C.S. Lewis and his brother Warren used the name Boxen for an imaginary land they invented during childhood. Boxen combined elements from two earlier imaginary countries, Box and India.
The brothers created stories, maps, histories, and political systems for their invented world. Their private mythology developed while Lewis was still a boy, long before he wrote the Narnia books. Animals were especially prominent in these early stories, which reflected Lewis’s strong interest in books and imaginative world-building.
Boxen is not another name for Narnia. Narnia was the separate fantasy world Lewis created for the seven-book series published from 1950 to 1956. Boxen belongs to his childhood writing and was not the setting of his mature novels.
The surviving Boxen material offers biographers evidence about Lewis’s early imagination. It also shows that his habit of building detailed fictional worlds began decades before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.