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Charn is a fictional realm in C. S. Lewis's book The Magician's Nephew, one of the Chronicles of Narnia. In the book, two children from Earth journey to Charn, where they find themselves in the royal palace of a very large and completely deserted city that is in a semi-ruined state. There is no presence of any life in this city, including weeds and insects, which is odd. However, there is mention of a vine existing in one of the courtyards, but according to the book it had died long ago. The river that had flowed through Charn was completely dried up, and there was no free water to be found anywhere.

The only living person in Charn at the time of the stories is Jadis, its last Queen. According to her account, She and her sister had fought a long war. Finally, defeated and facing capture and execution, Jadis instead spoke the Deplorable Word which killed all living things under the Sun apart from herself, a possible allusion to the atomic bomb (the name "Charn" is also reminiscent of "charnel house", a place in which anonymous bones are stored). After this she put herself into an enchanted sleep which was broken when Digory Kirke - who had arrived in Charn with Polly Plummer - succumbed to temptation and rang a bell in the hall where Jadis slumbered along with her ancestors.

Charn's Sun is red, large, and cold; it also has a solitary companion (either a planet or a blue dwarf star). When Digory asks Jadis about the sun's appearance, she asks him to compare it to our world's Sun. When informed that it is yellow, brighter, smaller, and "gives off a good deal more heat", she remarks "Ah, so yours is a younger world". This is a reference to "red giant stars", which are older and colder than our Sun, and are almost ready to die, and, as the name implies, big and red.

Charn was described as being completely destroyed after Jadis and the children left and its entrance from the Wood between the Worlds was closed. Jadis entered Narnia with the other humans from our world and after a thousand years became the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Jadis refers to a number of other places she has conquered, and presumably destroyed. However, it not clear whether these places are cities in the same world as Charn, or are other Worlds in their own right.

"Scum! You shall pay dearly for this when I have conquered your world. Not one stone of your city will be left. I will make it as Charn, as Felinda, as Sorlois, as Bramandin."

Mrs. Beaver speculates in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that Jadis is descended from "Adam's first wife", Lilith, on one side and from giants on the other. Assuming that this is true and not merely a rumour, this is rather confusing, since in the Narnian universe Adam would be presumed to be in our world, and the Witch to be in another. Since Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe first, he had not yet written the "true" origin of the White Witch in The Magician's Nephew, which he wrote later but is chronologically earlier. From what Mrs. Beaver said, Jadis did not have a drop of human blood in her, meaning that she could not have come from Adam. It might be possible that Lilith went to another world (presumably Charn) and gave birth with someone else. This theory is corroborated by a Jewish folktale that mentions Lilith as residing in an "Other World" through which she is able to traverse between worlds and visit her "demon lovers."^[1]

Some believe that Charn stands for the natural progression of human depravity; there is a striking similarity between Jadis's description of the life and death of her city and the text of the prophetic book of Nahum concerning the biblical city of Nineveh. Judging from the expressions of the waxwork images of Jadis' ancestors, it is apparent that while her race started out being gentle and wise, they later became corrupt.

1. ^ "Lilith's Cave," Lilith's Cave: Jewish tales of the supernatural, edited by Howard Schwartz (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988)