What I Learned Today: Planet Narnia

Over the past few days I've been pondering the Chronicles of Narnia and the latest finding about them from Dr. Michael Ward.  He is a C.S. Lewis scholar and in his new book Planet Narnia, he "...argues that Lewis secretly constructed the Chronicles of Narnia out of the imagery associated with the seven heavens of the medieval cosmos." 


This is interesting enough to me, but what's really intriguing to me is that for years I recall reading that J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis' good friend, didn't think much of the Narnia books.  He thought they were dashed off too quickly and not well written (probably from Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings).  So, for all these years, I too thought similar things about the books.  


I'm not suggesting that I would have found the seven heavens motif if I had thought on my own, but I am saying that I allowed someone, other than the author, to influence my thinking in such a way that I never even remotely considered other possibilities.


Gulp: what other unknown unknowns am I unaware I should be aware of?