You could argue that people wouldn't have been invested enough in the world of Narnia early in the series to be interested in its creation. It needed the first five books to make it marketable. 

@col-klink absolutely. In fact, I think that's pretty much true of all prequels on a conceptual level - learning about the creation of a thing is usually only really interesting if you already understand the significance of that thing.

@col-klink 

Yes, and the interest may have come later when people were curious about how Narnia came to be. I think that people may have mentioned that idea to Lewis long before he wrote The Magician’s Nephew, but after Narnia became well established. 

Posted by: @narnian78

He began The Lefay Fragment after writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but  apparently he wasn’t satisfied with it.  I don’t know why he waited until the sixth book for The Magician’s Nephew to finally tell the creation story of Narnia, but maybe it was then that he knew exactly how to finish the book.

It's possibly worth noting that we don't know exactly when the "Lefay Fragment" was written, as the manuscript is undated. Walter Hooper, who found it among Lewis's papers, assumed it was the beginnings of a sequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and written soon after Lewis finished writing that first book. However, we don't have any clear evidence of that.

I once found an online commentary — unfortunately I can't remember which website it was on or who it was by — that suggested the Lefay Fragment may actually have been Lewis's original attempt at writing a fantasy story for children, written before he started LWW. We don't have any proof of that theory either, but it makes sense from the point of view that he might originally have started writing one story, found he couldn't get anywhere with it, and then changed tack entirely.

The thing is, the Lefay Fragment definitely includes several elements that later became part of The Magician's Nephew, but because the story doesn't go very far before it cuts out, we've no way of knowing where Lewis might have taken it. There's no mention of Narnia in it, and no indication at all that it was intended to become the story of the creation of Narnia (as MN itself eventually turned out to be).

One intriguing element in the Fragment is that it's the story of a boy (Digory) who can talk to animals and trees in our world, and he's always had this ability and learned early on in his life that others don't have it. However, he loses that power when his new friend Polly persuades him to cut a branch off an oak tree in order to help her make a raft to explore the river at the bottom of her garden. The oak is in fact one of Digory's tree friends who talks with him regularly, but even though he apologises as he cuts the branch, the oak never speaks to him again, and from then on none of the other trees or animals do either. Digory is absolutely devastated and miserable (and can't explain the reason to anybody), but then this strange lady, his godmother Mrs Lefay, comes to visit him (carrying a rabbit in her handbag). She says knowingly that she can see he's lost something — apparently referring to the loss of his "gift" of speaking with trees and animals — and begins to give him instructions to go into London and walk into a certain shop... and then the manuscript ends halfway through a sentence, just as it's getting exciting!  

But as that's all we have of it, we don't know whether that story — if Lewis had gone on with it — would have taken Digory into Narnia or any other fantasy worlds, or whether all of the action would have remained in our world.

Getting back specifically to MN and when it was written, I can't think of many fantasy series that actually begin with an account of the creation of that world. As @Col-Klink and @icarus have said, first you really need readers to be "invested enough" in that world to take an interest in it. For another well-known example, I doubt The Silmarillion — which Tolkien never completed in his lifetime — would be of any interest to readers who weren't already familiar with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Even though I'm a Tolkien fan myself, I find The Silmarillion very hard to get into and still haven't managed to read the entire thing! But if I didn't already have the basis of knowing the world that it's about, from having read Tolkien's earlier and more accessible books, there's no way I would be able to follow it at all.

I can think of another series — a fantasy / sci-fi crossover this time — that also didn't begin at the "beginning". Anne McCaffrey's Pern series is set in the future on another planet, which has been colonised by humans from Earth, but over the centuries they've reverted to a largely agrarian / pre-industrial lifestyle and abandoned most of the technology that brought them there. Oh yes, and they ride dragons, which are in fact a native species to the planet of Pern, but they were genetically modified by the original colonists to make them big enough to ride and able to communicate telepathically with their rider.

We get hints of that history in the first several books McCaffrey wrote, but it was only after really establishing Pern with her readers that she wrote a prequel, Dragonsdawn, in which we follow the original colonists of the planet and discover how things came to be as they are there. There are a whole lot of "oh, so that's how that happened!" moments in that book, rather like in MN. I was into the Pern series in my teens and was glad I read them more or less in publication order, because while Dragonsdawn would still make sense story-wise to a reader who'd never read any of the other books, it was all the more satisfying to read it as someone who was already very familiar with Pern and could "get" all the references to places and names and other things that later become an established part of that world.

So — getting back to The Magician's Nephew — no, I don't think Lewis should have written it earlier in the series. If you look at the publication order, we actually get four books in a row that follow on from each other very closely as sequels: LWW, PC, VDT and SC. Then of the remaining three, HHB and MN circle back to earlier events in the history of Narnia, and finally we come to the end of that world — and the bringing together of all the main characters — in LB. But both HHB and MN, while they do work as stories in their own right, really do benefit from us knowing a fair bit about Narnia beforehand.

So I'm glad Lewis wrote and published the series in the order in which he did, and I really wish the publishers hadn't well-meaningly grabbed onto his one comment to a young reader and renumbered the books under the claim that it was Lewis's wish that they should be read in chronological order. But that damage is long done, and here we are now.

@courtenay 

Thanks for the information.  As soon I can find my copy of Past Watchful Dragons I  will reread the parts which have to with The Lefay Fragment.  Mr. Hooper’s book should be of some help in understanding The Magician’s Nephew.  Prequels usually work better if there is some previous material before them. It reminds me of Star Trek: Enterprise, a television series which had plenty of Star Trek episodes before it.  It was based on material from the years of stories that preceded it.  Lewis did have the advantage of more experience in writing Narnia stories when he finally wrote The Magician’s Nephew and transformed The Lefay Fragment into something better for his reading audience.

Posted by: @narnian78

@courtenay 

Thanks for the information.  As soon I can find my copy of Past Watchful DragonsI  will reread the parts which have to with The Lefay Fragment.  Mr. Hooper’s book should be of some help in understanding The Magician’s Nephew.  

I've just dug out my own copy of Past Watchful Dragons and had a look at what Hooper has to say about the "Lefay Fragment" (he's the one who gives that name to it — never italicised, since it isn't the official title of a published work). There are a couple of snippets of interest, which I'll quote here.

I have said that this fragment 'appears to be an early version of The Magician's Nephew', but I have it on the authority of my friend Roger Lancelyn Green that Lewis read the fragment to him in June 1949 — which means that it was almost certainly written immediately after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (Hooper, Past Watchful Dragons, pp. 72-3)

So that's the closest we have to a dating for it — that it was definitely written no later than June 1949. Earlier in the book (p. 40), Hooper informs us that Lewis had finished writing LWW by the end of March 1949, so it's certainly possible that he then wrote the Lefay Fragment some time in between March and June that year. (Hooper tells us on the same page that PC and VDT were completed by the end of February 1950.)

Hooper also goes on to say, in his commentary on the Lefay Fragment:

While the name 'Digory' does not appear in the first story of Narnia [i.e. LWW], it was Roger Lancelyn Green's belief, before it was mine, that in the Lefay fragment Lewis was searching for the origins of Narnia. If the author had gone on from this Lefay beginning, I think Digory would still have been discovered (as he is in The Magician's Nephew) to have been the boy who later in the series becomes Digory Kirke and, by a tying up of loose ends, the old Professor in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But Lewis went on to write Prince Caspian and so this was delayed. It is also worth noting that, in the end, Lewis decided against having talking animals and trees in England — thus causing, as I think he intended, a sharper contrast between our world and that of Narnia. (p. 74)

All of this is very interesting, but I think it's also worthwhile being alert that some of it is pure speculation on the part of both Hooper and Lancelyn Green. The only thing we know for certain is that the Lefay Fragment was written before Lewis wrote PC and VDT. (One of the other elements of the Lefay Fragment that ended up in a different story altogether was Pattertwig the squirrel, who in that fragment is one of Digory's animal friends that he talks to regularly — there's even a comment (in the narrator's voice) about it being bad manners to watch a squirrel going to fetch a nut from his hoard, in almost the same words that Trumpkin uses in making the same observation to Caspian in PC!)

To be fair, Lancelyn Green knew Lewis very well — better than did Hooper, who, although he corresponded by mail with Lewis for some years, only met him in person in the last several months of Lewis's life. So Lancelyn Green's "belief... that in the Lefay fragment Lewis was searching for the origins of Narnia" is certainly coming from a close personal friend of Lewis's, who was in regular contact with Lewis while the Narnia stories were being written, and with whom Lewis shared excerpts of his drafts along the way.

On the other hand, Lancelyn Green and Hooper are ultimately simply guessing, well after the event, that if Lewis had gone on from "this Lefay beginning", it would have turned into essentially the same story as The Magician's Nephew, with Narnia being created and Digory turning out to be the Professor in LWW. Naturally Lewis could have had that connection in the back of his mind as he was writing the fragment, and then that would be why he went back to the name Digory (and Polly) when he did write and publish Narnia's origin story in the form of MN. But I'm still a bit cautious about taking that as a "given", because there's absolutely no evidence in the Lefay Fragment itself that that's where it was going. The beginning of it doesn't give any timeframe at all, let alone the setting of several decades before WW2 that is obviously required if it's meant to be the childhood story of the Professor from LWW. And there's also no mention of this being a story about Narnia, unlike the opening of MN as it now stands:

This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child. It is a very important story because it shows how all the comings and goings between our own world and the land of Narnia first began.

Naturally, the fact that Lewis doesn't include this information in the Lefay Fragment is no proof that he wasn't intending this fragment to be the start of the story of Narnia's creation and the Professor's background! But there's also no absolute proof that he was — only Lancelyn Green and Hooper's assumptions about this fragment that they both knew about, but that Lewis apparently never discussed with either of them in detail.

So in the end, I'm not sure the Lefay Fragment, or Hooper's book Past Watchful Dragons as a whole, are really that much help in "understanding" The Magician's Nephew. There's some good food for thought there, but not that much we can say for absolute certain. It's just a pity (for Narnia enthusiasts, at least) that Lewis destroyed nearly all his other drafts after the completed books were published, or else we'd have far more insight into his creative processes and how his ideas about Narnia came together!

@courtenay 

Do you think that Lewis had issues with “writer’s block” or was it that he was simply able to think of a better story with the creation of Narnia in it? He apparently abandoned “The Lefay Fragment” and didn’t show any interest in publishing it.  I think maybe he just thought of writing an almost completely different story since The Magician’s Nephew seems to have only a little in common with the fragment. But maybe he did have “writer’s block” at the time the fragment was written that he overcame when he wrote the sixth book. It seems that the result was something that satisfied him and his readers. 

Posted by: @narnian78

@courtenay 

Do you think that Lewis had issues with “writer’s block” or was it that he was simply able to think of a better story with the creation of Narnia in it? He apparently abandoned “The Lefay Fragment”and didn’t show any interest in publishing it.  

I really don't know, as Lewis himself never left any comments about his writing process that mention the Lefay Fragment or give any hints of why he gave up on it! It certainly could have been "writer's block" — perhaps he just couldn't figure out where he wanted that story to go, and no fresh ideas came to him, so he abandoned it and turned to writing a new adventure in Narnia for the Pevensie children instead (assuming he did write the Lefay Fragment in between finishing LWW and starting PC).

That said, he breaks off the draft right in the middle of a sentence, just as Mrs Lefay is giving Digory directions to find her again, with the hint that she can't stay long (though she's only been there a short time), and there are a couple of very clear implications that she knows he's lost his ability to talk to trees and animals. So we're left with the expectation that Digory will soon decide to track her down and tell her about that terrible loss — which has left him feeling "as you or I would feel if one day all the grass disappeared and the whole country turned into grey dust: almost as we should feel if all the people in the world went suddenly dumb", as Lewis explains in his narrator's voice a little earlier in the fragment. I can't resist quoting the last part:

'... I only wanted to make you angry.'

'Why, Godmother?' asked Digory.

'To see what you'd look like, of course. To see if you'd the right flash in the eye. And you haven't lost that, anyway, though I think you've lost something else in the last day or so. And now, I don't want to waste any more time. Here's my card with my address on it, and if ever you want to see me, take in all these directions because I don't mean to say everything twice over. You can catch a tram outside this house that will take you to Ravelstone Circus. Then look all round the Circus till you see Little Antrim Street. Then go along that on the left side till you come to Cuckoo Court. Then go down the Court on the right side till you come to a furniture shop that sells birds and pictures. Then you must go into the shop and you'll see

... And that's where it ends, which I found frustrating enough when I first read this at the age of 7 or so, and I reckon I now find it even more frustrating all these years later!!!  

Seriously, I could understand if it felt like the story was running out of steam and going nowhere at this point. But (especially if you read the entire Fragment, which takes up about 16 pages of Past Watchful Dragons!) Lewis in fact builds it up so well and so vividly that it leaves you (or me, at least) wanting desperately to know what happens next. He had the makings of a really, really intriguing and engaging story here — with a few similarities to what became The Magician's Nephew (mainly in the names of Digory, Polly and Mrs Lefay), but with much more significant differences — and he breaks it off JUST as it's getting really exciting.

As I said (and as readers can probably pick up from that last paragraph, even if you haven't read the whole thing), there's a clear implication here that Mrs Lefay knows about Digory's "gift" and that he's lost it; the "flash in the eye" remark suggests that there's something about him that she recognises — perhaps something magical that she and he have in common? — and with those directions, we're definitely being set up for Digory to go and find her again and ask her to tell him more, which perhaps she will be able to in her own place where they're out of the reach of Digory's Aunt Gertrude, with whom he lives. (A thoroughly horrible character and one who seems to be an even nastier prototype of the Head of Experiment House in SC.)

What would Digory have found in that shop, and what would he have found out from Mrs Lefay, and where would all this have led him next? What kind of quest would he be sent to fulfil? Would Digory and his new friend Polly have found their way to Narnia — a land where the beasts and trees talk and everyone can hear them? Would being there have given him back his gift of talking to them in our world, or was that gone forever?

Or was it, perhaps, the sheer awkwardness of having "talking animals and trees in England" (to quote Hooper again) — which blurs the contrast between our world and Narnia, if indeed Narnia was going to come into it at all — that made Lewis stall at this point and eventually decide he couldn't make anything of this story after all? The questions are endless and unanswerable.

Of course, when Lewis eventually wrote The Magician's Nephew, it turned out quite different from this abruptly-cut-off fragment, and ended up being (I think) one of the richest and most emotionally moving and most brilliantly written books in the entire series. But I still can't help wishing sometimes that we could have found out what happened with this original Digory and the mysterious (but in this version, probably not evil) Mrs Lefay!  

I just did some nosing about online and found the blog post I remember reading a few years ago, which puts forward the hypothesis that Lewis may have written the Lefay Fragment as his first attempt at a children's story, BEFORE he actually came up with the concept of Narnia and wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:

A Pilgrim in Narnia — On a Picture by Chirico: A Proposal about the Creation of Narnia

It takes the writer (Brenton Dickieson — does anyone here know him?) a while to get to this theory about the Lefay Fragment, but the blog is worth reading, as he does make some very interesting observations, not only about the Fragment itself, but about other things that Lewis was writing at about the time he began working on Narnia, and it's quite thought-provoking.

I would say straight up that the main problem with Dickieson's hypothesis is that we have Roger Lancelyn Green's word for it (via Walter Hooper) that Lewis read the Lefay Fragment to Lancelyn Green in June 1949, after he'd finished writing LWW (which he completed in March 1949). He'd already shared LWW with Lancelyn Green (and of course with the other Inklings) while he was writing it.

If the Lefay Fragment was written before LWW, and put aside because Lewis wasn't getting anywhere with that plot and so he started a completely new one instead, why would Lewis read this aborted draft to his close friend and supporter, if he'd already decided to drop the Lefay story and had by this time conceived the world of Narnia and Aslan? That's the one thing that doesn't really make sense with this theory.

And yet, I must say, it's compelling. If you read the Lefay Fragment in full — reading it for what it is in itself, putting aside the preconceived notion that we all have (thanks to Lancelyn Green and Hooper) that this is the earliest version of The Magician's Nephew and it would have gone on in some way to tell the origin of Narnia — one thing that's striking about it is that there is absolutely no hint in it of the Narnia we know, the Narnia that Lewis had already invented vividly in LWW. The only similarity is the talking trees and animals (one of whom is a squirrel called Pattertwig!). But these are talking trees and animals in our world, and the only person who can understand them and converse with them (as far as we learn) is an otherwise ordinary English boy who was somehow born with this power, and who suddenly loses it when he wilfully harms a tree.

That just is not the world — or, at a deeper level, the spiritual ethos — that we know from LWW, let alone the rest of the Narnia stories that Lewis went on to write. There's no room even in LWW for the concept that animals and trees in our world can talk, but only a few magically gifted people have the power to understand them. Narnia is presented right from the start as a world separate from and different from ours, one where animals and trees can talk — and be understood by everyone — precisely because Narnia itself is infused with magic. And meanwhile, all the children from our world who enter Narnia — from the four Pevensies onwards — are ordinary children with no magical powers of their own, and no ability to either gain or lose any such powers, for that matter.

In the end, we can't prove anything either way about the Lefay Fragment, because the only person who could have told us the true facts about it — when it was written, where the author was thinking of going with that story, and why it fizzled out — is of course Lewis himself, and he didn't leave us any clues at all. But I can't help feeling that Dickieson may be onto something. If Lewis wrote the Lefay Fragment after LWW, as a first attempt at Narnia's origin story, he somehow wrote something that bears almost no resemblance to the world that he'd already created. (To me, the Lefay Fragment genuinely feels more like an E. Nesbit story — one of Lewis's own favourite authors when he was a boy — than like a Narnia story.)

On the other hand, if the Lefay Fragment really was Lewis's very first effort at a children's story, and he had no thought of Narnia — or of Aslan — in his mind as he was writing it, the Fragment suddenly makes a lot more sense. It's also a lot more clear why (if that is the case) he broke it off and wrote what became the first Chronicle of Narnia instead.

Again, we'll never know for sure (unless some previously unseen evidence among Lewis's papers comes to light, or else someone invents a time machine, neither of which looks very likely), but here's the crux of the argument in Dickieson's blog:

I want to tentatively suggest that when Lewis worked out what we have in the LeFay Fragment, he wasn’t simply trying a different sort of world than Narnia. I think that he had not yet had Narnia in his mind. I think that the LeFay Fragment is Lewis’ struggle to give voice to these nascent stories in 1948, and maybe even early winter of 1949. I suspect that Lewis was working out of some interesting characters, and a good supposal: what if a boy could talk to trees and animals? A fairy creature—Mrs. LeFay, quite literally a fairy godmother—elbows her way in at the end, but we don’t know where that story will go. I suspect that Lewis had some promising elements, but had large gaps between the pictures in his mind. I suspect the gaps were too large to keep the story together....

“But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it.” As Lewis says in “It All Began With a Picture,” Aslan pulled the whole story together—and then the whole series.

I want to argue that if Aslan was already in Lewis’ head, he wouldn’t have every [sic] attempted to use the magical structure of the LeFay Fragment (magic focussed around the boy). Narnia turns that entire structure upside down: it isn’t Digory that’s magical; it’s the whole wood—no, the whole world!...

That is why I think the LeFay Fragment is a few months earlier than many suspect. When it wasn’t coming together, Lewis set it aside. Then he began to dream of lions, and Narnia was born. Lewis never tried to rewrite the LeFay Fragment using the special boy as the mechanism. But Lewis took what he liked—especially the characters and some of the ideas—and reshaped them into Narnian chronicles, and eventually The Magician’s Nephew.

And to bring this discussion back to where we started, if it's true that the Lefay Fragment is not an early, immediately post-LWW draft of a new Narnia story after all, but an unrelated work from before Lewis came up with the concept of Narnia... well, that would mean that Lewis almost certainly wasn't ready to write Narnia's creation story — and, contrary to what Lancelyn Green and Hooper assume, he may have had no intention of even trying to write Narnia's creation story — immediately after he finished writing the first book in the series, and perhaps not for quite some time afterwards. 

Or even if the Lancelyn Green / Hooper theory is correct, and Lewis was "searching for the origins of Narnia" in writing the Lefay Fragment... he somehow took a completely different tack from his original Narnia story and then ran it into a dead end very quickly, without getting anywhere near the concepts of Narnia that he'd already conceived in LWW.

So either way, my answer to the question posed in the original post here — "Should Lewis have written The Magician’s Nephew earlier in the series...?" — is conclusively no. All the available evidence, whichever way you read it, seems to suggest that his creative thought just hadn't yet come together where it needed to be, in order to write MN and the creation of Narnia, until he was a lot further along in the process of writing the whole series.

@courtenay 

Thank you for sharing your views. It does seem that if Lewis had tried to write a creation story before the sixth book it might have turned out to be another fragment.  It does seem that his creative skills had matured enough by The Magician’s Nephew to write any kind of Narnia story. After five books he had certainly created enough of his own magical world.  I think that probably an experienced Narnian as Lewis was by the sixth book and that was the best time for writing The Magician’s Nephew. Experience is the best teacher even for Lewis himself.  🙂

@narnian78 Yes, I totally agree.  

I've been thinking about the hole in the theory that the Lefay Fragment dates from before Lewis actually conceived the idea of Narnia as we know it — the fact that Lewis read the Fragment to Roger Lancelyn Green a few months after he'd finished writing LWW. (If Lancelyn Green was remembering this correctly, that is, but we've no reason to believe he wasn't.)

It occurs to me that, especially since that reading (in June 1949) definitely happened before Lewis had come up with PC as the actual next book in the Narnia series, it's possible that he hadn't yet decided for sure where to go next with this new line of work (to him!) of writing children's stories. He'd just completed one (LWW) and shared it with his friends while he was working on it, and it met with disapproval from Tolkien and favour from Lancelyn Green. It's not impossible that, even if he had written the Lefay Fragment before he started LWW, he decided — after RLG's approval of LWW — to pull out this earlier beginning of a totally different story for children and run it past Lancelyn Green as well, just to see what he thought and whether this might give Lewis some encouragement to move past the point at which he'd stalled with that draft.

I say this because, from what we know through Hooper, it sounds like Lancelyn Green didn't know for sure that the Lefay Fragment was the beginning of a new Narnia book. Hooper tells us, as I quoted earlier: "... it was Roger Lancelyn Green's belief, before it was mine, that in the Lefay fragment Lewis was searching for the origins of Narnia." (Past Watchful Dragons, p. 74, emphasis added.)

In other words, it seems Lewis didn't introduce that manuscript to his friend with anything like "Here, Roger, I've been trying to start a new story about Narnia and how it came to be, but I'm stuck for where to go with it next. Have a listen to this and see what you think of it..." It sounds much more like he didn't introduce it as a Narnia story at all, and Lancelyn Green was only guessing (understandably, so soon after the writing of LWW) that that's what it was intended to be.

Which means it could be true that the Fragment was actually an earlier, non-Narnia-related draft that Lewis, after the success of LWW, decided to share as well and see if he found the inspiration to take it up again. And obviously he didn't, which would explain why he then turned to writing the direct sequel to LWW, but pulled out one appealing idea from that stalled draft — a talking squirrel called Pattertwig — that would fit well into this second Narnia story, which we now know as Prince Caspian.

It's all still speculation, and probably never will be proveable either way*, but it's definitely interesting to think about!  

* One thing, by the way, that would scupper the theory would be if the Lefay Fragment is in a notebook where it comes later than any notes that are definitely for a Narnia story. Unfortunately Hooper isn't clear on that point; he just describes it as being in "one of Lewis's notebooks", and the only other things he tells us about that particular notebook are that it also "contains notes on English literature that Lewis made a point of preserving" — hence why he saved this notebook instead of destroying it like most of his other drafts — as well as an early draft of Eustace's diary from VDT, which is written on the pages following the Lefay Fragment and therefore definitely dates from after it.

The only other indisputably-Narnia-related notes that Hooper uncovered are a draft of the opening paragraph of LWW, written "on the back of another book [Lewis] was writing at the time" (PWD p. 39), and the hurriedly-written list of "PLOTS" that includes ideas that found their way into VDT and PC. But as Hooper also only describes the latter as being in "one of Lewis's notebooks" (PWD p. 54), it's not clear whether it's the same one that contains the Lefay Fragment! I get the impression that it isn't, but there's no way of knowing without having seen the original notebook(s) themselves. I wonder where they are now... I'm guessing at the Marion E. Wade Center in Illinois, which sounds like it'd be a fab place to visit, but I don't currently have the time or the means for a trip to the US just to find this out.  

Considering Hooper's very short acquaintance with Lewis, it is wise not to take everything he says as gospel - or as Lewis. Some of his claims are not strongly based.

Posted by: @coracle

Considering Hooper's very short acquaintance with Lewis, it is wise not to take everything he says as gospel - or as Lewis. Some of his claims are not strongly based.

Yes, I'm aware of that too, and I've noticed other places in which he makes claims or assumptions that (while obviously well-meant and not harmful) aren't necessarily accurate. For example, also in PWD, when discussing the list titled "PLOTS" that Lewis scribbled in one of those few surviving notebooks, Hooper treats the entire list as "quite obviously a very rough sketch of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which was, when this was written, meant to be the sequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" (p. 55).

However, if you look at the list as Hooper reprints it in that book, it's actually quite likely that Lewis meant it to be ideas for plots (the title of the list is in the plural, after all!) of several separate stories — up to four of them, going by the fact that the list has four paragraphs with different headings. Two of them ("SHIP" and "PICTURE") did eventually become the basis of VDT, but only the last item, headed "SEQUEL TO L.W.W.", specifically mentions Narnia — it's a very rough outline of PC. ("The present tyrants to be Men. Intervening history of Narnia told nominally by the Dwarf...") 

(I've just found the post from a few years ago where I shared more about the "Plots List", if we may call it that.) 

My point here is that this shows Hooper making assumptions about the Plots List that aren't necessarily true about it, and that could be quite misleading from the perspective of figuring out how Lewis's writing processes worked and how his ideas developed and came together. So it's also very possible that his (and Lancelyn Green's) assumptions about the Lefay Fragment aren't necessarily accurate either. 

And indeed, if the Plots List represents Lewis's ideas for several different stories, and only the last of them was conceived as a new Narnia story to follow LWW, that also bears out the theory that Lewis actually had some non-Narnia-related children's stories in mind for a time, of which the Lefay Fragment could also be one.

The "Ship" plot, for example — see the link above — obviously eventually gave rise to VDT as we know it, but if you read the original sketch of it, it (similarly to the Lefay Fragment) doesn't really sound like a Narnia story at all. It involves two children finding themselves on a ship that's sailing backwards in time, to "islands that have not existed for millennia", in order to save the life of a sick king who "needs blood of a boy in the far future". Another very intriguing plot that could have made for an excellent fantasy adventure (I'd love to read it!), but it doesn't sound anything like the Narnia we know from LWW, which had already been written at the time Lewis penned these plot ideas. Assuming, that is, that all the paragraphs in the list were written at the same time, which may also be an unfounded assumption!

But yes, I'm thinking more than ever now that it looks like Lewis, both before and after he wrote LWW, had other ideas for children's stories that were not, at the time he wrote them down, intended to be related to Narnia. And I reckon all the more that that's the case with the Lefay Fragment as well.  

I guess Lewis thought of the magic rings in Uncle Andrew’s study later since the Lefay Fragment does not have them. Since Narnia is not mentioned in the fragment it may not have occurred to him at that time to make it into an another Narnia story.  The next book Prince Caspian seems more like it was intended to be a second Narnia book since it has a portal into that world, the train station.  He may have realized that he couldn’t do without something to transport his characters into another world so he didn’t use the fragment and created a different story. The creation idea probably came later, although he may have had it long before writing the sixth book.