C.S. Lewis’s childhood imaginary land was called Boxen. He and his brother Warren developed it from stories they began creating in childhood, combining two earlier imaginative settings: Boxen grew from “Box,” a world of anthropomorphic animals, and “India,” a world associated with human history and politics.
The brothers wrote and illustrated stories about Boxen rather than merely discussing it. Their private mythology included kings, political events, wars, and invented histories. Lewis’s early notebooks and manuscripts show how seriously he treated this imaginative project. The surviving material later helped biographers and literary scholars understand the development of his narrative interests.
Boxen is often confused with Narnia, the fantasy world of Lewis’s mature children’s novels. Narnia was created decades later for The Chronicles of Narnia, beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950. Boxen was a childhood creation and was not the setting of those published books.
Although Boxen itself was never a major commercial literary setting, its talking animals and elaborate invented history foreshadowed Lewis’s lifelong interest in world-building, mythology, and imaginative storytelling.