The Wood between the Worlds

There’s a brilliant section in one of the Narnia novels, The Magician’s Nephew, in which the book’s heroes, a boy and girl called Polly and Digory, find some magic rings which transport them into a place called the wood between the worlds. It’s a magical forest full of trees and little pools of water, and they discover that by jumping in the pools they can enter into hundreds of different worlds. It’s one of these jaunts that takes them to a brand new world which eventually becomes Narnia.

What’s great about this sequence is the moment of horror when the children realise that there is no way to clearly identify which pool leads to which world, or indeed, the one that leads them back to their own. They suddenly realise that they risk getting completely lost in the wood between the worlds, with no way to return home.

Michael Parsons ~ Times Online
19th October 2007