C.S. Lewis created the fictional country of Boxen before writing The Chronicles of Narnia.
Boxen was an imaginary world invented by Lewis and his brother Warren during their childhood. It combined two earlier ideas: Animal-Land, a setting for stories about talking animals, and India, a setting with human rulers and political institutions. The brothers merged these concepts into Boxen and developed its history, geography, and characters.
Lewis wrote and illustrated stories about Boxen while he was still young. The project gave him practice in constructing societies, inventing names, and treating an imagined world as a place with its own internal history. These habits later became important to his adult fiction.
Boxen is not an early name for Narnia. It is a separate childhood creation, although both settings show Lewis’s long-standing interest in myth, animals, monarchy, and invented histories. Much of the Boxen material was published posthumously from the brothers’ surviving manuscripts.