Magic rings

In order to use portals, a person must be touching one of the magical rings made by, Digory's magician uncle. The rings are of two types. Yellow rings transport a person from a world to the Wood. If a person on Earth touches a yellow ring, for example, he will disappear and appear in the Earth pool in the Wood. The green rings transport a person out of the Wood to a world. If a person in the Wood wants to go to, for example, he steps in the Charn pool while touching a green ring, and materializes on Charn. What determines the location where the traveller materializes, is not clear.

Contact with the ring must be by skin. Another feature of the rings is that the effect works like electricity, by chain of contact; you don't have to be touching a ring, merely touching someone who is touching one.

The rings themselves were created from a magical powder, originally in the possession of Uncle Andrew's godmother. This powder had come, via the lost island of Atlantis, from the Wood itself. Thus originally the dust must have been used in travelling between worlds, and it is implied that in the past, travel from our world to others such as Charn, may have been more common. This offers explination of how in "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe", is described by the beavers as descended from Adam's first wife Lilith, while at the same time she is the last of the royal house of Charn.

Neither Uncle Andrew, who made the rings, nor Digory and Polly, who were tricked by Andrew into trying them out, understood any of this. This resulted in Digory and Polly blundering into Charn, then accidently transporting Jadis with them back to Earth by the 'chain of contact' effect when she grabbed Polly's hair as they were leaving. The next time they used the rings, to get Jadis off of Earth, they understood them better, and used the 'chain of contact' effect, holding hands while Digory grabbed Jadis's heel and Polly touched her yellow ring. Unfortunately the chain of contact included Uncle Andrew, Frank the cabbie, his horse Strawberry, and even the cab, which all got transported first to the Wood, and then to Narnia of the year 1/1900.

An interesting detail is that the initial choice of Narnia as a world to go to, which began all the contact between Narnia and Earth, was made by Strawberry the horse, who blundered into the first pool he saw because he was thirsty, which happened to lead to Narnia.

When Charn the world was destroyed, the Charn pool in the Wood dried up into a grass thicket. This suggests that any pool that contains its world (including Earth and Narnia) dry up after it has met its end. There fore strongly implying, that the pool that contained Narnia in 2555/1949, had itself become a grass thicket. Ineristinglly, the pools that contained the worlds existed even before they had began, this implies that the "dark and stillness before the dawn of time" is itself an era, thus Narnia's Age of Conquest was precceed by an earlier period.

Access to the Wood between the Worlds was lost after Digory and Polly returned from Narnia, when they buried the magic rings so Uncle Andrew couldn't use them again. These rings were later dug up again by Peter and Edmund in order that Jill and Eustace could be transported to Narnia. However, they were transported to Narnia by other means before the rings could be handed over. The Wood could of been part of Aslan's Country, since like the Wood, it contained all the worlds.