The Narnia Trivia page. I loved how this page had turned out...on my computer. But it was one of those pages that on Mozilla or Firefox or even some IE it just wouldn't cooperate. Arevanye and I tried everything, nothing worked. So I shall save here for all to see how it actually was suppose to look.

Yes, it's simple. But I like simple.

That is where my work ended on this section. All the content was dug up by amatire, I have no idea how long it took her to find all this stuff, but it was a great contribution.

The Narnia Chronicals *nod to the original board* ;)

~ The original names of the children were Ann, Martin, Rose, and Peter.

~ The first draft of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" was completed in 1949 and contained no mention of Aslan. Lewis says he was meditating on images from the story and suddenly Aslan came bounding into the picture.

~ 'Turkish Delight' is a Turkish/Greek sweetmeat which is called 'Rahat Lokoum' in Turkish. It is made by mixing a rose-flavoured sugar solution in water with wheat or corn starch, so that it 'sets' into jelly. It is then cut into squares and dusted with icing sugar. In England it is popular at Christmas, which explains why Edmund chose it while in the snow-covered wastes of Narnia.

~ Some people believe that Lewis got the inspiration for Narnia's landscape from the view near his childhood home in Stormont Ireland of the distant Mourne mountains and Strangford Lough.  Lantern Waste may also be based on the wood behind that same house.

~ Harper Collins have expressed a wish to create new stories based in Narnia which will fill in some of the gaps in the chronology of Lewis' original books.

~ During World War II, four children stayed at Lewis' home, the Kilns. Perhaps this is where he came up with the idea for the Pevensie children staying with the old Professor.

~ The character of Puddleglum was based on C.S. Lewis' gardener, Fred Paxford.

~ Take a deep breath for this one, it gets complicated:  C.S. Lewis began writing the books in this order: LWW, PC, VDT, HHB, SC, MN, LB.  Lewis completed writing the books in this order: LWW, PC, VDT, HHB, SC, LB, MN.  The books were originally published in this order: LWW, PC, VDT, SC, HHB, MN, LB.  The books were recently renumbered chronologically: MN, LWW, HHB, PC, VDT, SC, LB.  Got that?  Good.

~ The image of a faun carrying parcels and an umbrella in a snowy wood came to Lewis when he was sixteen.

~ "The Last Battle" was awarded the Carnegie Award, the highest award for children's literature, and it is the only book not dedicated to anyone.

~ Roger Lancelyn Green, who wrote such classics as King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and A Tale of Troy which was illustrated by Pauline Baynes, was the one who suggested naming the books "The Chronicles of Narnia."

~ Of all the children Lucy spends the most time in Narnia, beating Edmund by roughly four hours.

Narnian Names

~ The original names of the children were Ann, Martin, Rose, and Peter.

~ The word "jadis" means "witch" in Persian. There is a town in Roseau County Minnesota called Jadis.

~ "Aslan" is the Turkish word for "lion." And can be used for a first name for a man or a surname. Currently the most famous person with the name Aslan is Aslan Maskhadov the President of Chechnya.

~ "Cair Paravel" means "a lesser court" (Old English: "caer" means "court" and "paravail" means "lesser" or "under".) In other words, the kings of Narnia are under Aslan.

~ "Arslan Tash," meaning "stone lion" in Turkish, is the name of an archaeological site which deals with the legend of Lilith (the White Witch's ancestor.)

Narnian History

~ The Lone Islands became tributaries to Narnia in 302, when King Gale of Narnia delivered those islands from a dragon (according to Lewis' timeline).

~ The Giant Pire, mentioned in "The Horse and His Boy," was killed by Olvin of Archenland in the year 407 (according to Lewis' timeline).

~ The pirates who would become the Telmarines left our world between 1933 and 1940, when there were still pirates in the South Seas. They arrived in Telmar in the Narnian year 460.

~ The War between Miraz and Caspian and the Old Narnians is called The War of Deliverance.

~ According to Lewis' timeline, in 302 the Calormenes who then inhabited Telmar behaved very wickedly and Aslan turned them into dumb beasts (Whether these inhabitants were humans or Talking Beasts remains debated.)

Changes and Mistakes

~ Lewis wrote a timeline after the Chronicles of Narnia had come out.  In one place it seems to disagree with the text of one of the books:  In The Magician's Nephew,  the second son of Frank I is said to become king of Archenland, but the timeline claims that Archenland was established in 180 by Col, the youngest son of Frank V.

~ Some early American copies of LWW and VDT contained minor changes from the original English versions.

~ Although there are supposedly no Talking Mice in Narnia prior to the Resurrection of Aslan, there are two suspiciously mouse-like creatures in Pauline Baynes' illustration of the coronation of Frank and Helen in "The Magician's Nephew."

~ Lewis' friend J.R.R. Tolkien so criticized "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" that Lewis nearly didn't finish it.

C.S. Lewis Trivia

~ C.S. Lewis was born in 1892 in Belfast, Ireland.

~ When Lewis was a boy he and his brother created an imaginary world called Animal Land. Which had a parliament run by a powerful Frog Prime Minister called Lord Big. However, in Surprised by Joy Lewis insists that this was an entirely different world to Narnia and did not inspire the later Chronicles at all.

~ Lewis' grandfather was a minister at St Marks Church in County Down, Ireland. On the door to his Rectory is an ornate handle in the shape of a lion which would have been at head-height for Lewis as a child of 5 or 6 years old. Could this be where Aslan first entered his thoughts?

~ If you are in the UK, you can visit certain sites from Lewis' life: Magdalen College, (pronounced 'Mawdlin') Oxford which is often open to public visits in the vacations, Holy Trinity Churchyard Headington Quarry, Oxford (the site of Jack's grave), The Kilns, Lewis's home for many years, which is currently under restoration and may eventually be opened to the public and the Eagle and Child (the Bird and Baby) pub where many of the Inklings meetings were held.

~ Wheaton College in the far western suburbs of Chicago, houses an extensive collection relating not only to C.S. Lewis, but also to G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers. Among its treasures is the original Wardrobe that C.S. Lewis supposedly had in mind when he wrote the Narnia books.

~ A play of C.S. Lewis' life and his relationship with Joy and Douglas Gresham called Shadowlands was made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins in 1993. The name 'Shadowlands' comes from the end of 'The Last Battle' where Aslan tells the children that 'you are all dead, as you used to call it in the Shadowlands': the idea behind the name is that our world and Narnia are only dim reflections of Aslan's kingdom.

~ The film omitted the part of one of Joy's sons: David Gresham. His brother Douglas says 'In terms of hard facts it is deliberately and by necessity very inaccurate, but emotionally it is spot on.' High praise indeed! David Gresham is now living in India.

~ Anthony Hopkins described the movie as 'a fictional illumination based on the facts.'

~ Douglas Gresham wrote an autobiography called Lenten Lands, My Childhood With C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman.

~ Lewis' personal favourite of all his fictional works was written in 1956 and is called Till We Have Faces. It is a Christian version of the myth of Cupid and Psyche.

~C.S. Lewis died on the same day as American President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. 

~ In 1998, a statue was erected at Hollywood Arches library in east Belfast to mark the centenary of Lewis' birth. The life-size bronze depicts Digory Kirke, the writer's fictional alter ego, entering Narnia through the magic wardrobe.

Movie Trivia

~  Two stars from the J.K Rowling inspired Harry Potter series - Emma Watson (Hermione) and Daniel Radcliffe (Harry) - are rumoured to have auditioned for the roles of Peter and Susan in the new Disney film of LWW. Others mentioned for the role of Susan include Rachel Hurd Wood who played Wendy in the 2003 film version of Peter Pan.  

~ Six films of the Chronicles have been made, all for TV: An animated version of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" in 1979, live versions of "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe," "Prince Caspian and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader" (combined into one film), and "The Silver Chair" in the 1980's (they aired on the BBC), and a little-known black-and-white version of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" for England's ITV in 1968.