The Hidden History of Narnia

I've read and re-read the Narnia books countless times, but sometimes one comes across a passage which never really sunk in, that the reader skims over - and in my case forgets - and it wasn't until the other day that I came across this passage which I had never really noticed before. It's from "The Last Battle":

In between their visits there were hundreds and thousands of years when peaceful King followed peaceful King till you could hardly remember their names or count their numbers, and there was really hardly anything to put into the History Books. And because I glossed over it so many times (and I wonder how many other readers have), I've called it "The Hidden History of Narnia":

The Hidden History of Narnia

And he went on to talk of old Queens and heroes whom she had never heard of. 

He spoke of Swanwhite the Queen who had lived before the days of the White Witch and the Great Winter, who was so beautiful that when she looked into any forest pool the reflection of her face shone out of the water like a star by night for a year and a day afterwards. 

He spoke of Moonwood the Hare, who had such ears that he could sit by Caldron Pool under the thunder of the great waterfall and hear what men spoke in whispers at Cair Paravel. 

He told how King Gale, who was ninth in descent from Frank the first of all Kings, had sailed far away into the Eastern seas and delivered the Lone Islanders from a dragon and how, in return, they had given him the Lone Islands to be part of the royal lands of Narnia for ever. 

He talked of whole centuries in which all Narnia was so happy that notable dances and feasts, or at most tournaments, were the only things that could be remembered, and every day and week had been better than the last. 

And as he went on, the picture of all those happy years, all the thousands of them, piled up in Jill's mind till it was rather like looking down from a high hill onto a rich, lovely plain full of woods and waters and cornfields, which spread away and away till it got thin and misty from distance.

A Post-Script

http://vanhise.lss.wisc.edu/~aschmidt2/danish/hca/texts/swanwhite.hca.html

Swanwhite is the name of a princess who is beautiful in a story of the same name by Hans Christian Anderson, written in 1923. Lewis most probably found the name there.