Perelandra

by

C. S. Lewis

The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril Character Analysis

The Green Lady is the first rational creature whom Ransom meets on Perelandra; she is the biblical Eve figure of that world. Though she looks just like a human being (with the exception of her green skin), she is actually a different species altogether. The Green Lady has a goddess-like beauty combined with a childlike delight in the world and a perfectly poised dignity. Because she is uncorrupted by sin, the Green Lady enjoys a perfectly harmonious relationship with Maleldil (God), whose will is her deepest delight, and she has effortless command over her own desires and emotions. She especially loves tending and teaching Perelandra’s creatures and swimming in the waves that Maleldil sends. The Green Lady describes growth in wisdom as “growing older.” After Weston arrives on Perelandra, he tempts the Green Lady to sin by suggesting that disobeying Maleldil’s commands (particularly the command not to dwell on the Fixed Land) will allow her to grow “older” still. Though the Green Lady ponders this possibility and even indulges in self-centered imaginings for the first time, she successfully resists Weston and never fully succumbs to temptation. Separated from her husband, the King, throughout most of the story, she reunites with him to reign in love and splendor at the end of the novel. After taking the throne, she is called Tinidril. She will become the mother of Perelandra’s children.

The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril Quotes in Perelandra

The Perelandra quotes below are all either spoken by The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril or refer to The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Exploration, Wonder, and God’s Plan Theme Icon
).
Chapter 5 Quotes

"And do you," said Ransom with some hesitation—"and do you know why He came thus to my world?"

All through this part of the conversation he found it difficult to look higher than her feet, so that her answer was merely a voice in the air above him. "Yes," said the voice. "I know the reason. But it is not the reason you know. There was more than one reason, and there is one I know and cannot tell to you, and another that you know and cannot tell to me."

Related Characters: Dr. Elwin Ransom (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Maleldil
Related Symbols: Waves
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:

"I wonder," said the woman, "if you were sent here to teach us death."

"You don't understand," he said. "It is not like that. It is horrible. It has a foul smell. Maleldil Himself wept when He saw it." Both his voice and his facial expression were apparently something new to her. He saw the shock, not of horror, but of utter bewilderment, on her face for one instant and then, without effort, the ocean of her peace swallowed it up as if it had never been, and she asked him what he meant.

Related Characters: Dr. Elwin Ransom (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Maleldil
Page Number: 58
Explanation and Analysis:

“I thought,” she said, "that I was carried in the will of Him I love, but now I see that I walk with it. I thought that the good things He sent me drew me into them as the waves lift the islands; but now I see that it is I who plunge into them with my own legs and arms, as when we go swimming. […] It is a delight with terror in it! One's own self to be walking from one good to another, walking beside Him as Himself may walk, not even holding hands.”

Related Characters: The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Maleldil
Related Symbols: Waves
Page Number: 60
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

"I have said already that we are forbidden to dwell on the Fixed Land. Why do you not either talk of something else or stop talking?”

"Because this forbidding is such a strange one,” said [Weston’s] voice. "And so unlike the ways of Maleldil in my world. And He has not forbidden you to think about dwelling on the Fixed Land. […] [I]n our world we do it all the time. We put words together to mean things that have never happened and places that never were: beautiful words, well put together. And then tell them to one another. We call it stories or poetry. […] It is for mirth and wonder and wisdom.”

"What is the wisdom in it?"

"Because the world is made up not only of what is but of what might be. Maleldil knows both and wants us to know both.”

Related Characters: Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Maleldil
Related Symbols: The Fixed Land
Page Number: 89
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

[The smile] seemed to summon Ransom, with horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence. It was beyond vice as the Lady was beyond virtue.

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man, The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril
Page Number: 95
Explanation and Analysis:

"And will you teach us Death?" said the Lady to Weston's shape, where it stood above her.

"Yes," it said, "it is for this that I came here, that you may have Death in abundance. But you must be very courageous."

"Courageous. What is that?"

"It is what makes you to swim on a day when the waves are so great and swift that something inside you bids you to stay on land."

"I know. And those are the best days of all for swimming."

"Yes. But to find Death, and with Death the real oldness and the strong beauty and the uttermost branching out, you must plunge into things greater than waves."

Related Characters: Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom
Related Symbols: Waves
Page Number: 98
Explanation and Analysis:

"Your deepest will, at present, is to obey Him […] The way out of that is hard. It was made hard that only the very great, the very wise, the very courageous should dare to walk in it, to go on—on out of this smallness in which you now live—through the dark wave of His forbidding, into the real life, Deep Life, with all its joy and splendour and hardness."

"Listen, Lady," said Ransom. "There is something he is not telling you. […] Long ago, when our world began, there was only one man and one woman in it, as you and the King are in this. And there once before he stood, as he stands now, talking to the woman. […] And she listened, and did the thing Maleldil had forbidden her to do. But no joy and splendour came of it.”

Related Characters: Dr. Elwin Ransom (speaker), Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man (speaker), Lewis (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril, Maleldil
Related Symbols: Waves
Page Number: 102
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

She stood like one almost dazed with the richness of a day-dream. She did not look in the least like a woman who is thinking about a new dress. The expression of her face was noble. It was a great deal too noble. Greatness, tragedy, high sentiment—these were obviously what occupied her thoughts. Ransom perceived that the affair of the robes and the mirror had been only superficially concerned with what is commonly called female vanity. The image of her beautiful body had been offered to her only as a means to awake the far more perilous image of her great soul. The external and, as it were, dramatic conception of the self was the enemy's true aim. He was making her mind a theatre in which that phantom self should hold the stage. He had already written the play.

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man, The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

It snapped like a violin string. Not one rag of all this evasion was left. Relentlessly, unmistakably, the Darkness pressed down upon him the knowledge that this picture of the situation was utterly false. His journey to Perelandra was not a moral exercise, nor a sham fight. If the issue lay in Maleldil's hands, Ransom and the Lady were those hands. The fate of a world really depended on how they behaved in the next few hours. The thing was irreducibly, nakedly real. They could, if they chose, decline to save the innocence of this new race, and if they declined its innocence would not be saved. It rested with no other creature in all time or all space. This he saw clearly, though as yet he had no inkling of what he could do.

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril, Maleldil
Page Number: 121
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

"The world is born to-day," said Malacandra. "To-day for the first time two creatures of the low worlds, two images of Maleldil that breathe and breed like the beasts, step up that step at which your parents fell, and sit in the throne of what they were meant to be. It was never seen before. Because it did not happen in your world a greater thing happened, but not this. Because the greater thing happened in Thulcandra, this and not the greater thing happens here."

"Elwin is falling to the ground," said the other voice.

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril, The King/Tor
Page Number: 169
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

The eyes of the Queen looked upon him with love and recognition, but it was not of the Queen that he thought most. It was hard to think of anything but the King. And how shall I—I who have not seen him—tell you what he was like? It was hard even for Ransom to tell me of the King's face. But we dare not withhold the truth. It was that face which no man can say he does not know. You might ask how it was possible to look upon it and not to commit idolatry, not to mistake it for that of which it was the likeness. For the resemblance was, in its own fashion, infinite, so that almost you could wonder at finding no sorrows in his brow and no wounds in his hands and feet.

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril, The King/Tor
Page Number: 177
Explanation and Analysis:

"So this is hru," he said at last. "I have never seen such a fluid before. And this is the substance wherewith Maleldil remade the worlds before any world was made."

He washed the foot for a long time but the bleeding did not stop. "Does it mean Piebald will die?" said Tinidril at last.

"I do not think so," said Tor. "I think that any of his race who has breathed the air that he has breathed and drunk the waters that he has drunk since he came to the Holy Mountain will not find it easy to die. Tell me, Friend, was it not so in your world that after they had lost their paradise the men of your race did not learn to die quickly?"

"I had heard," said Ransom, "that those first generations were long livers, but most take it for only a Story or a Poetry and I had not thought of the cause."

Related Characters: Dr. Elwin Ransom (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril (speaker), The King/Tor (speaker), Lewis (speaker)
Page Number: 189
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Perelandra LitChart as a printable PDF.
Perelandra PDF

The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril Quotes in Perelandra

The Perelandra quotes below are all either spoken by The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril or refer to The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Exploration, Wonder, and God’s Plan Theme Icon
).
Chapter 5 Quotes

"And do you," said Ransom with some hesitation—"and do you know why He came thus to my world?"

All through this part of the conversation he found it difficult to look higher than her feet, so that her answer was merely a voice in the air above him. "Yes," said the voice. "I know the reason. But it is not the reason you know. There was more than one reason, and there is one I know and cannot tell to you, and another that you know and cannot tell to me."

Related Characters: Dr. Elwin Ransom (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Maleldil
Related Symbols: Waves
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:

"I wonder," said the woman, "if you were sent here to teach us death."

"You don't understand," he said. "It is not like that. It is horrible. It has a foul smell. Maleldil Himself wept when He saw it." Both his voice and his facial expression were apparently something new to her. He saw the shock, not of horror, but of utter bewilderment, on her face for one instant and then, without effort, the ocean of her peace swallowed it up as if it had never been, and she asked him what he meant.

Related Characters: Dr. Elwin Ransom (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Maleldil
Page Number: 58
Explanation and Analysis:

“I thought,” she said, "that I was carried in the will of Him I love, but now I see that I walk with it. I thought that the good things He sent me drew me into them as the waves lift the islands; but now I see that it is I who plunge into them with my own legs and arms, as when we go swimming. […] It is a delight with terror in it! One's own self to be walking from one good to another, walking beside Him as Himself may walk, not even holding hands.”

Related Characters: The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Maleldil
Related Symbols: Waves
Page Number: 60
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

"I have said already that we are forbidden to dwell on the Fixed Land. Why do you not either talk of something else or stop talking?”

"Because this forbidding is such a strange one,” said [Weston’s] voice. "And so unlike the ways of Maleldil in my world. And He has not forbidden you to think about dwelling on the Fixed Land. […] [I]n our world we do it all the time. We put words together to mean things that have never happened and places that never were: beautiful words, well put together. And then tell them to one another. We call it stories or poetry. […] It is for mirth and wonder and wisdom.”

"What is the wisdom in it?"

"Because the world is made up not only of what is but of what might be. Maleldil knows both and wants us to know both.”

Related Characters: Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Maleldil
Related Symbols: The Fixed Land
Page Number: 89
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

[The smile] seemed to summon Ransom, with horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence. It was beyond vice as the Lady was beyond virtue.

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man, The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril
Page Number: 95
Explanation and Analysis:

"And will you teach us Death?" said the Lady to Weston's shape, where it stood above her.

"Yes," it said, "it is for this that I came here, that you may have Death in abundance. But you must be very courageous."

"Courageous. What is that?"

"It is what makes you to swim on a day when the waves are so great and swift that something inside you bids you to stay on land."

"I know. And those are the best days of all for swimming."

"Yes. But to find Death, and with Death the real oldness and the strong beauty and the uttermost branching out, you must plunge into things greater than waves."

Related Characters: Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril (speaker), Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom
Related Symbols: Waves
Page Number: 98
Explanation and Analysis:

"Your deepest will, at present, is to obey Him […] The way out of that is hard. It was made hard that only the very great, the very wise, the very courageous should dare to walk in it, to go on—on out of this smallness in which you now live—through the dark wave of His forbidding, into the real life, Deep Life, with all its joy and splendour and hardness."

"Listen, Lady," said Ransom. "There is something he is not telling you. […] Long ago, when our world began, there was only one man and one woman in it, as you and the King are in this. And there once before he stood, as he stands now, talking to the woman. […] And she listened, and did the thing Maleldil had forbidden her to do. But no joy and splendour came of it.”

Related Characters: Dr. Elwin Ransom (speaker), Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man (speaker), Lewis (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril, Maleldil
Related Symbols: Waves
Page Number: 102
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

She stood like one almost dazed with the richness of a day-dream. She did not look in the least like a woman who is thinking about a new dress. The expression of her face was noble. It was a great deal too noble. Greatness, tragedy, high sentiment—these were obviously what occupied her thoughts. Ransom perceived that the affair of the robes and the mirror had been only superficially concerned with what is commonly called female vanity. The image of her beautiful body had been offered to her only as a means to awake the far more perilous image of her great soul. The external and, as it were, dramatic conception of the self was the enemy's true aim. He was making her mind a theatre in which that phantom self should hold the stage. He had already written the play.

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, Professor Weston/Weston’s Body/The Un-man, The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

It snapped like a violin string. Not one rag of all this evasion was left. Relentlessly, unmistakably, the Darkness pressed down upon him the knowledge that this picture of the situation was utterly false. His journey to Perelandra was not a moral exercise, nor a sham fight. If the issue lay in Maleldil's hands, Ransom and the Lady were those hands. The fate of a world really depended on how they behaved in the next few hours. The thing was irreducibly, nakedly real. They could, if they chose, decline to save the innocence of this new race, and if they declined its innocence would not be saved. It rested with no other creature in all time or all space. This he saw clearly, though as yet he had no inkling of what he could do.

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril, Maleldil
Page Number: 121
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

"The world is born to-day," said Malacandra. "To-day for the first time two creatures of the low worlds, two images of Maleldil that breathe and breed like the beasts, step up that step at which your parents fell, and sit in the throne of what they were meant to be. It was never seen before. Because it did not happen in your world a greater thing happened, but not this. Because the greater thing happened in Thulcandra, this and not the greater thing happens here."

"Elwin is falling to the ground," said the other voice.

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril, The King/Tor
Page Number: 169
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

The eyes of the Queen looked upon him with love and recognition, but it was not of the Queen that he thought most. It was hard to think of anything but the King. And how shall I—I who have not seen him—tell you what he was like? It was hard even for Ransom to tell me of the King's face. But we dare not withhold the truth. It was that face which no man can say he does not know. You might ask how it was possible to look upon it and not to commit idolatry, not to mistake it for that of which it was the likeness. For the resemblance was, in its own fashion, infinite, so that almost you could wonder at finding no sorrows in his brow and no wounds in his hands and feet.

Related Characters: Lewis (speaker), Dr. Elwin Ransom, The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril, The King/Tor
Page Number: 177
Explanation and Analysis:

"So this is hru," he said at last. "I have never seen such a fluid before. And this is the substance wherewith Maleldil remade the worlds before any world was made."

He washed the foot for a long time but the bleeding did not stop. "Does it mean Piebald will die?" said Tinidril at last.

"I do not think so," said Tor. "I think that any of his race who has breathed the air that he has breathed and drunk the waters that he has drunk since he came to the Holy Mountain will not find it easy to die. Tell me, Friend, was it not so in your world that after they had lost their paradise the men of your race did not learn to die quickly?"

"I had heard," said Ransom, "that those first generations were long livers, but most take it for only a Story or a Poetry and I had not thought of the cause."

Related Characters: Dr. Elwin Ransom (speaker), The Green Lady/The Queen/Tinidril (speaker), The King/Tor (speaker), Lewis (speaker)
Page Number: 189
Explanation and Analysis: