Update - To see the trailer for the new movie, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, click here. To see all my posts on C.S. Lewis, click here.
- Last night I read the last few pages of C.S. Lewis's fantasy, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (one of the books from the stupendously popular series, The Chronicles of Narnia). The concluding pages tell the story of the valiant little mouse, Reepicheep, setting off in his little "coracle" for Aslan's Country. It's obvious that "coracle" refers to a little boat of some kind, but the word was new to me and I needed to find out more. My first stop was "dictionary.com" which produced this definition:
a small, round, or very broad boat made of wickerwork or interwoven laths covered with a waterproof layer of animal skin, canvas, tarred or oiled cloth, or the like: used in Wales, Ireland, and parts of western England.
I had trouble visualizing that description. So I went to other dictionary websites for further help. One site gathered definitions from several websites and put Flickr thumbnail photos at the bottom of the page. "Now," I thought, "we are getting somewhere!!" Two more definitions:
noun A small rounded boat made of waterproof material stretched over a wicker or wooden frame.
noun A fisherman's boat used in Wales and on many parts of the Irish coast, made by covering a wicker frame with leather or oil-cloth; a kind of bull-boat.
Here are two photos of a "coracle." The one above shows the rib construction and the one below shows a man carrying a coracle on his back. These illustrate the typical size and demonstrate its light weight.
Adding considerable interest is a wonderful, short old-time newsreel showing construction of a coracle in Ireland. - http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=4622
Fascinating! Now I know what a "coracle" looks like. Apparently the boat is familiar to everyone in Great Britain since C.S. Lewis used it to refer to Reepicheep's little bark in his children's book.