Katherine Langrish, in her book From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia, argues that Prince Caspian is built around the classic fairy-tale trope in which people step “into fairy rings or disappear into a fairy kingdom for what seems a few hours or a few days, only to find on their return that a hundred or more years have passed, and no one now remembers them.” That sense of loss haunts the book. The golden chess-knight discovered by Susan in the ruins of the castle is a nod to the Golden Chessmen of the Aesir in Norse myth, which the sons of the gods will find lying in high grass after the destruction of all things at Ragnorak (as told in the Icelandic tale The Deluding of Gylfi). Susan’s horn draws inspiration from one of Lewis’s favorite medieval romances, Huon of Bordeaux, featuring an enchanted horn worn around the neck: “whosoever heard it, if he were a hundred days journey off, should come at the pleasure of him that blew it.” There are also echoes of Hamlet running all through the story: Caspian’s father is deposed by his murderous uncle and, as Langrish notes, Caspian learns the truth and embraces his vocation on the tower roof, like Hamlet on the ramparts of Elsinore. This, by the way, is what makes the Narnia books so enduringly resonant: Lewis was one of the best-read people, maybe the best-read person, of his generation.