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See also Just-so story for anthropological sense
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The Just So Stories for Little Children were written by British author Rudyard Kipling. They are highly fantasized origin stories and are among Kipling's best known works.
[edit] Description
The stories, first published in 1902, are pourquoi stories, fantastic accounts of how various phenomena came about. A forerunner of these stories is "How Fear Came" in The Second Jungle Book (1895), in which Mowgli hears the story of how the tiger got his stripes.
The original editions of Just So Stories were illustrated with woodcuts by Lockwood Kipling, (father of Rudyard) , though later editions have included illustrations by other artists.
Each story is accompanied by a poem, in a somewhat ballad style. The poem after "The Elephant's Child" is particularly widely quoted; it opens:
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
Many of the stories are addressed to "My Best Beloved" (they were first written for Kipling's eldest daughter, Josephine, who had died during an outbreak of influenza in 1899), and throughout they use a comically elevated style inspired by the formal speech of India, full of long and improbable-sounding words and place names, some of them made up. As a result, it is a delight to read them aloud, and easy to memorise passages from them. They were a highly popular item on the BBC's radio programme Children's Hour in the 1950s.
In 1979 Thames Television produced an animated collection of the Just So Stories for TV. The stories were each 10 minutes in length. Frankie Howerd wrote additional material included in the videos and narrated them.[1]
[edit] The Elephant's Child
Some sense of the style of the stories may be gathered from the following extract:
One of Kipling's original illustrations for The Elephant's Child.
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In the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side; but he couldn't pick up things with it. But there was one Elephant—a new Elephant — an Elephant's Child — who was full of 'satiable curiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions…
One fine morning in the middle of the Precession of the Equinoxes this 'satiable Elephant's Child asked a new fine question that he had never asked before. He asked, "What does the crocodile have for dinner?" Then everybody said, "Hush!" in a loud and dredful tone, and they spanked him immediately and directly, without stopping, for a long time.
By and by, when that was finished, he came upon Kolokolo Bird sitting in the middle of a wait-a-bit thornbush, and he said, "My father has spanked me, and my mother has spanked me; all my aunts and uncles have spanked me for my 'satiable curiosity; and still I want to know what the Crocodile has for dinner!"
The Kolokolo Bird said, with a mournful cry, "Go to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, and find out."
That very next morning, when there was nothing left of the Equinoxes, because the Precession had preceded according to precedent, this 'satiable Elephant's Child took a hundred pounds of bananas (the little short red kind), and a hundred pounds of sugar-cane (the long purple kind), and seventeen melons (the greeny-crackly kind), and said to all his dear families, "Good-bye. I am going to the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, to find out what the Crocodile has for dinner." And they all spanked him once more for luck, though he asked them most politely to stop.
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[edit] The full list of Just-So Stories
How the Rhino got his Skin, woodcut by Kipling
- How the Whale got his Throat- Explains how the whale was once a fearsome predator who ate humans, but was changed by one of his victims.
- How the Camel got his Hump- Explains how the idle camel was punished.
- How the Rhinoceros got his Skin- Explains why Rhinos have folds in their skin and bad tempers.
- How the Leopard got his Spots
- The Elephant's Child- The story of how the elephant's trunk became long.
- The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo- The story of how the kangaroo turned from a grey, wooly animal with short, stubby legs, to the athletic animal we know today.
- The Beginning of the Armadilloes- The story of how the hedgehog and the turtle transformed into the first armadillos.
- How the First Letter was Written- Introduces the only characters who appear in more than one story- a family of cave-people, called Tegumai Bopsulai (the father), Teshumai Tewindrow (the mother), and Taffimai Metallumai, (the daughter). Explains how Taffy delivered a picture message to her mother.
- How the Alphabet was Made- Taffy and her father invent the earliest form of the alphabet.
- The Crab that Played with the Sea
- The Cat that Walked by Himself- The longest story. The story of how all domesticated animals became that way, especially focussing on the wildest of all, the cat. We also learn how the dog, the cow and the horse became man's servants.
- The Butterfly that Stamped- The story of how wise king Solomon rid himself of troublesome wives, and saved the pride of a butterfly.
- The Tabu Tale (missing from most British editions; first appeared in the Scribner edition in the US in 1903)
As well as appearing in a collection, the individual stories have also been published separately, often in large-format illustrated editions for younger children. A video edition has also been released; on VHS tapes it required three tapes with four episodes on each.
[edit] Trivia
The "magic mark" inscribed on the stone under the man's foot in Kipling's original illustration for "The Crab That Played With the Sea" is actually an inverted swastika (originally a sign of peace, before it was adopted by the Nazis); Kipling used the inverted swastika as an emblem on his books, for its oriental connections.
The Just So Stories were adapted into a musical, called Just So in 1984.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes and references
[edit] External links
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Nineteenth-century British children's literature |
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