★★★★★ Pre-Empire English History

Puck of Pook's Hill

Rudyard Kipling

Puck of Pook's Hill and its sequel Rewards and Fairies are, in my opinion, among the very best of Rudyard Kipling's books, and that is saying a great deal. They are Kipling's presentation for children of the early history of England.

It starts like this: brother and sister Dan and Una play scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream in a fairy ring on a hill near their home. This act summons Puck, the oldest of the Old Ones of England. (Puck, by the way, objects to being called a "fairy", preferring the terms "Old Ones" or "People of the Hills". I will respect his wishes.) Puck, from gratitude to Dan and Una and the original Puckish sense of humor, makes them an offer,

if you care to take seizin from me, I may be able to show you something out of the common here on Human Earth. You certainly deserve it.

Thus begins a series of stories from Old England. Puck tells only a few of the stories himself. Mostly, when the kids come to meet him on subsequent days, they find he has a companion, some person from past times who tells his story. (I think they're all men -- the only female point of view is Una, as far as I remember.) The story is told in part in poetry.

The structure is a little reminiscent of The Jungle Books -- a series of stories, many of them forming a connected series about the same characters with a coherent plot, with less tightly connected stories interspersed. The three main characters are Hugh, a Saxon manor lord, Sir Richard Dalyngridge, a young knight who comes to England with the Norman conquest, and their lord, De Aquila, also Norman. But we also meet a Roman centurion from the time when England was part of the Roman Empire, a Jewish money-lender, and others. The children don't meet any great historical figures: no kings or princesses. It's all what we might call upper middle class, if such a thing existed in 1066.

It is obvious that Kipling tries hard to present history accurately. I would be interested to hear the opinion of an English historian as to how well he succeeds. My (very amateur) impression is that he gets it mostly correct, within the bounds you would expect of an English story-teller who wants to make English children feel good about being English. Even the fantasy elements feel historically accurate, in the sense that they are based on historical English folklore. You don't get the tales of the British Empire you might expect from Kipling's other works. With one exception, the stories occur before the 16th century. The exception concerns the People of the Hills. The main story Kipling wants to tell is how Saxons and Normans ceased to be Saxon and Norman and became English.

I think Kipling's great strength as a story-teller is the feeling of authenticity. He can write stories from the point of a boy raised in the jungle by wolves, and while you're reading you absolutely believe in Mowgli and that this is the way he would think and feel. By contrast, a young Norman knight of the 11th century or a Roman centurion of the 5th are not much of a stretch. Kipling was proud of Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies, and that pride is justified.

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