Cleander wrote:Well, as someone mentioned recently, there was apparently a discrepancy concerning Queen Swanwhite. Lewis had mentioned in The Last Battle that she lived "long before the White Witch," but in his timeline he placed her as living after the Pevensie reign, thus raising conjecture among fans as to whether there might be two Swanwhites. Perhaps Lewis might have cleared this up in his next revision.
Oh yes, I've noticed that too. Mind you, the timeline was never actually published during Lewis's lifetime — I think it was first printed in
Past Watchful Dragons by Walter Hooper, in 1979. I've always assumed that Lewis remembered he'd made a reference to a Queen Swanwhite in
The Last Battle but forgot when he said she'd reigned and mistakenly placed her after the Pevensies instead of before. There are quite a few discrepancies and continuity errors between the Chronicles themselves that make me suspect Lewis didn't do a lot of re-reading what he'd previously written to check he was being consistent before writing a new one...
The example that stands out the most to me is the huge difference between what we're told about the White Witch's background in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Jadis's background in
The Magician's Nephew. They are of course meant to be the same person — that's made very clear in MN — but in LWW, which was written first, the Witch is presented as "the Emperor's hangman", someone whose claim to be Queen is false but who has a genuine and divinely appointed role in Narnia as the one who executes traitors, under the Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time. We're also told that she's descended on one side from Adam's "first wife" Lilith (a mythical demonic figure who isn't in the Bible at all), and on the other from "the giants" — that there's "not a drop of real human blood in the Witch".
However, when we meet Jadis in Charn, she's presented as the last of a long line of rulers who (it's implied from the statues of them) started out noble and kind but became more and more corrupt and cruel over many generations, until they culminated in this last Queen who would destroy every living thing in the world (with one word!) rather than let her sister take the throne. Lewis drops a hint about possible "giantish blood" in her family, but that's the only echo of what he told us in LWW.
Then when Jadis comes into what will become Narnia and watches Aslan create it, she is clearly NOT given any cosmic role as the executioner of wrong-doers, contrary to what we're told about the Deep Magic in LWW. She is terrified of Aslan and his power from the start, and flees after she throws the iron bar at him and it simply bounces off. She later steals the apple from the garden and becomes immortal, but all we're told beyond that is that she waits in the far northern lands, "growing stronger in dark Magic", until 1,000 years later — presumably after Narnia's tree of protection has died — when she comes back as the White Witch and begins the 100-year winter. Nothing at all about Aslan or the Emperor giving her a legitimate (though horrible) place in Narnia's scheme of things, which is what she had in LWW; here, she's been thoroughly evil and the servant of evil from the start.
What I'm wondering is — had Lewis forgotten the role he originally gave to the White Witch in LWW, which is the whole point of why Aslan had to sacrifice himself, in order to override the Deep Magic with the Deeper? If Lewis had done a revision of the books and found that discrepancy, would he have rewritten a few passages in both books to make them more consistent with each other? It doesn't bother me too much as a reader, but if Netflix is going to make films or serials of all seven Chronicles, they're going to have to figure out how to handle that issue — especially if they go for chronological order (MN first, followed by LWW) rather than original publication order.
Just another thing we'll never know for sure, but it's intriguing to think about!