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Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Horse and His Boy, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Freedom and Justice
Bravery vs. Recklessness
Christianity
Gender Roles
Summary
Analysis
Shasta wakes up the next morning around noon, feeling stiff after riding Bree so much (and sometimes falling off) the previous night. Shasta is hungry and finds that Anradin left some food and money in the saddle bags. They get going and head north toward the city of Tashbaan, which will be followed by a desert. The road to Tashbaan is relatively barren, and Shasta soon gets used to riding Bree.
Although Shasta’s stiffness as a rider shows his continued resistance to leaving home, he begins to see the positive side of journeying as well. The food that he and Bree find in the saddle bags is a stroke of good luck, but it also hints again at the novel’s Christian themes—that God will provide for the faithful in unexpected ways.
Themes
As Shasta and Bree are traveling the deserted road, Bree thinks he hears lions and crosses a stream to cover up their scent. But on the other side, Bree still hears lions. Bree also thinks he hears the sound of a Tarkaan on horseback nearby. But as the other rider gets closer, Shasta notices that this rider has no beard. He is surprised to hear two voices: The rider also has a Talking Horse.
Lions are dangerous but also a majestic example of the power of nature. Although the lions seem to be an obstacle, they end up leading Shasta to meet the other rider. This once again seems to connect to the Christian idea that God works in mysterious ways, with the lions (as part of nature) representing God’s power.
Themes
Bree calls out to the other talking horse, who turns out to be a mare named Hwin. The rider is not a Tarkaan but a Tarkheena: a girl named Aravis. Aravis doesn’t like Shasta calling her “only a girl” and she accuses him of being an enslaved boy who ran off with his master’s horse. But Bree tries to calm Aravis’s anger, and she admits that she and Hwin are also running away.
Shasta shows some of his own biases when he calls Aravis “only a girl,” but her defiant response shows how she is determined to go against gender expectations in her society. The fact that Aravis is also a runaway on a Talking Horse invites comparisons between her Shasta, despite their different situations (due to gender and Aravis’s much higher social status).
Themes
Shasta and Aravis would like to each get on their way, but the horses Bree and Hwin think it would be best for all of them to travel together. The two humans agree to go together. The horses talk about all the places in Narnia they remember, while the humans continue to distrust each other. At last, Bree asks Aravis to tell him her life story, which she agrees to do because storytelling is an important part of education in Calormen.
Calormen is loosely based on various Arabic countries in the Near and Middle East, and storytelling is an important part of one of the most famous Arabic pieces of literature, One Thousand and One Nights (which consists of several folk stories connected by one frame story). Although Lewis has been criticized for portraying Calormen (and by extension, Arabic culture) in a mostly negative light, full of corruption and slavery, here, Aravis’s skill at stories shows a positive aspect of her culture.
Themes
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