To other worlds, of course. There's no way of knowing what they're like.

It's hard to know what the other pools in the Wood Between the Worlds lead into. Some things in the Narnia series are never explained. It's never explained how each child is able to travel into Narnia or how the transition works. For instance, it's never explained how the picture in the bedroom gets bigger or if it is the children getting smaller.

You can possibly think of other worlds that the pools lead into: Middle Earth, Prydain, Ga'Hoole, Oz, Wonderland, Neverland.

@jasmine_tarkheena I think that is one of the things I love about Lewis's writing of the Chronicles of Narnia. He leaves so much open for imagination and wonder.

I love your ideas for where other pools might lead too...especially Middle Earth 🙂

When this thread came up and I thought about how the other pools could lead to fantasy worlds by different authors, Middle-earth was the first one that sprang to mind... the snag there, however, is that Tolkien implied in his writings that Middle-earth is actually meant to be our own world, in a time when humans weren't the only sentient race on the planet, before Elves and Hobbits and so on either left this world or went into hiding. I don't think he ever quite stated that explicitly — I have a feeling he wavered on this point over the years he was writing — but it was definitely there in his thought.

Lewis often encouraged his young fans to write their own stories based on his (long before "fan fic" was a thing!), so I'm guessing that might have been his answer to anyone who wrote to him asking what other worlds the other pools led to — something like "I don't know, but why don't you try writing a story about one of them?"

Even as early as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis dropped a significant hint that Narnia could be just one of many "other worlds" outside the one we know:

"But do you really mean, sir," said Peter, "that there could be other worlds — all over the place, just round the corner — like that?"

"Nothing is more probable," said the Professor...

So in a way, the Wood between the Worlds is Lewis's answer to the question of why the Professor in LWW was so convinced of the probability of other worlds existing! But apart from the ruins of Charn and of course the creation of Narnia, he left it all completely up to us to imagine what kinds of worlds might be out there...

@courtenay 

It sure leaves the door of your imagination wide open. There are things that's never explained in Narnia. And the Wood Between Worlds is one of them.

I have always thought that the other pools could have led to any time or place. I wonder what would have happened if Digory and Polly had ended up in our world at the present time.  They didn't have any control over the specific time and place. Would they have been surprised?

The Wood Between the Worlds always fascinated me, since they saw A LOT of different pools. They could've led anywhere! I think it is fun to let one's imagination run wild with what sort of worlds it could have led.

The Wood Between The Worlds is like a railway station, where people arrive from one place and set off for another. These stations aren't exactly exciting (usually), and their value is where you can get to from them.
Most English children reading or hearing this story would have travelled to a station, and possibly changed trains at one (remember in PC the station they were pulled out from was a junction where the boys and girls were going to catch trains to their different schools?)

 They might then imagine that the pools could take them to places such as the countryside, a little seaside town, or another city in a different part of England. We can think of other countries, with strange cultures and customs, or other planets or alternative universes. 
I am a keen reader of Diana Wynne Jones books, and several of hers have a multiverse, where parallel worlds exist; people can travel from one to another using magical skills.  I'd love to hear what children have thought the Wood might take them to, over the decades since MN was written.

@coracle 

I have noticed that there are fewer railroad stations in my area of the U.S. than when I was a child. These transitional places don’t seem to be needed as much anymore. The places like Narnia in our world are getting scarcer too as woods are being lost to development. If you want to get to Narnia you have to do it through reading the books since our real world is becoming less like the fictional one.  While our world does have pools (or ponds) I don’t think so many of them exist as in the time of The Magician’s Nephew.

It occurs to me that the Wood between the Worlds is something that Lewis introduced really late in the writing of the Narnia series — The Magician's Nephew was the second last book to be published and I believe it was the last one he actually finished writing. Modern readers, if they follow the revised chronological order of the books (which, in my experience, most long-term fans of Narnia aren't comfortable with), will assume that the Wood is something primal that has been part of the Narnia universe all along, since it comes into the "first" book so early on and plays a huge role in the story, but then, perhaps puzzlingly, we never hear any more about it in the "later" books. But in fact, it's a concept that Lewis didn't come up with until he'd almost finished writing the whole series — too late, in authorial terms, to make any further use of it than he does. By the time he thought of this quite awesome idea of "a place that isn't in any of the worlds, but once you've found that place you can get into them all" — which I would argue is probably the most original and striking concept in the entire series — he had already settled on seven as the final number of Chronicles and had already plotted out the last book and Narnia's ultimate end.

I wonder how different Lewis's fantasy saga would have been if he had thought of and written about the Wood between the Worlds in the actual first book he wrote, or maybe the second at the latest? Would he then have reused the Wood in at least some of the later stories, and maybe ended up writing a series that wasn't focused on just one magical world (Narnia), but perhaps had his main characters travelling to a different world or worlds in each book and having new adventures there? Obviously it would be a completely different series if that happened (though maybe they'd still find Aslan, or the same Saviour under yet another name, in every world? ), and I should add I love the Chronicles as they are and wouldn't change them for anything!! But I'm just finding it fascinating to wonder where else the Wood might have taken us — and the whole series — if the author had come up with it much earlier...

It may be that parks that are converted from other places are something like the Woods Between the Worlds. I have known of parks that were former golf courses and even landfills, which are rejected by most people.  But if left alone for many years they can actually be restored to a more natural appearance even though some people might not be willing to enter them. If they become natural again could they actually be transitional places with a kind of magic about them like the woods in Narnia?

The thought just came to me that the Wood only connects places with *magic* in them. This Earth would not have been a part of it. But the Earth as Lewis wrote, that also had the wardrobe, Atlantis, and fairy godmothers, did.

@cobalt-jade Not quite sure what you mean there... this world (Earth) IS connected to the Wood between the Worlds in MN. It has its own pool there, which Polly and Digory have the good sense to mark by cutting away a strip of the grass next to it before they venture into another world, so they can be sure of getting back to London. (Which they do, with Jadis in tow... )

Posted by: @cobalt-jade

The thought just came to me that the Wood only connects places with *magic* in them. This Earth would not have been a part of it. But the Earth as Lewis wrote, that also had the wardrobe, Atlantis, and fairy godmothers, did.

How would we know that there are any world without magic then? Maybe all of them just do.