns out the gods are not amused. Orual is very successful as Queen and makes many positive changes in Glome. She uses her work to distract herself from her sorrows, and she buries her old self deep inside her, letting her persona as Queen take over. Even so, repeatedly thinks she hears Psyche crying outside, though she knows it’s only chains creaking in the well. The Fox and Bardia act as excellent advisors, though the Fox eventually dies. The Queen finds her life monotonous and decides to travel to other kingdoms.It is presented as the record — and the formal complaint against the gods — of Orual, daughter of the King of Glome, a pagan kingdom to the north of ancient Greece. Her father, hot-tempered and prone to violence, has little love for his three daughters, least of all for ugly Orual. Her only friends in the palace are her beautiful half-sister Istra and her tutor, a Greek slave who she only knows as "the Fox". Orual and Psyche fight over whether the palace is real or a figment of Psyche’s imagination. Orual feels very far away from Psyche, and begins to hate the god and Psyche’s situation. She wants Psyche to run away with her, but Psyche insists that she owes her duty to her husband now. They part. Near dawn, Orual walks to the river’s edge and sees a brief glimpse of the palace, but she hardly believes her own vision. Abusive Parent: The King has no problem calling his daughter ugly to her face and beats her several times for speaking out of turn. He has to fake concern when one of his children is doomed to die because he's too relieved that his own hide is saved. Orual fits this to an extent as well. In his essay On Three Ways of Writing for Children, C.S. Lewis wrote ‘ I now enjoy the fairy tales better than I did in childhood: being now able to put more in, of course, I get more out.’ I feel similarly, having enjoyed them in childhood but have found my interest and enjoyment reinvigorated with a greater intensity as an adult. There are extensive literary theories and techniques and many have written about the moral and psychological aspects in them such as Carl Jung who believed fairy tales were a way to study the ‘ anatomy of the psyche’ and Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz wrote that ‘ fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes.’ Alternatively there is Philip Pullman who believes ‘ there is no psychology in a fairy tale,’ and instead it is simple repetition on good and bad. For Lewi

a b Key bits of the wording of the letters are available at: "C.S. Lewis Bibliography III. C.S. Lewis on TWHF (letters from CSL to publisher of Till We Have Faces, etc)". Trent University . Retrieved 28 July 2020. Right for the Wrong Reasons: The people from a neighboring country describe Orual as ruining her sister’s life out of envy. They turn out to be right, but they believe that Orual was envious of her sister due to her good fortune when in reality Orual was jealous of the God of the Mountain for enjoying her sister’s love.For Orual, love doesn’t come without jealousy. Her jealousy stems in large part from her ugliness, which makes her very insecure about the affection that anyone shows her, because characters such as the King, Redival, and Batta have always shown their disgust at her appearance and made it clear that she will never be able to marry. Essentially, she has been taught that she is unlovable, so she more easily recognizes the ways in which people don’t love her than the ways in which they do. Due to her appearance, Orual does not receive the sort of automatic love that the beautiful Psyche does. She has to work to gain the love and respect of those around her, and when she does, she doesn’t want to share it with anyone else. Both of her two great loves, Psyche and Bardia, have commitments to love their partners, which to Orual means only that they can’t love her. Donaldson, Mara E (1988), Holy Places are Dark Places: CS Lewis and Paul Ricoeur on Narrative Transformation, Boston: University of America Press . Lewis sets his retelling of this myth in the fictional kingdom of Glome, contemporary with Hellenistic Greece, and he tells his version from the perspective of one of Psyche’s sisters, whom he names Orual. Till We Have Faces begins as Orual’s accusation against the gods, who she says have stolen Psyche from her and wronged her with their deviousness. The older sisters in the original myth are unequivocal villains, but Lewis makes a fundamental change to the story that makes Orual’s claim admissible, one which he says “forced itself upon me, almost at my first reading of the story, as the way the thing must have been.” To Orual, the palace Psyche shares with Cupid is invisible. While Bardia is on his deathbed, Orual decides she can no longer stand the sight of her own kingdom and decides to leave it for the first time to visit neighboring kingdoms. While resting on her journey, she leaves her group at their camp and follows sounds from within a wood, which turn out to be coming from a temple to the goddess Istra (Psyche). There Orual hears a version of Psyche's myth, which shows her as deliberately ruining her sister's life out of envy. In response, she writes out her own story, as set forth in the book, to set the record straight. Her hope is that it will be brought to Greece, where she has heard that men are willing to question even the gods. Flying Dutchman: Istra, after disobeying her husband, is exiled to wander the earth until she can be reunited with the God of the Mountain.