The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated

Rudyard Kipling’s tales of Mowgli, the Man-cub, raised by wolves, are not for children only. They have never been out of print, and they have shaped the English language and the British (and American) psyche to an extraordinary degree. The stories that concern Mowgli’s adventures, from his adoption by Mother and Father Wolf to his marriage and taking service in the Indian Forestry as an adult, have been collected, placed in their internal chronological order, and annotated in this volume by the historians GMW Wemyss and Markham Shaw Pyle, the celebrated chroniclers of the Titanic enquiries, the rise of Churchill, and how the US Congress, four months before Pearl Harbor, kept the draft – by one vote. As in their previous noted annotation of The Wind in the Willows, Mr Wemyss and Mr Pyle, the first a British historian, the second, an American historian, have ranged widely in annotating this classic work. It is prefaced with essays on imperialism, dryland farming, the climate and geography of Madhya Pradesh, Kipling’s tribalism and his opposition to the Kaiser’s nascent imperial adventurism, and the image of the Mother-figure. Over 350 footnotes accompany the text in this second edition, delving into ecology; irrigation; literary echoes from Bunyan, the Authorised Version, Milton, Blake, Chaucer, and Shakespeare; Kipling’s literary influence upon Tolkien and Lewis; wergild; snake-cults and Greek oracles; ethnology; mana and tapu; Anglo-German and Anglo-Russian relations; forestry; and any number of subjects with these, Uncle Tom Cobleigh and All. They have given a new generation the knowledge that the initial Victorian and Edwardian reader should have had ... and much more. If you wish to enjoy these tales with deeper understanding; if you wonder what Buldeo has to do with Mr Sherlock Holmes’ antagonist Dr Roylott; if you have ever wondered just why a Gond hunter reminds you of the frontman of Jethro Tull; or if you simply want a cracking good read of stories you but half-remember: here is your book.