I wonder if those nymphs I photographed on my prickly pear are baby Narnians.

I often talk to the bugs I'm trying to photograph, but maybe not in ways that a Narnian Talking Bug would answer..."Come on, *don't* go down there behind that...come on out...hold STILL..."

But this was taken in March 2006, so I don't know what I said beyond the first "Whoa! What the heck is that and what's it doing?"

Do we automatically assume Narnians talk in English. I know the Pevensie children were all from England, but maybe Aslan gave them the power to speak Narnian when they ended up there. If that is so, then presumably the bug wouldn't understand you anyway.

I don't know enough about entomology to know whether the genus name _Narnia_ was assigned before or after C.S. Lewis wrote the Narnia books (and thus whether it was a reference to those books or to something else.) Anyone who wants to look up the etymology of entomology in this instance is welcome to do so (I have another bad headache, grump, grump.)

The headache let up enough that I started hunting down the etymology.

My guess is that Lewis got the name Narnia from a town in Umbria, that took the name Narnia when it became a Roman colony, sometime before 299 B.C.E. The name is said to derive from the name of the river Nar. With his education, this is the kind of thing he'd be aware of.

One biology site said the etymology of the genus name _Narnia_ was from "yellow jacket" (and would thus refer to the fact that for some species in the genus, the front of the pronotum is tan or yellow.)

I haven't found anything *directly* linking "yellow jacket" to the town in Umbria, or to an older word that means "yellow jacket"...hmmm. Maybe the town's militia wore yellow jackets at some point?

And for those who'd like to know more about Narnia-the-Umbrian-town-now-called-Narni...

http://www.italianvisits.com/umbria/narni/index.htm