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Just So Stories
| Author: | Rudyard Kipling |
| Publisher: |
Macmillan Publishing, 1902 |
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| Book Type: | Collection |
| Genre: | Fantasy |
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Synopsis
The Just So Stories are a collection written by the British author Rudyard Kipling. Highly fantasised origin stories, especially for differences among animals, they are among Kipling's best known works.
The stories, first published in 1902, are pourquoi (French for "why") or origin stories, fantastic accounts of how various phenomena came about. A forerunner of these stories is Kipling's "How Fear Came," included in his The Second Jungle Book (1895). In it, Mowgli hears the story of how the tiger got his stripes.
The Just So Stories typically have the theme of a particular animal being modified from an original form to its current form by the acts of man, or some magical being. For example, the Whale has a tiny throat because he swallowed a mariner, who tied a raft inside to block the whale from swallowing other men. The Camel has a hump given to him by a djinn as punishment for the camel's refusing to work (the hump allows the camel to work longer between times of eating). The Leopard's spots were painted by an Ethiopian (after the Ethiopian painted himself black). The Kangaroo gets its powerful hind legs, long tail, and hopping gait after being chased all day by a dingo, sent by a minor god responding to the Kangaroo's request to be made different from all other animals.
Kipling illustrated the original editions of the Just So Stories. Other illustrators of the book include Joseph M. Gleeson.
The Just So Stories began as bedtime stories told to 'Effie' (Josephine, Kipling's firstborn); when the first three were published in a children's magazine, a year before her death, Kipling explained: "...in the evening there were stories meant to put Effie to sleep, and you were not allowed to alter those by one single little word. They had to be told just so; or Effie would wake up and put back the missing sentence. So at last they came to be like charms, all three of them,--the whale tale, the camel tale, and the rhinoceros tale."
Table of Contents:
- How the Alphabet Was Made - (1902)
- How the Camel Got His Hump - (1902)
- How the First Letter Was Written - (1902)
- How the Leopard Got His Spots - (1902)
- How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin - (1902)
- How the Whale Got His Throat - (1902)
- The Beginning of the Armadillos - (1902)
- The Butterfly That Stamped - (1902)
- The Cat That Walked by Himself - (1902)
- The Crab that Played With the Sea - (1902)
- The Elephant's Child - (1902)
- The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo - (1902)
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