The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, and the other Narnia stories

Walt Disney Pictures/Walden Media's "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian", the second movie in the Narnia series, was released in the US on May 16th, and will be released in the UK on June 26th. I read all seven Narnia books as a child and loved them, especially the first three, and I have to say that I also really enjoyed the first movie in the series, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" - it fully lived up to my expectations. I shall make a real effort to see the new movie, although I want to watch Disney's other new movie, "WALL-E", first.

I have added a few Narnia Flash online games to my Free Fun and Games website for you to play, in case you are a fan of the series like me - two Prince Caspian ones are listed below:

  Prince Caspian - Pinball

  Prince Caspian - Gryphon Attack

C. S. Lewis's wonderful series of "Chronicles of Narnia" books can be a little bit confusing in one sense, because the third book written and published - "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" - is actually the fifth in the series in terms of the internal story chronology. It will also be the third movie to be made, currently scheduled for release in 2010, and from that I think it is reasonable to suppose that the movie series will continue to be produced in the book publication sequence - movies of all seven books are planned.

Many of the books in the Narnia series feature stories that follow on in a different sequence to the one in which they were written and published. This is completely different to another very famous series of seven books, the "Harry Potter" stories, which all follow each other sequentially in terms of both the internal story chronology and the dates they were written and published.

To help clarify the situation, below is a list of all the Narnia books in their original publication sequence annotated with their internal chronological sequence:

1. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) - 2nd story
2. Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia (1951) - 4th story
3. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952) - 5th story
4. The Silver Chair (1953) - 6th story
5. The Horse and His Boy (1954) - 3rd story
6. The Magician’s Nephew (1955) - 1st story
7. The Last Battle (1956) - 7th story

There are conflicting opinions about which sequence is the best one to actually read them in. For me, the publication sequence works best, for the simple reason that it is the one in which the stories were created by C. S. Lewis.