Puck & Co.: Reading Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies as a Romance

The Puck books, Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910), are unlike anything else that Rudyard Kipling wrote for children. The Jungle books, Just So Stories, and Stalky & Co. are collections of stories and occasional poems that may have a common style or motifs or themes or characters, but none of their elements depends for its reading on a reading of all the others in the same book. Any one story may be extracted and read in isolation without a significant loss of appreciation. The stories about Mowgli in the Jungle books come closest to interdependence and are best read in chronological order, but it would be wrong to say that a reader could not fully understand "The King's Ankus" without reading "The Spring Running" or vice versa. But the elements of the Puck books, I will argue, are far less self-contained and far more interdependent because the Puck books are a single, intricately integrated work rather than simply the two collections of stories and poems they appear at first to be.

At first glance the Puck books present a formidable array of story and verse. Their frame narrative establishes the premise that two children, Dan and Una, conjure up Puck himself by acting out parts of A Midsummer Night's Dream in a fairy ring on midsummer eve in the shadow of Pook's Hill—that is, Puck's Hill. Puck gives them "seizin"—formal possession—of Old England, which means that from time to time he introduces them to men and women from England's past who tell the children stories about their lives. The supernatural narrators include (in order of appearance) a Norman knight who tells of the Conquest, a British-Roman soldier who describes the decay of the Roman Empire, a Tudor artist, a medieval Jewish physician who gives the secret history of the Magna Carta, Elizabeth I, a dying Regency beauty, an Iron Age tribesman, an Anglo-French gypsy with tales of Washington, Napoleon, and Talleyrand, and a seventh-century archbishop. Between each tale is at least one poem, often two, which elaborates or comments upon some aspect of the adjacent narratives. All told, Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies comprise twenty-one tales and thirty-eight poems, and it is my argument that between them they compose a single unified work, specifically, a romance.

The unity of Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies is not a new idea, though it is often ignored, but rather an idea that has never been satisfactorily worked out. Peter Hinchcliffe, making the best attempt to date, writes that "despite their apparently random chronological arrangement the stories in these two books are a coherent unity, much more than Kipling's other collections of stories" (156). He even believes that "one ought to consider both books as forming one interconnective narrative" (157). But the Puck books provide an obstacle to searching out their own interconnections. In his autobiography, Kipling wrote of the books: "I worked the material in three or four overlaid tints and textures, which might or might not reveal themselves according to the shifting light of sex, youth, and experience. It was like working lacquer and mother-o'-pearl, a natural combination, into the same scheme as niello and grisaille, and trying not to let the joins show" (205). And, as Hinchcliffe points out, "They are slick in a good and almost literal sense, presenting the smoothest of surfaces to the reader, as Kipling's own description of them implies. They are also intentionally complex, and a full reading of the Puck stories ought to do what Kipling suggests and look for the shapes that lie beneath the 'lacquered' surface" (157).

When he looks beneath the surface, Hinchcliffe finds that "arranging the tables of contents of the two books in parallel columns reveals a nicely symmetrical pattern of complementary stories" (158). The symmetry leads him to believe that the stories told by the Roman soldier and the gypsy "are the core of each book, and...