The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Dog Names

The names of all four of the Pevensie children can be found in prominent canine stories within the last century, all in the children’s native country of England. Lucy the dog played herself in the award-winning movie “Wendy and Lucy” in 2008, an English drama about a woman named Wendy and the dog she is trying to support as they travel to Alaska for work, while several puppies were featured at St. Edmund’s College in Cambridge in 2013 when guide dog-to-be puppies came to visit the college. The visit was beneficial to both the students and the young dogs as the dogs were able to help relieve stress for the students and the students were able to help socialize the puppies to a new situation. Queen Susan is represented as well, although her canine counterpart was not a queen herself, and was named slightly before the book was written. Susan was a Pembroke Corgi King George VI gave to his daughter Elizabeth on her 18^th birthday. Apart from being the constant companion to Queen Elizabeth for 15 years, a period of time that spanned the first seven years of her reign as Queen, Susan also had the honor of being the common ancestor to all of the Queen’s Corgis, with the current royal Corgis, Holly and Willow, believed to be the 14^th generation after her. King Peter the Magnificent also had a canine counterpart in England prior to the publication of the book, in fact, Peter the dog was a search and rescue dog during the time that the book was set in, active from 1945 until World War II ended, a service for which the brave and determined Collie received the Dickin medal with a citation that read “For locating victims trapped under blitzed buildings while serving with the MAP attached to Civil Defence of London.” 

Aslan, though, is by far the most popular dog name from the book, and it seems that most of the dogs named Aslan are just here to help! There’s Aslan the white German Shepherd in England who picks up litter, there’s Aslan the newly trained hearing aid dog who was just paired with a woman in Wales, and there’s Aslan the Leonberger in Falls Church, VA, a therapy dog who visits cancer patients to help improve their mood. Aslan was also the name of a military explosives detection dog from Malmstrom Airforce Base, a hardworking and devoted German Shepherd who was memorialized in June of 2017 as a part of a mural in the main headquarters building. Since starting his career in 2009, Aslan performed more than 9,500 hours of installation security and responded to 25 bomb threats in the state of Montana, assisted both federal and local law enforcement agencies in many prominent explosives missions, as well as serving a deployment in Iraq in 2010 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom where he accepted multiple base security operations and combat patrols. At his memorial service in June, an American flag was folded in his honor and a bell rung to signify bringing a dog home.