I'm Having Fits. . . About Narnia

I'm blogging because I'm about to have a fit, and I figured I could vent about it, get my feelings out, and (I hope) go on. I'm reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which I have read many, many times. And I have my old (like 20 years old) copy which I've read and reread and marked up many times when I've taught the book, when I was working on my diss, whatever.

Anyhow, I have a new copy that I was working through, the edition that I'd ordered for my students. And I figured I should "bite the bullet" and go ahead and annotate my new copy (I hate having to work with a new edition) so that my pagination would match what my students have, and thus, class tomorrow morning would go much more smoothly.

Anyway, as I was reading, I started noticing little things that had been changed. Wording was different; one character (Fenris Ulf / Maugrim) even has a different name. This was news to me. In my research and my work on Lewis, I'd never read anything about differing editions of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. And I'm about to have a fit. I said above that little things are different. But they aren't little. I mean what seem to me to be clear references to Norse myth (the character Fenris Ulf, a reference to the "World Ash tree") have been replaced with something else. This to me seems thematically important.

But what really bothers me is why I've been unaware of this until now. Why haven't I read anything about these different versions of Lewis's famous novel? Hasn't anyone done a textual study? Why don't I know about it? I can't be the first person to be aware of this with all the Lewis loonies in this world. So why am I just now noticing this. Goodness, I feel like Oedipa Maas. And I'm about to have a fit. This seems like a big deal to me. Does no one care?