Deplorable Word facts for kids
The Deplorable Word, as used by author C. S. Lewis in The Magician's Nephew, is a magical curse which ends all life on a fictional world except that of the one who speaks it.
Background
In The Magician's Nephew, the children who are the central characters, Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer, come to a lifeless world called Charn. In an ancient, ruined building they awaken a queen called Jadis. She tells them of a worldwide civil war she fought against her sister. All of Jadis's armies were defeated, having been made to fight to the death of the last soldier, and her sister claimed victory. Then Jadis spoke the horrible curse which her sister knew she had discovered but did not think she would use. In speaking the Deplorable Word, Jadis killed every living thing in her world, except herself, to avoid losing the war to her sister.
The children are shocked by this account, but Jadis has no remorse or pity for all the ordinary people whom she killed; in her eyes, they existed only for her to use. The past rulers of her race, who evidently had not always been evil, knew of the Deplorable Word's existence but not the word itself, and had vowed that none of them, nor their descendants, would seek to discover it. Jadis said she had “learned it in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it".
Lewis did not write what the word was, or the price paid to learn it.
Similar themes in other literature
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson include a similar magical feature, though of a less total destructive power. Uttering Donaldson's "Ritual of Desecration" would result in widespread destruction and devastation, and a country hit by it would take centuries to recover, but unlike the Deplorable Word it does not kill everybody.
