By Tenethia

Warning: Minor Spoilers may be accessed by reading this.

C.S. Lewis told us much about Narnia when he wrote his seven books, but there are several things his readers were not told that they wondered about. When Lewis was alive, his fans had the option of sending their questions to him to get answers. Lewis wrote many letters during his lifetime, and several volumes were published. C.S. Lewis’s Letters to Children reveal five things about The Chronicles of Narnia that we would not know without reading the letters.

1. We learn where Aslan’s name came from. In a letter to Carol, he reveals that Aslan means lion in Turkish, and that the way he meant for it to be pronounced was “Ass-lan.”

2. Phyllida sent Lewis a letter, wondering if the party in the woods in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe had been turned right again. Lewis responded by saying: “I thought people would take it for granted that Aslan would put it all right. But I see now I should have said so.”

3. We learn that Lewis considered two other names for the seventh book in the Chronicles before he settled on The Last Battle. These names were The Last King of Narnia, and Night Falls on Narnia.

4. Lewis reveals in a letter to a girl named Marcia that he intended all through the books to have Susan lose her way in The Last Battle. He said it this way: “Haven’t you noticed in the two you have read that she is rather fond of being too grownup? I am sorry to say that side of her got stronger and she forgot about Narnia.”

5. We also learned that Lewis didn’t intend for The Last Battle to shut Susan out of Aslan’s country forever. Lewis told us in a letter to someone named Martin that “There is plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end – in her own way.”

While Lewis has written these letters (and there are others!) explaining bits of The Chronicles, he has left some things to our imagination. Lewis has purposely left us tid-bits about Narnia that aren’t explained, so that we can continue writing them ourselves. He even mentioned one in particular in one of his letters: Lucy and the Unicorn speaking in The Last Battle. While Lewis has answered some of our questions, he has left us to answer some of them ourselves.