Wanderer Between Worlds wrote:Justin of Archenland, something else that came to mind is the LeFay fragment that Lewis began writing shortly after LWW. It involves a boy named Digory having the ability to talk to trees and animals (including a squirrel, Pattertwig), perhaps indicating that there were indeed talking beasts in
our world. I have not read Walter Hooper's
Past Watchful Dragons, so I don't have access to the original manuscript, but it does make me wonder where Lewis had intended to go with such an idea.
It always makes me wonder too, Wanderer!
I do have
Past Watchful Dragons and the Lefay Fragment is one of my favourite parts of it. (You can get secondhand copies of it quite easily — I picked one up via Amazon about a year ago, as I needed to use it as a reference and my original copy is back at my parents' home in Australia.)
Of course the Lefay Fragment is most often thought of as an early draft of
The Magician's Nephew and is assumed to have been written soon after Lewis completed
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But I've just found
a post by Brenton Dickieson (I don't know anything about him, but maybe others here do), from his blog A Pilgrim in Narnia, in which he makes an intriguing speculation. Maybe the Lefay Fragment was actually written BEFORE any of Lewis's Narnia stories and was his first attempt at a children's story, but he wasn't able to get anywhere with that idea, so he abandoned it and tried a different tack and
then Narnia began to take shape as "Aslan came bounding into it"?
Dickieson starts out by discussing other things Lewis was working on in the late 1940s — also very interesting, especially the poem about the horses! — but he ties all this in with the Lefay Fragment further on and I think he makes a good case for the argument that "the LeFay Fragment is an early, pre-Narnian attempt at a fairy tale, not a second attempt at Narnia." What do others here think?
(Apologies if this takes the thread off topic — I'm happy for it to be split into a different one if the mods think that's more appropriate.)