The Jungle Books
May. 5th, 2025 08:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo I've hesitated before re-reading the Jungle Books. They meant so much to me when I was a kid- and I was afraid the magic wouldn't hold- but this is Kipling- and I needn't have worried.
I started with "The Undertakers" which has an elderly crocodile reminiscing about the joys of eating people and concludes with a British engineer blasting him to bits with an elephant gun and his "friends" the stork and the hyena eating what is left of him. "Listen with Mother" it ain't. I remember finding it difficult to understand- because it hints and alludes and never explains- but not turning a hair at its horror. We go wrong when we try to protect kids from the grim and ghastly because there's nothing they like more....
The Mowgli stories are the heart of the matter. As Edward Shanks wrote in 1940 (thanks to the Kipling Society for the quote) "Kipling has the myth-making genius. It is rare in modern literature but it is a sign of greatness whenever it occurs...." They're not all equally good- and sometimes stray a little too close to allegory and the pedagogical- but all carry that mythic charge. How I deplore what Disney did to them!
I started with "The Undertakers" which has an elderly crocodile reminiscing about the joys of eating people and concludes with a British engineer blasting him to bits with an elephant gun and his "friends" the stork and the hyena eating what is left of him. "Listen with Mother" it ain't. I remember finding it difficult to understand- because it hints and alludes and never explains- but not turning a hair at its horror. We go wrong when we try to protect kids from the grim and ghastly because there's nothing they like more....
The Mowgli stories are the heart of the matter. As Edward Shanks wrote in 1940 (thanks to the Kipling Society for the quote) "Kipling has the myth-making genius. It is rare in modern literature but it is a sign of greatness whenever it occurs...." They're not all equally good- and sometimes stray a little too close to allegory and the pedagogical- but all carry that mythic charge. How I deplore what Disney did to them!
