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Which Editions' Text Were Read For HarperAudio's Unabridged Audiobooks?

Wood Between The Worlds
(@woodbetweentheworlds)
NarniaWeb Newbie

Greetings, friends, 

My brother gave me my own copy of the unabridged audiobooks of The Chronicles of Narnia for my birthday recently. I'd borrowed a set in the early 2000s a couple of times and enjoyed them.

I also own all seven eBooks twice over on Kindle.
(Grievously, the Kindle editions do not specify which edition of the text they contain.)

Recently I've been listening along and reading the text at the same time and taking note of where they diverge. I've only gone through MN and LWW thus far and am still refining my notes on LWW

I expected minor discrepancies from the narrators, such as:

  • accidentally switching a pair of words to a contraction when reading the words aloud
    ("I am" becomes "I'm", for example)
  • or minor wording differences
    ("Hoovers" becomes "vacuum cleaners", "bunk" becomes "leave"),
  • or even the occasional accidentally omitted or inserted word,
  • but found a number of pronoun switches in MN as well, which was mildly surprising to me. 

In any case, that set the tone of my expectations for re-listening to the rest of the series—although, because this series has a different narrator for each book, one can expect that each speaker will bring their own eccentricities to bear in their readings. 

What I was not prepared for was Susan and Lucy's dialogue prior to following Aslan near the beginning of Chapter Fourteen: The Triumph of the Witch being omitted wholesale from the audiobook. When I noticed this, I double checked my audio files and then the physical CDs that I'd been given but there was no mistake on my part - that passage of the book simply is not present in the audio recordings. 

  • Could this passage simply not be present in some editions of the book? 
    (presumably an edition which Michael York was reading from when recording his audiobook)
  • Did a page from the script get dropped or stuck together in the recording booth? 
  • Did the audio engineers make a mistake when editing the audio together? 
  • Is this a known issue which was fixed in later editions of the audiobooks and I simply have an edition which has a defect?

When I began listening to MN I was noting a number of differences which I thought to be mistakes on Kenneth Branagh's part, which I later discovered were simply textual variants from other editions of the book. Could the following missing passage be a similar story with LWW?

“Something about Aslan,” said Lucy. “Either some dreadful thing is going to happen to him, or something dreadful that he’s going to do.”
“There’s been something wrong with him all afternoon,” said Susan. “Lucy! What was that he said about not being with us at the battle? You don’t think he could be stealing away and leaving us tonight, do you?”
“Where is he now?” said Lucy. “Is he here in the pavilion?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Susan! let’s go outside and have a look round. We might see him.”
“All right. Let’s,” said Susan; “we might just as well be doing that as lying awake here.”

Thank you for your time and thoughtful feedback. 

This topic was modified 5 months ago 8 times by Wood Between The Worlds
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Topic starter Posted : December 1, 2023 1:57 am
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