Ages of Pevensie children?

Ciwhat said:
ya what i said is what it says in the book. i always thought they were 14, 12, 10, 9, but that's just me. the book also says they get a year older every book

That was about my original thought too. It makes sense that they get a year older or so in "the real world." Hmm...perhaps later books could help us peg their ages. At the end of PC Aslan tells Peter and Susan that they are too old to return to Narnia for now, and tells Ed and Lucy the same thing at the end of Dawn Treader. Hmm...if Peter and Susan are 12-14 in LWW, perhaps they would be 13-16 (depending on who you talk to) at the end of PC--maybe 13/14/15 is that "cut off" age when coming back to Narnia.
 
ya that's exactly what i was thinkin. But even though in the movie they made them older then that it worked out good cuz i though they looked a lot younger then their real ages.
 
Lenny said:
Namaste said:
There's another thread where people ask that question and I cited the answer according to a book I have here. It says that Peter is 13, Susan is 12, Edmund is 10, and Lucy is 8.
hhmmm, in the book it says edmund is only a year older than lucy.

x
Maybe Edmund is slightly more than a year older than Lucy (e.g. 14 months), but it rounds to a year, and LWW takes place at the time of year when Edmund is barely 10 and Lucy is almost 9.
 
I think Peter is 14 Susan is 12 Edmund is 10 and Lucy might be seven at least thats the age they look in the moviPevensies ages e]
 
I always thought of them as Peter 16, Susan 15, Edmund 12, and Lucy 10, And that is how I have always imagined them since I was two...or a bit older...anyway I am not gonna believe what books say (the Narnia trivia books and such) because thats not what the Author said and probably just the way one person saw it, and why should their opinion or view be more crediable then mine?
 
There's no doubt that the movie actors & actresses are older than the ages of the book characters. Pauline Baynes' original illustrations for the books confirm this. But who am I to challenge King Hollywood? Just a Telmarine lord, that's all. I'm still mad that they made my good friend Glozelle a general instead of lord like he was in the books. He wasn't too happy either.:D:D:D
 
I always thought Peter was 15 Susan was 13 Edmund was 10 and Lucy was 9.;)
In the movie the kids actors are waaaay older than in the books.:rolleyes:

I'll ask when I go to Heaven.:D
 
[I'll preface all this with where I'm getting the time gaps between the books from: LWW is in the summer; PC takes place 12-15 months later, in the fall; VDT is at the end of that school year, say ten months; SC takes place a few months later, in the fall. I don't think we have any real solid evidence for LB, but Lucy is finished with school, so this is probably seven years after LWW at the least. At any rate is has to be set after 1948, because they reference British Railways.]

Best guesses:
Lucy is ten in LWW, and turns eleven after they return to England. She spends the next year with the Professor, but turns twelve just before PC and her first year of boarding school. She's still twelve for VDT (in fact, her birthday would be on the boat), but she turns thirteen when they come back, just before the start of SC and her second year at school. She leaves school just before her eighteenth birthday, and LB is sometime after that, when she is seventeen at the earliest.

Edmund is an old eleven or youngish twelve for LWW; he starts boarding school when they get back. He is thirteen for PC and his second year at school. If he's young for his year he's still thirteen in VDT, but he may have already turned fourteen. He's fourteen and in third form for SC, and at least eighteen for LB, by which time he's been out of school (and at university?) for a year.

Susan is probably thirteen or fourteen in LWW, depending on how much older she is than Edmund, which means she's about fifteen or sixteen in VDT when she goes to America. (Personally I lean toward fourteen and sixteen respectively.) That puts her around twenty at the earliest for LB.

Peter is probably studying for his HSC in VDT, which means he's probably seventeen-going-on-eighteen for VDT and SC. Working backwards, that means he was sixteen/seventeen in PC and fifteenish in LWW, and of course twenty-two or so in LB.

This makes Lucy and Peter a bit older than I thought, but I think it fits. It gets more complicated if you consider that Lucy is done with school in LB but Eustace is not, even though SC is her second year or boarding school and (at least) his second year at Experiment House, but I'm just going to assume that Experiment House gets them at a much younger age--that also means Eustace and Jill can be several years younger than Lucy. More detailed and rambling explanations where I worked things out are below!

Lucy's first year of boarding school is in PC. She's probably about twelve then, for first form, which makes her ten/eleven during LWW (depending on her birthday). If she's young for her year (say late summer or fall birthday), she's going to be ten/eleven in LWW, eleven/twelve in PC, twelve in VDT, and twelve/thirteen in SC. If she's finished school by LB, that makes her probably at least seventeen. If she has a winter birthday, she'd be a year older, but I think she seems young enough for a summer birthday.

Edmund is about a year older than Lucy, although that could be as many as two school years. If the "horrid school" where he begins to go wrong is the same boarding school Peter attends, his first year is pre-LWW and he is probably going on thirteen during LWW. Otherwise, his first year of boarding school is post-LWW and his second is PC, so he's probably eleven/twelve for LWW and twelve/thirteen for PC. Add a year for VDT/SC, and remember he's probably eighteen at least for LB.

Peter is studying for exams in VDT, but I've no idea if those are meant to be university exams or secondary school exams or what. Wikipedia (which as we all know is always accurate!) tells me that if he's sixteen he's going for his School Certificate and if he's eighteen it's his Higher School Certificate. Let's say fifteen/sixteen or seventeen/eighteen in VDT/SC, since he's still studying for them instead of taking them; that puts him at either fourteen or sixteen in PC and thirteen or fifteen in LWW. I think thirteen is much too young, so he's got to be fifteen in LWW and studying for his HSC in VDT.
 
Here's something to think about regarding their schooling. In LWW, Peter is yelling at Edmund after he denies going to Narnia, "You've always liked being beastly to anyone smaller than yourself; we've seen that at school before."

Now, in this context, does we mean the royal 'we,' Peter and his school friends, or the rest of the family?

MrBob
 
I thought it meant Peter and Susan (and by extension, probably their parents). It's too early for bookverse Peter to use the royal we, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to use it in that context if he means his friends at school. Especially because if Ed's a year younger than Lucy, then what's he doing bullying younger students at boarding school already? I guess this could be his smaller form mates, but it seems like it makes more sense for him to be going after kids who are much younger (ie, when he was an older student in primary school). And anyway, pre-Aslan Edmund is the type of kid to get bullied by older kids, so it seems like he'd have less time to bully younger kids.

But then, why is it the school that gets blamed? It's a "horrid" school that turns him bad--if Peter went to the same school, why do they assume it's turned Ed bad? If he didn't, how do Peter and Susan know about this anyway? Is Peter saying essentially "We (the older members of the family) know because we've had to field calls from parents and letters from your head, and Mum writes to us at school to tell us"?
 
Good detective work Animus. One thing to note though - in England people tend to start boarding school at 11 not 12 so you would need to take a year off Lucy and Edmund's age.

Also Wikipedia is wrong. He would have been studying for O-levels or A-levels, and I would guess O-levels which you took at 16. By Animus' system that would make for LWW: Peter 14, Susan 12 (I think she would have gone to America before starting O-levels), Edmund 11 and Lucy 9/10 depending on birthday but I'd go for 9.

I think those ages seem about right... but the films have clearly only got Lucy's age right...
 
As far as I know (I might be wrong?) A-levels aren't introduced until the early fifties--which is to say, Peter misses them by a few years, I think.

So you start at eleven--is it six years or seven?
 
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You'd start at age 11 and be at school for five years definitely. School leaving age would be 16. Some people may have stayed on for two more years to do advanced exams (maybe not A-Levels then but something equivalent). In those days though, not many people stayed on after 16 so I reckon Peter would have been studying for his age 16 exams in VDT.

EDIT: I just had a check and I think you were right about SC and HSC. I'd gone by the date of publication in VDT but of course if VDT only happened 2 years after LWW and LWW was during the Blitz, then it would have been well before the 1951 introduction of O-level and A-level. Nevertheless, the exams were taken at equivalent times so I still think Peter would have been taking his aged 16 exams.
 
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Tbh, Peter strikes me as the type who would stay in school longer, and probably go on to university later. I think that if he's studying for his SC in VDT, that makes him too young for LWW. YMMV of course.

The other question--Lucy's second year of boarding school is SC; Eustace has been at Experiment House for at least a year by the start of SC. Yet in LB, Jill and Eustace are apparently the only ones still at school (Experiment House, probably, since they're still together). I can't see Lucy leaving school early (although I suppose YMMV on that too), and canon seems to peg Eustace as younger than Lucy anyway, so did he and Jill start school earlier?
 
With Peter I would still go with younger. At the end of PC we're told that Peter and Susan are too old. Going by the older Peter reckoning he'd be very nearly 17 and I think that's WAY past being too old already! This is a fantasy land clearly for children and I think under-16 has to be a limit to that, especially in that day and age. People at 16 have full time work and are elligible for marriage etc...

The Lucy/Eustace thing is interesting. It does seem right that Eustace and Jill should be younger than Lucy. If they're in second year in SC then Lucy has to at least be in third year but that would mean she started school late. The other option is that they went to really posh boarding school which begins at age 13, but that would push all their ages up really high...

Hmmm... I'm going to have to have a chat with my Gran as she went to school under that system and I'll be able to find out what age people 'usually' went to boarding school at...

EDIT: Ok, I had a check on Wikipedia too and there is the possibility that Experiment House was in fact an elementary school catering for 5-14 year olds. That could make Jill and Eustace any age at all...
 
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