The Green Witch’s enchantment

The Green Witch’s enchantment is a sustained magic of memory and will: it makes the Witch’s imposed ideas feel like the captives’ own, and makes the world beyond her underground kingdom seem unreal. It governs both Prince Rilian’s long captivity and the gnomes’ years of forced service, then nearly persuades Jill and Eustace to disbelieve their own experience. Its defeat begins not with a counter-spell but with Puddleglum’s deliberate act of resistance, which interrupts the Witch’s method and restores the travelers’ capacity to choose what they believe.

Methods and Effects

The Witch reinforces her influence through two coordinated means. She casts green powder into the fire, releasing a sweet, drowsy smell that grows stronger during the conversation; at the same time, she plays a small instrument in a steady, monotonous rhythm. The smell and the music make sustained thought difficult. The effect works gradually: the rhythm becomes easy not to notice, while continuing to influence the listeners. The enchantment is therefore not simply a claim the Witch asks her victims to accept; the scene shows their powers of attention and judgment being weakened as she speaks.

The Witch directs that weakened judgment toward a systematic denial of the travelers’ world. When Jill insists that she and Eustace came from another world, the Witch treats the idea as a game and asks what connects the worlds. Jill’s thoughts briefly reach toward familiar things from home, including Experiment House, her family home, radio sets, cinemas, cars, aeroplanes, ration books, and queues. But the list fades before she can use it to defend her memory. She cannot recall the names of those things, and does not recognize that she is under enchantment. Instead, it feels like a relief to concede that the other world may have been a dream. The scene makes the spell’s central danger clear: it changes not only what Jill believes, but her ability to notice that her belief has been changed.

The Witch’s argument also recasts the travelers’ memories as copies of things in her own world. She dismisses the sun as an imagined, larger lamp and Aslan as an imagined, larger cat; from those comparisons she insists that Narnia, the Overworld, the sky, the sun, and Aslan do not exist. She presents sleep as the sensible next step and proposes that the group begin a wiser life the following day. Her performance of calm reason accompanies a spell already close to overcoming the Prince and the children: they stand with lowered heads, flushed cheeks, and half-closed eyes, with their strength nearly gone.

Puddleglum’s Interruption

Puddleglum disrupts the Witch’s influence by walking to the fire and stamping on it with his bare foot. He knows the act will hurt, and it does; but part of the fire is ground into ashes. The intervention changes the room’s conditions as well as the travelers’ resolve. The heavy smell diminishes, and the remaining smoke takes on the unpleasant smell of burnt Marsh-wiggle. The Prince and the children lift their heads and open their eyes as their thoughts become clearer. The Witch’s voice, previously sweet and quiet, turns loud and threatening when she orders Puddleglum not to touch the fire again.

Pain provides Puddleglum with a moment of clarity. He does not claim that the Witch’s reasoning has been answered point by point; instead, he allows that her account might be true and judges the worlds by what they mean. Even if the things they remember—trees, grass, sun, moon, stars, and Aslan—were imagined, he argues, they would still matter more than the Witch’s bleak kingdom. He chooses to stand with Aslan and live as like a Narnian as he can, even on the possibility that neither exists. That decision is the spell’s decisive defeat in the chamber: the Witch has made doubt feel like certainty, but Puddleglum refuses to let uncertainty dictate allegiance. He declares that the travelers will leave her court and seek the Overworld, and the Prince and children are no longer simply yielding to her version of reality.

Captivity and the Gnomes’ Release

The enchantment has operated on a wider scale than the attempted persuasion of the four travelers. Golg explains that the gnomes were brought up from Bism by the Witch’s magic and made to work for her in the Shallow Lands. They had forgotten who they were and where they belonged; they could do and think only what she put into their heads. For years, she supplied them with gloomy thoughts, leaving them unable even to remember their former joy in jokes and dancing. Their servitude is thus also a theft of memory and identity: the gnomes experience the Witch’s imposed life without understanding its origin or knowing that another home is theirs.

Their enchantment breaks when a great crash opens a chasm toward the Really Deep Land, a thousand fathoms below, and the sea begins to rise. The shock makes the gnomes recognize that they have been enchanted; they drop the loads, bundles, and tools they had been carrying and hurry toward the opening. Golg identifies their true home as Bism and describes the return of the feelings and impulses the Witch had suppressed. The gnomes’ joyous celebration contrasts with their former sadness and silence, showing that the spell had not merely restricted their actions: it had concealed their identity and kept their desires aligned with the Witch’s demands.

Prince Rilian and the Larger Plot

Prince Rilian’s captivity is another consequence of the Witch’s magic. Once released from the Silver Chair, he tells the Witch that the sorceries binding him have ended and identifies himself as the son of Caspian X and heir to Narnia. He rejects the plan to put him at the head of an army of Earthmen and use him to seize a foreign throne, recognizing it as villainy. His declaration establishes the difference between the Witch’s control and his recovered judgment: while enchanted, he had been made an instrument of a plan he did not understand; freed, he identifies the plan as an assault on a country that is his own.

After the escape, Rilian discusses the adventure with the older and wiser Beasts and Dwarfs while Jill and Eustace sleep. In their account, the Witch killed Rilian’s mother and enchanted him; she had dug beneath Narnia and intended to emerge and rule it through him, while keeping him unaware that the land he would supposedly rule was his own. The gnomes, too, had been recruited into her scheme without knowledge of their origin or purpose. The spell therefore links private captivity, stolen identity, and political conquest: by controlling what Rilian and the gnomes remember, the Witch seeks to turn the rightful prince and an enslaved people into means of invasion.

The Witch’s defeat ends this network of control. When the gnomes learn what has happened, they explain that the crash and opening chasm broke their spell; the gathered Narnian listeners understand that the Witch had planned to invade through Rilian and had been connected with the dangerous giants of Harfang. The Green Witch’s enchantment is consequently more than a device for producing disbelief in one room. Across the story, it hides origins, narrows thought, and makes imposed obedience appear natural. Its breaking restores memory and choice, allowing Rilian to recognize his duty, the gnomes to seek Bism, and the travelers to leave the Witch’s court in allegiance to the world she had tried to erase.