Kidnapping of Prince Cor

The Kidnapping of Prince Cor is the childhood abduction that separates Cor from his family and sets in motion his life under the name Shasta. Engineered by the disgraced Lord Bar to thwart a prophecy about Archenland’s deliverance, the kidnapping ends not with Cor’s recovery but with his disappearance at sea; Aslan’s later account connects that missing boat to the child found by Arsheesh.

Prophecy and the Conspiracy

A week after the birth of Cor and his twin, Corin, their parents took them to a wise Centaur in Narnia for a blessing. The Centaur prophesied that Cor would one day save Archenland from the deadliest danger it had ever faced. The prophecy pleased the king and queen, but Lord Bar, then the king’s Lord Chancellor, understood it as a threat to his own plans.

Bar had been dismissed after wrongdoing, though he was allowed to remain in Archenland. Cor later learned that Bar had also been in the pay of the Tisroc and had sent secret information to Tashbaan. Once he heard the prophecy, Bar decided Cor must be put out of the way. The kidnapping thus joined a domestic act of treachery to a wider political conspiracy: the child singled out to protect Archenland was secretly carried toward the power working against it.

Abduction and Pursuit

Cor’s account leaves the precise method of the kidnapping uncertain: he says he does not know exactly how Bar succeeded. The escape from Archenland was prepared in advance, however. Bar rode down the Winding Arrow to the coast, where a ship manned by his own followers was waiting, and put to sea with Cor aboard.

Cor’s father learned of the abduction and pursued the ship. He reached the coast too late to prevent its departure, but it was still in sight; within twenty minutes he had embarked in one of his warships. The pursuit lasted six days. On the seventh, the king’s forces brought Bar’s galleon to battle, in a sea-fight that began at ten in the morning and continued until sunset. They ultimately captured the ship, but Bar had already sent Cor away in a boat.

Disappearance and the Hidden Outcome

When Bar realized that his ship would be overtaken, he entrusted Cor to one of his knights and sent them away in the ship’s boat. The boat was never seen again, and the knight’s identity remained unknown to Cor. Bar himself was killed in the battle. The attempted rescue therefore stopped the conspirator and his vessel without recovering the child, leaving Cor’s family with no account of where he had gone.

The boat’s fate is disclosed only much later. After meeting Aslan in the mountain pass, Shasta recounts his dangers, including his childhood arrival in Calormen. Aslan reveals that he had pushed the boat carrying a child near death ashore, where Arsheesh was waiting at midnight. Cor later recognizes this as the same boat that carried him away from Archenland. He imagines that the unnamed knight must have kept him alive, perhaps at personal cost, but the knight’s name and precise part in the journey remain unknown.

Narrative Significance

The kidnapping turns a prophecy into a causal thread that Cor can recognize only after the long separation has ended. As a child, he disappears from Archenland and grows up without knowing his parentage; as an adult, he can tell how the sea voyage connected him to Arsheesh and to the name Shasta. The episode’s meaning also extends beyond the abduction itself: Aslan describes the boat’s arrival as one part of a larger story, while insisting that he tells each person only that person’s own story. Cor’s later explanation supplies the family history behind Shasta’s beginning without erasing the limits of what Cor knows.