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Mr Toad jailed because he stole a car.  The Telegraph  
The Wind in the Willows, by Arthur Rackham
Photo credit: The Telegraph 
 
MendozaW45
(Photo credit: Philip Mendoza, Illustrations, Posters)
 
 
The Wind in the Willows
(see the video at the bottom of this post)
 

It would appear that animals are indeed everywhere.  We find mythological, mythical, zoomorphic and theriomorphic animals in the most ancient texts.  In this regard, India seems our main source.

But so is the Bible, where we find archangels, good angels and bad angels:  the Devil himself!  As well, the Bible also warns that we must not trust appearances.  In Matthew 7:15, we read:

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

Literature is home to an extraordinary number of ravenous wolves.  In La Fontaine’s fables, we have a wolf who eats a lamb, “Le Loup et l’Agneau.”  In fairy tales, Little Red Riding Hood loses her grandmother to a wolf.

And, as strange as it may seem, literature is also home to the zoomorphic and theriomorphic (deified beasts) animals featured in mythologies, but reappearing along with new fantastic beasts in medieval Bestiaries, including Richard de Fournival‘s Bestiaire d’amour. 

arthur-rackham-the-wind-in-the-willows-1940-it-was-a-golden-afternoon-the-smell-of-the-dust-they-kicked-up-was-rich-and-sastifying
The Wind in the Willows, by Arthur Rackham
 

High Fantasy Literature 

Finally, literature is home to more or less recent high fantasy works featuring fantastic beasts:

  • J. R. R. Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) is the author of The Hobbit, 1937, the high fantasy The Lord of the Rings trilogy, written between 1954 to October 1955, and the mythopoeic Silmarillion, published posthumously, in 1977, by Tolkien’s son Christopher and Guy Gavriel Kay.  Tolkien taught English literature at Oxford and, among other works, he drew his inspiration from Beowulf for what he called his legendarium.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

In these books, new lands are created as well as new beasts, but these works also feature beasts borrowed from antiquity and various medieval bestiaries.  The books I have mentioned were immensely successful, which shows the importance of fantasy in the human mind. We need imaginary worlds, worlds like the pays de Tendre, worlds with maps and topsy-turvy worlds.

Topsy-Turvy Worlds

What I would like to emphasize is this blog is the topsy-turvy world of beast literature and the comic text.  In Reynard the Fox, not only do animals talk, but they are an aristocracy. Humans are mere peasants.

As for the theriomorphic,[i] creatures of mythologies, as I mentioned above, they are deified beasts attesting that Beast Literature is indeed an the “upside-down” world, as Jill Mann mentions with respect to Reynard the Fox.[ii]  We also have underworlds.  In Greek mythology, we have an Underworld, whence one cannot escape, as Cerberus guards its entrance.  Tolkien created a “middle-earth” and C. S. Lewis, worlds in outer space.  The Judeo-Christian hell is also an underground world.  Moreover, how ironic it is that Richard de Fournival should use animals in praise of women.

However my favourite underworld can be found in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.  The Mole and the Rat get lost in the woods during a snow storm.  They see a mat and beyond the mat a door which leads to the Badger’s underground residence.  After dinner, the Mole the Rat, the Otter, who arrives later, and Badger, their host, sit by the fire and the Badger praises his underground world where he is sheltered from both the cold and the heat:

The Badger simply beamed on him. ‘That’s exactly what I say,’ he replied. ‘There’s no security, or peace and  tranquillity, except underground. And then, if your ideas get larger and you want to expand–why, a dig and a scrape, and there you are! If you feel your house is a bit too big, you stop up a hole or two, and there you are again! No builders, no tradesmen, no remarks passed on you by fellows looking over your wall, and, above all, no WEATHER.[iii]

 Detail-from-Arthur-Rackha-007

Mole and Rat meet the horned god Pan
“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”
The Wind in the Willows 
(Photo credit: The Guardian)
 
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[i] “The animal form as a representation of the divine…”
Kurt Moritz Artur Goldammer, “religious symbolism and iconography.”  Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 26 Aug. 2013.            
<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/497416/religious-symbolism>.
[ii]  Jill Mann, “The Satiric Fiction of the Ysengrimus,” in Kenneth Varty, editor, Reynard the Fox: Social Engagement in the Beast Epic from the Middle Ages to the Present (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000), p. 11.
[iii]  The Wind in the Willows is the Project Gutenberg [EBook # 289]
 

—ooo—

The Wind in the Willows

 
mr_toad1Mr Toad,
by Ernest Shepard
(Photo credit: James Gurney)
 
 
© Micheline Walker
31 October 2011
Revised on 26 August 2013
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