This is the happiest time of Orual’s life. Orual, Psyche, and the Fox all become close and constantly spend time together. Orual and the Fox love her deeply, and Orual takes on the duty of raising her. The baby is named Istra, which translates to Psyche in Greek, and her beauty stuns all around her. He orders the Fox to work in the mines, but soon realizes that he needs the Fox to advise him in affairs of state instead.
The King falls into a rage on the night of the birth, for the baby is a girl, and he needs a son to be his heir. When he makes the girls wear veils for the wedding, Orual realizes that she is ugly. He teaches her Greek myths and philosophy, and he insists on rational thinking, even doubting the existence of the gods.īefore long, the King announces his engagement to the princess of a nearby kingdom. Orual comes to love the Fox more than anyone. Their father, the King, buys a Greek slave whom he nicknames the Fox and assigns to teach Orual and Redival. Orual’s mother dies when she and her sister Redival are children. The gods most central to the story are Ungit, a goddess who corresponds to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, but in Glome is represented by a rugged black stone and is essentially cruel and her son, the god of the Grey Mountain, who lives on a mountain near Glome. In her old age, Orual writes Part I to lay out all of the wrongs that the gods have done to her, hoping that a traveler will bring the book to the Greeklands, where she thinks their people’s wisdom might find some answer to her questions about the gods. The narrator is Orual, a princess who eventually becomes the Queen of Glome when her father, the King, dies. The novel takes place in the fantastical kingdom of Glome, situated in a world that also includes a country called the Greeklands, modeled after ancient Greece.
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