Field of Arbol

> "No feet have walked, nor shall, on the ice of Glund; no eye looked up from beneath on the Ring of Lurga; and Ironplain in Neruval is chaste and empty. Yet it is not for nothing that the gods walked ceaselessly around the fields of Arbol. Blessed be He!"
>
> The Oyarsa of Malacandra or the Oyarsa of Perelandra in *Perelandra*, pg. 342 of the Pan one-volume edition of "The Cosmic Trilogy"

The **Field of Arbol** also known as the **Solar System**, was a star system in the Milky Way with the Sun itself being known as Arbol. The Old Solar language name for it may be **Eribol-ef-Cordi** but this form only appears in the name of the Language itself. It in turn is part of the Milky Way. The planets of the Field of Arbol are all participants in the Great Dance in Deep Heaven.

* Low Worlds
	+ **Viritrilbia** (Mercury)
	+ **Perelandra** (Venus)
	+ **Thulcandra** (Earth)
		- Sulva (Moon)
	+ **Malacandra** (Mars)
		- Malacandrian moons (Phobos and Deimos, not named individually)
* **Asteroid Belt** or the **dancers before the threshold**
* Great Worlds
	+ **Glundandra** or **Glund** (Jupiter)
	+ Lurga (Saturn)
		- Ring of Lurga
	+ **Neruval** (probably Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto)

Elwin Ransom only ever visits three of the Low Worlds in person, his native Thulcandra, Malacandra (in *Out of the Silent Planet*) and Perelandra (in the novel of *Perelandra*).

Ransom gets much information on cosmology from the Oyarsa (presiding angel) of Malacandra, or Mars. Maleldil, the son of the Old One, ruled the Field of Arbol directly. But then The Bent One rebelled against Maleldil and all the eldila of Deep Heaven. In response to this act, The Bent One suffered confinement on Earth where he first inflicted great evil. Thus he made Earth a silent planet, cut off from the Oyéresu of other planets, hence the name 'Thulcandra', the Silent Planet, which is known throughout the Universe. Maleldil tried to reach out to Thulcandra and became a man to save the human race. According to the Green Lady, Tinidril (Mother of Perelandra, or Venus), Thulcandra is favoured among all the worlds, because Maleldil came to it to become a man.

In the Field of Arbol, the Great Worlds were older, and the Low Worlds were newer.

## Non-canon names

Outwith the works of Clive Staples Lewis, one can find the following forms:

* Argusandra - Pluto
* Lurgadandra/Lurgandra - Saturn
* Nevrilbia - Uranus
* Sulvacandra/Sulvadandra - alternative names for Sulva

Sulva is the only one of the planets' moons to be given a specific name within the canonical works.

## Origin of names

The Old Solar names of the Field of Arbol have some resemblance to Latin and Greek originals. In particular, "Thulcandra" has some similarity to "Tellus" (meaning Earth in Latin), and Sulva resembles the Greek *Selene* mixed with the Latin *Luna* and the English "silver".

## Quotations

* “He wondered how he ever could have thought of planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now, with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets - the 'earths' he called them in his thought - as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven - excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but subtraction from, the surrounding brightness.” (*Out of the Silent Planet*)
* "*Sulva is she whom mortals call the Moon. She walks in the lowest sphere. The rim of the world that was wasted goes through her. Half of her orb is turned towards us and shares our curse. Her other half looks to Deep Heaven; happy would he be who could cross that frontier and see the fields on her further side.*"(*That Hideous Strength* 271)
* "Many of the pictures he could make nothing of. One that particularly puzzled him showed at the bottom a segment of a circle, behind and above which rose three-quarters of a disk divided into concentric rings. He thought it was a picture of the sun rising behind a hill; certainly the segment at the bottom was full of Malacandrian scenes – Oyarsa in Meldilorn, sorns on the mountain edge of the harandra [table-lands], and many other things both familiar to him and strange. He turned from it to examine the disk which rose behind it. It was not the sun. The sun was there, unmistakably, at the centre of the disk: round this the concentric circles revolved. In the first and smallest of these was pictured a little ball, on which rode a winged figure something like Oyarsa, but holding what appeared to be a trumpet. In the next, a similar ball carried another of the flaming figures. This one, instead of even the suggested face, had two bulges which after long inspection he decided were meant to be the udders or breasts of a female mammal. By this time he was quite sure that he was looking at a picture of the solar system. The first ball was Mercury, the second Venus – 'And what an extraordinary coincidence,' thought Ransom, 'that their mythology, like ours, associates some idea of the female with Venus.' The problem would have occupied him longer if a natural curiosity had not drawn his eyes on to the next ball which must represent the Earth. When he saw it, his whole mind stood still for a moment. The ball was there, but where the flame-like figure should have been, a deep depression of irregular shape had been cut as if to erase it. Once, then – but his speculations faltered and became silent before a series of unknowns...He looked at the next circle. Here there was no ball. Instead, the bottom of this circle touched the top of the big segment filled with Malacandrian scenes, so that Malacandra at this point touched the solar system and came out of it in perspective towards the spectator. Now that his mind had grasped the design, he was astonished at the vividness of it all. He stood back and drew a deep breath preparatory to tackling some of the mysteries in which he was engulfed. Malacandra, then, was Mars. The Earth – but at this point a sound of tapping or hammering, which had been going on for some time without gaining admission to his consciousness, became too insistent to be ignored." (*Out of the Silent Planet*)