Boxen was the imaginary world C.S. Lewis created with his brother Warren during childhood.
Lewis and Warren developed Boxen through stories, maps, histories, and illustrations while growing up in Belfast. The world combined elements of two earlier imaginative projects: “Animal-Land,” created by Lewis, and “India,” created by Warren. Lewis’s animal characters often lived in a setting influenced by railway culture and political institutions.
Boxen is important because it shows how early Lewis’s lifelong habit of constructing fictional worlds began. These childhood notebooks were not the same as Narnia, which Lewis created decades later, but they reveal his continuing interest in talking animals, invented societies, and layered histories.
Readers sometimes confuse Boxen with Narnia because both include animals and fantasy elements. Boxen was a childhood collaborative creation, whereas Narnia became a published series of seven novels beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950.