Diania was a Queen of the Fairies. She appeared as a young woman that Malcolm Polstead and Alice Parslow encountered on the Enchanted Island halfway between Oxford and London. Diania sought to keep the baby Lyra Belacqua as her daughter after feeding her milk from her breast. Malcolm speculated that the cloud of butterflies surrounding her may have collectively been her dæmon.[1]
Behind the scenes[]
- Philip Pullman gives a quotation from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene at the end of La Belle Sauvage and implies that Lyra has been given some power for drinking Diania's milk.
- Diania is a name etymologically similar to a number of famous fairies, notably Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, the moon and nature, Titania, William Shakespeare's Queen of the Fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, Gloriana.
Appearances[]
- La Belle Sauvage
- The Secret Commonwealth (Mentioned only)
References[]
- ↑ La Belle Sauvage, Chapter 21