Well, in the case of the Stone Table, I imagine it crumbled away to nothing by the time of The Last Battle. As for the Tree of Protection, C. S. Lewis actually didn't create it until he was working on the last books in the series, so he couldn't have used it more. (I know pointing that out is a boring answer but if I didn't mention it, Courtenay would. I thought I'd save her the trouble.) Anyway, since The Magician's Nephew takes place at the very beginning of Narnian history and the premise of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe required it to be gone, I'm not surprised we didn't see it again. My head canon is that eventually the Narnians neglected it or even completely forgot its purpose and made it into kindling, allowing the White Witch to enter Narnia and put a curse on the land.

Posted by: @col-klink

Well, in the case of the Stone Table, I imagine it crumbled away to nothing by the time of The Last Battle. As for the Tree of Protection, C. S. Lewis actually didn't create it until he was working on the last books in the series, so he couldn't have used it more. (I know pointing that out is a boring answer but if I didn't mention it, Courtenay would. I thought I'd save her the trouble.)

Very decent of you!  

I would only add that we do see the Stone Table again in Prince Caspian, the second book to be written, in which the broken Table is now hidden away under a mound full of caves and passages, called Aslan's How. That story is set over 1,000 years after the events of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and we're not given many details about how the mound was created. It's clearly a place of awe and reverence and to some degree fear, but its main function in the story is to give Caspian and his allies a place to hide out while they're waging guerrilla warfare against Miraz's forces. Plot-wise, that could easily have been done in any hidden complex of caves and tunnels and so on — the Stone Table is pointed out as an object of reverence, but it's not actually "used" in the story in any way. It just provides atmosphere and a link with the previous book (in order of publication).

And after that — presumably because Lewis never came up with any further plots that required it — the Stone Table simply never gets mentioned again. We can only guess whether or not any remnant of it still existed at all at the time of The Last Battle, a few centuries after Prince Caspian.

The thing is, Lewis was (if I may say!) downright sloppy in his world-building compared to Tolkien, but then he was never trying to achieve anything on the scale and complexity of Middle-earth. So there are plenty of things that crop up in one book but are never mentioned in the others, and quite a few significant inconsistencies between what we're told in one book and what we're told in a later one. The discrepancies between The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (written first) and The Magician's Nephew (published sixth, though I gather Lewis was writing it and The Last Battle pretty much simultaneously) are actually huge. Jadis's backstory in MN is completely different from what we're told of the White Witch's background in LWW, and there's no reference at all in MN as to how Jadis took on the cosmic-level role of the Emperor's executioner that she has in LWW, or to the Stone Table being created as the place for her victims to be killed. I can only guess that Lewis had outright forgotten a lot of what he wrote in the first Narnia book by the time he came to write the "how it all began" prequel, and he never checked over his earlier books to make sure that either everything squared up, or there was a logical in-universe explanation if it didn't.

As I've said before, for me this doesn't spoil my enjoyment of the Chronicles, but it does make it pretty much impossible to set out a definitive explanation of everything in Narnian history. I did read somewhere that in 1963, in an interview with Kaye Webb, editor of Puffin Books (who published the first paperback editions of the Narnia books some years later), Lewis acknowledged that he was aware of inconsistencies between the books and he would have liked to make some revisions to them for new editions. Unfortunately, he died only two days after giving that interview, so what kinds of changes he would have made, we'll never know!!!

@col-klink

Haha, maybe the Tree was knocked over after Mr Toad was out for a ride in his motorcar, took the turn a little too fast.

The Stone Table was used as the name of a website where I used to post on the forums under the name Ramandu. The website sadly is no longer in existence. I always thought the name was interesting and unique for a website. I think C. S. Lewis meant that the stone table was something unique to his stories in being the location of Aslan’s sacrifice. I think it was created by Lewis as something similar to the cross where Jesus died. I don’t know of any other writers that used it in their stories except that it has similarities to the location where Jesus was crucified in the Bible.  It is a place of suffering and sacrifice for Aslan just as the cross was for Christ. 

@courtenay 

Yeah this was what I was thinking, more of a matter of writer's inconsistency.  The Stone Table...was made of stone, so pieces of it had to have ended up somewhere.  Even if the two halves were to crumble away, someone would've kept pieces as historical relics of some sort.  And you would think Deeper Magic would've somehow come into play at the end of the world.

Jadis was the Emperor's hangman and descended from Lilith or giants.  Then the next thing you know, she's an alien.

@tractorfeed1008 motor cars and Mr Toad do not appear anywhere in the Narnia stories.
(just in case that needed clarifying! )

For the Tree of Protection, since it was first named in the sixth book published, we should not expect to see it mentioned in any of the previous books.  We can only assume it grew old and perished some time after it was planted in MN, and before the White Witch had taken over Narnia, (which was approximately 100 years before the Pevensie children arrived there).

The comments that Mr Beaver makes about Jadis are not backed up anywhere else, and it's thought by many readers and scholars that it's either his opinion or a kind of legend or rumour that someone started long ago. It also comes under the general heading of writer inconsistency.

(Edited)

...agreed on the bit where it does in fact come up in at least one other book. But also, as for the time of The Magician's Nephew -

Two possibilities occur to me. One is that although the magic it invokes is ancient, we don't actually *know* at what point in Narnian history it was built or created, and whether it came into being with the world in the beginning or not. It could have been carved later, either under the direct guidance of Aslan during one of his visits or by some kind of divinely directed coalition of prophetic Centaurs/good Magicians working within Aslan's laws/Dwarvish craftspeople, just as a couple options.

The other possibility is of course that even if it *had* been brought into being at the foundation of the world, there was no clear reason why we should have seen it in MN - our heroes were busy and only in Narnia briefly, they didn't have either time or inclination to explore the whole landscape searching for magical artifacts they didn't know were relevant yet.

The Howe/the caves built around the Table would have definitely still been there during Dawn Treader and Silver Chair but there we run into the issue of it being out of the way for our heroes to run into. We know the Howe was built after the Pevensies' reign, meaning the broken Table was still free-standing during Horse and His Boy, but we don't know if they went there much in the Golden Age or not - was it avoided as a place with traumatic memories attached, or revisited regularly for festivals to celebrate Aslan's resurrection? Something for fic writers to explore, perhaps.

By the time of The Last Battle it *might* have crumbled away to nothing... or it might have been preserved by the magic in the stone. If it was still around I would like to think it would be used as a place of retreat for some of the nearer-by vulnerable Narnians and their caregivers during the invasion, and either the Calormens would have sent a squad to attempt to ferret them out, or they would have stayed safeish until the world actually ended and everything was falling apart around them, and woken up as they died in the stable seeing Aslan. If so we would have not been told about it because Lewis mostly liked to follow one group's point of view for Narnia, and the protagonists weren't there to see - but they might have heard some "where were you when the old world ended" stories from other Narnians as they explored their new home in Aslan's Country.

Posted by: @coracle

@tractorfeed1008 motor cars and Mr Toad do not appear anywhere in the Narnia stories.
(just in case that needed clarifying! )

Yeah that was a joke.  You never read The Wind in the Willows?  And besides, over several thousand years, why wouldn't Narnian technology have evolved to develop motorcars?  Even in The Wind in the Willows, Toad is adventurous and impulsive and obsessed with new fads.

@silverlily 

Well, if the table was created or dropped in somewhere during the events of MN, the place where Aslan was standing while actually creating Narnia seems like a very significant location.  I mean, this is the very point of origin, so if the Table was created at the Dawn of Time, this would be it.

Then in LB, I just think for the sake of story telling, it should've played a bigger role somehow.

This is kind of just summarizing/repeating what Silverlily wrote, but I don't really see why the Stone Table would show up in other stories. Apparently, it's main function was to be a place of execution and after the final execution, it was destroyed and so was the official executioner. In Prince Caspian, we learn that it became a memorial and it arguably had thematic significance to that story, but I don't know what they would have used it for in any of the other ones.

@tractorfeed1008 mine was a joke too. Hence the winky face! I know Mr Toad well, and once acted with him and his riverbank friends !

@col-klink I think you're right. Aslan's How might have survived for centuries, but its importance was as you say.

Posted by: @tractorfeed1008

And besides, over several thousand years...

2,555 years, to be precise (going by the official-ish Narnian timeline).  

 

why wouldn't Narnian technology have evolved to develop motorcars?  Even in The Wind in the Willows, Toad is adventurous and impulsive and obsessed with new fads.

Presumably because C.S. Lewis was setting his stories in a firmly medieval-style fantasy world, and Kenneth Grahame wasn't.

Looking at that interesting question more seriously, though — there are various ways in which one can define "human civilisation", depending on which technological developments you date it from. But going by archaeology, human beings have existed in this world for tens of thousands of years, and it's only in about the last 5,000 years before the present day that we developed sophisticated enough systems of writing for there to be such a thing as recorded history, which about coincides with humans beginning to live in more complex urban settlements (starting in ancient Mesopotamia). And it's only from around 1760 AD onwards — that is, about 260 years ago — that we had the Industrial Revolution that eventually gave us the technology to develop motor cars. Compared with our own world, Narnia's very short span of history doesn't give it enough time to move from a largely agrarian society to even the beginnings of the steam age, let alone the internal combustion engine.

Obviously, one could argue that Narnia had a head start, in that the first humans there came from the late Victorian era in our world and would have had at least some knowledge of industrial-age technology. Uncle Andrew certainly has ambitions in that direction when he imagines the magic in the newly-created Narnian soil turning bits of scrap iron into "brand new railway engines, battleships, anything you please." But apart from the fact that that particular power is only temporary, humans share this new world of Narnia with literally dozens of other sentient beings: Talking Beasts, Dryads, Naiads, Fauns, Dwarfs, and still others, most of whom probably wouldn't be at all impressed by the kinds of technology Uncle Andrew would like to create there. Plus it's a world where magic definitely exists and has real power, and where human ambitions and schemes (and vanity) don't tend to get very far. Regardless of the time span available, it is just not the kind of world where one could expect technology to evolve in anything like the same way it has on our planet.

By contrast, The Wind in the Willows is also a form of fantasy, but it's definitely set in our world — that is, in a fantasy version of our world where animals talk and live in houses and interact directly with humans and use the kinds of technology, including motor cars, that humans had developed by the time the book was written (1908). That's the boringly pedantic answer from a Narnia fan with a degree in history!!  

@silverlily 

Well, if the table was created or dropped in somewhere during the events of MN, the place where Aslan was standing while actually creating Narnia seems like a very significant location.  I mean, this is the very point of origin, so if the Table was created at the Dawn of Time, this would be it.

I honestly get the impression that by the time Lewis wrote The Magician's Nephew — after he'd finished almost all the other books in the series — he had either forgotten about the significance of the Stone Table in the first two books (LWW and PC), or he had moved on from there in his own imagination. Absolutely nothing in MN squares with what we were told about the Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time in LWW. That aspect of the overall saga — including the White Witch's role as "the Emperor's hangman" and the threat of all Narnia being destroyed if she isn't allowed to sacrifice her "lawful prey" on the Table — seems to have completely gone from Lewis's mind by the time he invented Narnia's origin and the Witch's backstory as Jadis of Charn.

If Lewis had planned out his whole series in more detail before writing each individual story, he might have come up with some scene in MN where Aslan strikes a deal with Jadis by allowing her to remain in Narnia as the official executioner of traitors — provided she doesn't get any greater ambitions about her place and power — and then maybe we'd see the Stone Table being created then and there as the place of sacrifice. But that would change the tone of the story that Lewis apparently wanted to write by the time he got up to MN, in which Jadis / the White Witch isn't a servant of Aslan's Father at all, but an alien intruder who came into Narnia through a human boy's foolish action and who brings nothing into Narnia but utterly self-centred evil.

Then in LB, I just think for the sake of story telling, it should've played a bigger role somehow.

Well, as others have mentioned, after Aslan fulfilled the Deeper Magic by offering himself as an innocent victim in place of a traitor, the Stone Table was broken — implicitly, it was no longer needed, because the whole system of blood payment for sin was undone by Aslan's self-sacrifice. (This of course is Narnia mirroring traditional Christian theology, particularly as it developed after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD.)

So what further role could the Stone Table have played in Narnia's history, even just "for the sake of story telling"? What role could it have played in The Last Battle, or any of the other stories, when it no longer had any function or purpose? It could have been a place of worship, perhaps, but we never see acts of "worship" in Narnia — not in the way that the Calormenes, for example, have temples and worship their gods in the form of idols. Nobody in Narnia, as far as we see, makes shrines to Aslan or holds prayer services or rituals in places sacred to him. I would guess Lewis was quite deliberate in not giving the Narnians an organised religion centred on Aslan, despite him being the same Saviour who is worshipped religiously in our world under "another name".

That in itself may be why he never re-used the Stone Table in any of his stories after its brief reappearance as a long-hidden-away relic in Prince Caspian. Narnia apparently just isn't the sort of place where physical sites and physical objects get turned into quasi-idols and made into the focus of rites and ceremonies. That, or as I keep saying, the fact that Lewis seems to have largely forgotten about it as a plot element as the series went on...

But there's one thing he did encourage among his readers — fan fiction, long before we even had that term for it. If you read his letters to young Narnia fans, his standard answer to questions like this one — what happened to so-and-so, or why didn't we hear more about such-and-such — was usually something like "I've said all I have to say about Narnia. Why don't you try writing a story about that yourself?"  

Posted by: @courtenay

So what further role could the Stone Table have played in Narnia's history, even just "for the sake of story telling"? What role could it have played in The Last Battle, or any of the other stories, when it no longer had any function or purpose? It could have been a place of worship, perhaps, but we never see acts of "worship" in Narnia — not in the way that the Calormenes, for example, have temples and worship their gods in the form of idols. Nobody in Narnia, as far as we see, makes shrines to Aslan or holds prayer services or rituals in places sacred to him.

Honestly, put that way, maybe C. S. Lewis should have used the Stone Table in The Last Battle. It would have been effectively shocking to see Shift and the Calormenes using a place that was sacred to the Narnians for their evil purposes.

Posted by: @col-klink

Honestly, put that way, maybe C. S. Lewis should have used the Stone Table in The Last Battle. It would have been effectively shocking to see Shift and the Calormenes using a place that was sacred to the Narnians for their evil purposes.

Now there's a thought — that really could have been a very effective use of it in the plot. But even if Lewis had thought of it (which I assume he didn't), the interior of Aslan's How wouldn't have been a good setting for the Narnians' meetings with the fake Aslan, let alone for the Last Battle itself. The story would have to be changed around a fair bit to bring the Table into it directly.

Unless the Stable Hill actually was Aslan's How — that is, the top of it — and the Stone Table was buried underneath (and perhaps the passages leading to it had been closed up and forgotten by then)? That would be an interesting twist, but it still wouldn't really affect the story itself unless the actual Table could be brought into it directly somehow. Maybe that's food for "alternative Last Battle plot" fan fic... I don't know! (I've never tried writing fan fiction myself and I only very rarely read it, and I'm pretty sure linking to it from this website isn't allowed, if anyone was wondering. I just find it deeply interesting that Lewis himself loved the idea of his young readers inventing their own stories for all the things in Narnia that he left unexplained!)

Posted by: @courtenay

So what further role could the Stone Table have played in Narnia's history, even just "for the sake of story telling"?

Oddly enough, I think that's exactly the question that the author Francis Spufford must have asked himself...

But there's one thing he did encourage among his readers — fan fiction, long before we even had that term for it. If you read his letters to young Narnia fans, his standard answer to questions like this one — what happened to so-and-so, or why didn't we hear more about such-and-such — was usually something like "I've said all I have to say about Narnia. Why don't you try writing a story about that yourself?"  

And oddly enough that's exactly what the author Francis Spufford did!

I know copyright issues can be a sensitive subject for many, but just as I love hearing all of the crazy fan theories and speculations from the fans on NarniaWeb, i'd also love to hear a crazy fan theory from an award winning author articulated in professional-quality storytelling.

Doubtful its ever something I'll get to see in my lifetime though.