Hmmmm.... well.... my explanation is, the lamppost is clearly alien to Narnia, from Victorian London, and they'd forgotten it as all their memories of England were far-off and hazy. Of course they knew the name Lamppost Waste, and also that a Lamppost was there, but because their minds had become Narniaized (to coin a word) they were expecting a Narnian lamppost, which given the technology of the place, was probably a crude lantern nailed on top of a wooden post. So seeing a tall iron one with a glass case and decorative scrollwork might have thrown them for a loop.and they wouldn't have known what it was.

This is one of Lewis’ many “errors” that – I think – are probably not errors at all, but rather an indication that he was driving at something that is not immediately recognizable in the surface level plot.  It is not just that the children have forgotten about the lamppost – but also that it is in disrepair: the light has gone out and trees have grown up around it. It seems less important to the story as a whole. I suspect the children’s meeting with Aslan and assumption of power in Narnia has something to do with the diminished status of the lamppost. 

In our world a place like Lantern Waste would probably have an historical marker where the lamppost was since it was the location of an entrance from the another world. I don’t think people would attempt to use the entrance again since it was one way from the wardrobe in world, and it was for only one time use.  Evidently the Narnians had some regard for their history as shown by the name Lantern Waste. And I think all or at least most of them knew about the magic of the place.  🙂

Posted by: @kingedthejust

Lastly, I think that they wouldn't remember the Lamppost because they had been living in Narnia for so long, the memories of how they got there might have been faint. It was almost like for them they were born in Narnia. For example: Lucy had been living in Narnia  longer than she had been living in England!

I think you're on to something there.  My earliest (clear) memories are from when I was 5, in the house I remember as my first home.  But my parents had another home before that, one that I apparently spent my first 2-3 years in.  I have a few, extremely faint, memories that might be that place.  So if a kid lived in one place until they were 7, then spent 20-30 years somewhere else (and somewhere as extremely different and totally awesome as Narnia), I think those early years would be similarly vague.  And I don't remember every detail of when I was 11 or 14 either, though those memories are much clearer.  But I've been living in a different state from the one I grew up in, and like the Pevensies I think I've picked up some of the local language (though thankfully not the accent lol).  In another 10 years, my life in that other state may as well be a dream, so okay, I can buy that. 😀

The life in our world was only remembered in Narnia as a dream, but the life in Narnia was always something that the Pevensies wanted to experience again. I think our world was something that they liked but did not want stay in forever except when it was renewed by Aslan in The Last Battle.  I think Narnia had more good in it than our world even when it was imperfect.   It had a kind of beauty that we do not have entirely here, although we do have some of it in our natural world. 🙂

So interesting this question appears here, as I showed my children The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe the movie last week, and my 10 year old daughter (who has been reading some of the books to her younger siblings came out and asked me this same question, about the issue with lamppost.  Clearly the most obvious answer is that it is an inconsistency that Lewis didn't think about as he wrote later books (in particular H&HB), but I, wanting to give a "theory" as to their potential lack of memory of what the lamppost was, suggested to her that in fact, perhaps they did not so much forget that they saw a lamppost, but forgot rather that they forgot what the lamppost looked like seeing as there is no further record of them seeing the lamppost between when Lucy and Edmund saw it originally as children to the day they were hunting for the white stag.  Afterall, this lamppost was most likely the only lamppost of its kind (a London lamppost) not only in all Narnia, but also in the whole world of Narnia, thus, when they saw it again as adults, it took them a moment to realise what it was.  Also, as I think was mentioned previously - there's no account that the location of that place was called Lantern Waste until later books, so perhaps may not have even been named that until after their time?

Just a theory.... 😀 

Posted by: @pete

in fact, perhaps they did not so much forget that they saw a lamppost, but forgot rather that they forgot what the lamppost looked like seeing as there is no further record of them seeing the lamppost between when Lucy and Edmund saw it originally as children to the day they were hunting for the white stag.  Afterall, this lamppost was most likely the only lamppost of its kind (a London lamppost) not only in all Narnia, but also in the whole world of Narnia, thus, when they saw it again as adults, it took them a moment to realise what it was. 

Going by the actual book, they genuinely have forgotten not only what the lamppost looks like, but what it is entirely...

So they alighted and tied their horses to trees and went on into the thick wood on foot. And as soon as they had entered it, Queen Susan said,"Fair friends, here is a great marvel, for I seem to see a tree of iron."

"Madam," said King Edmund, "if you look well upon it you shall see it is a pillar of iron with a lantern set on the top thereof."

"By the Lion's Mane, a strange device," said King Peter, "to set a lantern here where the trees cluster so thick about it and so high above it that if it were lit it should give light to no man!"

"Sir," said Queen Lucy. "By likelihood when this post and this lamp were set here there were smaller trees in the place, or fewer, or none. For this is a young wood and the iron post is old." And they stood looking upon it. Then said King Edmund,

"I know not how it is, but this lamp on the post worketh upon me strangely. It runs in my mind that I have seen the like before; as it were in a dream, or in the dream of a dream."

"Sir," answered they all, "it is even so with us also."

They carry on in that vein until they finally decide to go past the strange "lamp on the post":

So these Kings and Queens entered the thicket, and before they had gone a score of paces they all remembered that the thing they had seen was called a lamp-post, and before they had gone twenty more, they noticed that they were making their way not through branches, but through coats. And next moment they all came tumbling out of a wardrobe door into the empty room...

From the style he uses in that episode, I get the impression Lewis was trying to make it feel as if the four Pevensies themselves have become like characters in a fairy-tale, speaking in archaic language and having no knowledge of things from the ordinary world of humans. It makes for a sort of dream-like atmosphere that I don't think occurs anywhere else in the Chronicles, at least not in quite this way. But it's clear Lewis himself forgot the details of this scene somewhere between writing LWW and HHB. There really is no other explanation for the inconsistency.

@courtenay I like your explanations.

(Lewis was planning some rewriting, but poor health prevented him. Yet I wonder if he would have changed the archaic speech: its quaintness is sweet, and I'd be loath to lose it.  Perhaps he could have merely added in that sometimes the four of them spoke in courtly language [e.g.   ].)

Posted by: @coracle

Yet I wonder if he would have changed the archaic speech: its quaintness is sweet, and I'd be loath to lose it.  Perhaps he could have merely added in that sometimes the four of them spoke in courtly language [e.g.   ]

But verily he doth explain it within the pages of the hallowed volume itself, forsooth!  

And they saw the stag enter into a thicket where their horses could not follow. Then said King Peter (for they talked in quite a different style now, having been Kings and Queens for so long), "Fair Consorts, let us now alight from our horses and follow this beast into the thicket; for in all my days I never hunted a nobler quarry."

"Sir," said the others, "even so let us do."

As I was saying, it gives that part just before the end a sort of fairy-tale atmosphere that makes us feel that the Pevensies have been completely transformed by their long time in Narnia, to the point where they virtually are fairy-tale characters themselves — until suddenly, they're not.

Lewis does have his royal characters speak with "courtly" language elsewhere in the Chronicles, but I don't think he ever lays it on with anywhere near the intensity we have in this scene. In HHB we hear the adult Susan and Edmund speaking to each other mostly quite formally, with a few archaisms here and there, and addressing each other as "brother" and "My dear sister and very good Lady". But they also break into exclamations of "Oh, Edmund" and "Courage, Su, courage", even in front of their courtiers and noble supporters, which helps them seem a bit more human!

And of course it's at the end of that book that we have Queen Lucy recounting "the tale of the Wardrobe and how she and King Edmund and Queen Susan and Peter the High King had first come into Narnia" — an account we're assured that most of those present had "heard... many times but they all wanted it again". So I'm afraid that is genuinely a case of Lewis forgetting exactly what he'd done at the end of LWW (written several years earlier) in making the Kings and Queens so completely "Narnianised" that they don't remember anything about the lamppost or the wardrobe until moments before they pass back into this world. Netflix (or any future screen adaptations) will have to decide which way they go with that discrepancy, if they do manage to do all seven books. But the books are as they are, inconsistencies and all. I also often wonder what Lewis might have changed if he'd lived long enough to revise them as he was hoping to do, but unfortunately we'll never know...

I was just curious about if anyone has a lamppost which looks like the Narnia lamppost.  We had one in the yard of the house where I grew up, although it was an electric lamp which I guess was too modern for Narnia.  The outside of the lamp was a bit old fashioned looking. My guess is that the Narnia lamp was more like the lamps you see in the illustrations of Charles Dickens’ books.  And I think it definitely resembled the lampposts in Pauline Baynes’ artwork. Narnia’s lamp in Lantern Waste originated from the metal that was planted in the ground during the creation in The Magician’s Nephew.  I always wondered if Narnia had any other lampposts besides the famous one which the children first saw. 🙂

Posted by: @narnian78

 I always wondered if Narnia had any other lampposts besides the famous one which the children first saw

I was under the impression that there weren't, since the Pevensies had no idea what a lamppost was at the end of LWW. But of course, everyone in this thread is saying that part was a continuity goof, so maybe I should ignore it.   I thought the Narnians referred to it as the lamppost, implying it was the only one, but I could be wrong about that. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

Posted by: @col-klink

I was under the impression that there weren't, since the Pevensies had no idea what a lamppost was at the end of LWW. But of course, everyone in this thread is saying that part was a continuity goof, so maybe I should ignore it.

The continuity goof isn't the Pevensies having no idea what the lamppost is at the end of LWW — it's Lucy near the end of HHB (written a few years later) retelling how she and her siblings first came into Narnia, a tale that we're assured she's told many times before. That scene is set, chronologically, only a year before the Pevensies return to their own world, and yet it's totally inconsistent with them (in LWW) having almost no memory of the lamppost and nothing but the vaguest idea that "strange adventures or else some great change of our fortunes" lie beyond it!!  

I personally think that the situation in LWW is the one that has to stand, if Netflix is going to be faithful to the original stories but not have inconsistencies. The whole point of the adult Pevensies' final scene in Narnia is that they have virtually forgotten their own world, and how they came out of it into Narnia, to the point where they don't recognise the lamppost and they have no idea that they're about to walk back through the wardrobe and into their childhood selves in England. If you take out that element of it, that part of the plot doesn't work. They're not consciously looking for the way back into this world — they're no longer aware that it exists — and that's why they go on, with some trepidation, into "the adventure that shall fall to us".

If they knew what they were walking into and what would happen next, that would take a lot of explaining — why have they suddenly been seized by a desire or an impulsion to give up their lives as Kings and Queens and go back to their old world, when apparently they've never thought to do this before? I honestly can't think of any way that scene could be rewritten to have the Pevensies still aware of their former lives in England, of the lamppost and the wardrobe and the passage between the two worlds, without making that part of the plot all messy and totally unconvincing. Whereas the snippet from Lucy in HHB can easily be left out of an adaptation, because it doesn't make any difference at all to the plot of that story.

Posted by: @col-klink

I thought the Narnians referred to it as the lamppost, implying it was the only one, but I could be wrong about that. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

Mr Tumnus certainly refers to it as "the lamppost" when he first tells Lucy what Narnia is — "all that lies between the lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel on the eastern sea" — but they are standing underneath it (the lamppost) at the time, so that may be why... The Pevensies obviously don't encounter anything else like it in Narnia during their 15-year reign, or they would know what it was and not call it "a tree of iron" when they first see it. So we can assume it is, at least at the time of LWW, the only lamppost in Narnia. (Lewis of course later gives it a backstory in MN, when it grows from the iron bar that Jadis tore off a lamppost in London.)

By the time of Prince Caspian (almost 1,300 years after the end of the Pevensies' reign, according to Lewis's later timeline), we find that the area around the lamppost is called Lantern Waste, and it's known as the place "where the Royal Children first appeared in Narnia, as the records tell". I guess we can assume those records were written by Mr Tumnus, who of course first encountered the youngest of the "Royal Children" there! (But he apparently never reminded them of it in the later years of their reign.)

I was wondering whether by that stage there could have been other lampposts in Narnia, as the story shows the Telmarines living in substantial villages — a more "developed" society than anything we saw in LWW. But now I think about it, for an ordinary lamppost to actually work, you need either electricity or gas laid on, which of course Narnia doesn't have at any stage of its history... So I'd say the Lantern Waste one probably remained the only lamppost in Narnia, even in the books that were written later. (And as it lights up without any connection to gas or electricity, we'll have to fall back on fantasy's standard get-out clause: It's Magic, Duh. )

Posted by: @courtenay Going by the actual book, they genuinely have forgotten not only what the lamppost looks like, but what it is entirely...

Good point!  As you can probably tell my theory clearly not develop based on a recent read of the relevant text.  That said, I like your explanation both of the writing of scene and the use of the archaic language in general.  I also agree with you in your later post that if/when future movies/series are made, they should stick to what Lewis is trying to convey in this scene as opposed to what he says about Lucy retelling the story of how they came to Narnia in HHB.

On another note, regarding the lamppost, when showing my children the movie recently, my oldest daughter (who has a keen eye for detail) noted how the lamppost looked organic - as in that it had grown and had roots, and she really appreciated that touch - knowing the history behind the lamppost in MN.  She also had a good appreciation for the design of the wardrobe. 😀 

Did Narnia have any modern inventions?  It seems unlikely since Lewis was not fond of them. An electric lamppost would probably have not worked there unless Aslan provided the current.  I guess the lamppost in Lantern Waste was lit by magic and it continued to glow for many years after the children found it.  Lewis used the technology of his time very sparingly (e.g. radio for broadcasting Mere Christianity), but he was not so fond of the modern world.  I guess Narnia was without electricity just like Tolkien didn’t want technology in Middle Earth.  In fact I think both Lewis and Tolkien would probably have wanted nothing to do with computers. They may have wanted to do without most technology.

@the-mad-poet I wondered why they wouldn't remember it as well. I mean, one of Edmund's titles was Duke of Lantern Waste. You would think at least he would remember it.