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Rudyard Kipling
PUCK OF POOK'S HILL (1906) House of Stratus. 2009. 232 pages. Paper. ISBN: 0755117336 reviewed by Patrick Killough (1) biblio.com 09/15/2011 Would you recommend this book to other readers? Yes. review: Rudyard Kipling's PUCK OF POOK'S HILL appeared in 1906. Its prose "yarns" are placed in southeastern England, East Sussex, near "Batesman's," Kipling's home, which was set in an estate of 300 acres enlarged for maximum privacy. In the course of the story-telling, we learn from ancient fairy Puck himself that Pook's Hill means Puck's Hill. To two young children, Una and Dan, sister and brother, Puck conjures up or himself plays the parts of earlier inhabitants of Sussex. In non-chronological order of presentation we meet and hear (1) tales about Saxons before the Norman
Conquest of 1066,
(2) then of Normans becoming masters of Sussex. (3) A Danish longboat takes Norman knight Sir Richard Dalyngridge and his Saxon friend Hugh on a successful voyage for gold into west Africa. A powerful, magic sword is also introduced and plays a role. (4) We then move back in time to around the year 1100. (5) We next go even farther back -- to 4th Century Rome and the rise and fall of the fortunes of a young centurion named Parnesius. His family had been resident in Britain for over two centuries. Sent to Hadrian's wall, he and a Roman fellow Centurion Pertinax then become close to a Pictish prince north of the wall. As general Magnus Maximus takes up arms against the young Gratian, Emperor of the West, he strips the Wall of troops (6) while leaving Parnesius and Pertinax to hold off both Picts and invading Norsemen. (7) The two children Dan and Una, under Puck's guidance, are then brought forward to the late 1400s for a tale of explorer Sebastian Cabot outwitting wily local Sussex cannon makers. (8) A bit later, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, myriads of fairies all around Britain panic. For these people of the Hills are suddenly regarded as forbidden Catholic "images." They succeed in persuading a seer woman to let her two sons, one blind, the other mute, row them to nearby France where humans, at least for a while, remain more welcoming of the Little People. (9) Finally, a Jewish physician and moneylender named Kadmiel tells how lack of gold forced King John to cede power to the barons and to the people of England at Runymede in 1215. We learn at last what happened to the large amount of gold brought back from Africa and hidden centuries earlier by a Norman knight and a Saxon noble. PUCK OF POOK'S HILL also contains 15 or so poems by Kipling. They function as a kind of chorus for the narratives. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that PUCK OF POOK'S HILL was the source of a beloved song that I first heard and memorized with no context around age 12 in Shreveport on a 33 1/3 rpm recording of Kipling's poems set to music. I speak of "A Smugglers' Song" which begins, "If You wake at midnight, and hear a
horses's feet,
Don't go drawing back the blind or looking in the street." My edition of PUCK OF POOK'S HILL lacks a map of Sussex or southeastern England. Ditto glossary or end notes. Kipling limns his local landscape in loving detail with generous dollops of local speech patterns and vocabulary. One way or another you will therefore have to learn old Roman names for Sussex places, also the Weald (forest), the Downs, terminology relating to growing and processing hops, Bath Oliver (a cracker eaten with cheese) and such like. But all this is a small price to pay for imagining this loving recreation of England (and a bit of Scotland) down through the centuries. -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/books/376958446.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 09/17/2011 name of review: The Last Years of Roman Britain rating: * * * * review: On a hot summer's day in 1900, 34-year old world famous author Rudyard Kipling and his Vermont-born wife Carrie were house hunting. They fell in love at first sight with a Tudor/Stuart era home called Bateman's in southeastern England's county Sussex, situated in the valley of the tiny river Dudwell. A year later the Kiplings bought Bateman's. Seeking privacy from his growing body of fans, Rudyard then systematically bought up more and more surrounding farms, turned a grain mill into a generating station, took up beekeeping and applied agricultural ideas from his great chum Cecil Rhodes -- derived during annual steamer visits by the family to the area near Capetown, South Africa. Rudyard Kipling immersed himself in all the nearby sights: ruins of a 4th Century Roman camp, a Norman castle, woods, swamps and hills. He learned the lore of the Old Things and Fairies of Sussex. Kipling became as enamored of his beloved Bateman's (now a national museum) as Sir Walter Scott before him had been of Abbotsford, 40 miles southeast of Edinburgh. Both men loved their lands and wrote in affectionate and imaginative detail about where they and their families lived. In 1906 Rudyard Kipling published the first of two books about his part of Sussex. Both were children's books, laying out tales and poems from prehistoric days into nearly modern times. The first was PUCK OF POOK'S HILL. The next year Kipling won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He had rooted his original yarns in real-life mini-adventures of his two children in local forests and on neighborhood rivers and hills. Kipling the writer is famous for writing of places he had seen in person or been told about by eyewitnesses to what they then told Rudyard. A hint of his two future books about England he wrote to a friend: "The
Old Things of our Valley glided into every aspect of our outdoor works.
Earth, Air, Water and People had been – I saw it at last – in full
conspiracy to give me ten times as much as I could compass, even if I
wrote a complete history of England, as that might have touched or
reached our Valley."
Puck, the all but immortal last remaining fairy in England, is unwittingly conjured by two young children, siblings Una and Dan Reynolds, as they repeat three times a line from a shortened version they are rehearsing outdoors of scenes from Shakespeare's MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. Thereafter Puck evokes or impersonates historical or imagined personages (including the explorer Sebastian Cabot) who were once active near the Kiplings' Bateman's estate. First to appear before Dan and Una is Weland, once a minor god in the service of Thor, brought to Sussex by Norsemen. After more than a thousand years being worshipped, he must work for pennies shoeing horses for local farmers. Only when someone actually thanks Weland can he be released to return to Valhalla. A young Saxon named Hugh brings this about shortly before the 1066 invasion of Sussex by William the Conqueror and his Norman knights. A grateful Weland then makes a magical singing sword for Hugh. The victorious Norman knight who is given Hugh's land, is captured by Danes who take him and Hugh on a treasure-seeking expedition far down the coast of West Africa. There, having fought off murderous gorillas, the long boat brings the two Britons with a vast treasure back to Sussex where the Norsemen deposit the two friends. Like others, they are in the process of ceasing to be, respectively, Saxon or Norman, but are becoming English. I will mention only one other among the several sets of related historical tales and verse, and dwell briefly on it to give you a flavor of how Kipling proceeds throughout PUCK OF POOK'S HILL. Once again two young friends cooperate in great deeds. Both are Roman soldiers active in the late 300s A.D. and towards the time when the last legions were deliberately withdrawn from Britain in the early 400s. The mixture of three prose stories and several poems is called "A Centurion of the Thirtieth." One day Una, while waiting for Dan to complete his Latin lesson, is romping alone on a hillside, reciting McCaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome." Una without aiming fires off her sling shot into a copse. It strikes Parnesius, a young Roman in colorful armor who had heard of the siblings from a "Faun" named Puck. Over some days the children learn the history and adventures of Parnesius. For generations -- over 400 years -- his family had lived in an estate on the south side of Vectis (the Isle of Wight), an island visible on a clear day from the nearby east Sussex Downs. It turns out that Parnesius's father is an old comrade in arms of the Roman general for Britain, Magnus Maximus. Maximus makes Parnesius a centurion and sends him a 20 days march north to Hadrian's Wall. There he is met by the centurion posted next to him facing north across the wall, Pertinax, who had been there two years already. They become friends and take frequent hunting leaves north of the wall among hostile but not very formidable Picts. A Pict prince befriends the two young Romans,who are both worshippers of Mithras. Later as Scandinavians attack, Parnesius spares the life of a leader of the Norseman, because he is a fellow believer in Mithras. Eventually Magnus Maximus is recognized as Emperor of a huge part of the Western Roman Empire but ultimately overreaches and is defeated in battle and executed. Emperor Theodosius then sends two legions to the Wall, who save its nearly over run garrison and offers commands of two legions to valiant Parnesius and Pertinax. But they accept the second option, to receive a Triumph and retire in peace to their homes. The broader lesson of Kipling's PUCK OF POOK'S HILL may be simply that all of us would find treasures if only we walked about outside our homes and looked around, drank in the air and sights and dug for the geology, human happenings and local memories and lore that preceded our own brief sojourn in these parts. -OOO- http://community.cafelibri.com/reviews/book/User Review-Puck_of_Pook_s_Hill_Rudyard _Kipling_Centenary_Editions_-74-1647700-213447 -The_Last_Years_of_Roman_Britain.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (3) bn.com 09/18/2011 title of review: "And so was England born!" rating: * * * * review: Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) issued PUCK OF POOK'S HILL in 1906. Next year he won the Nobel Prize for literature. Coincidence? Maybe not. I have just read PUCK OF POOK's HILL. I knew and have been singing since age 12 "A Smuggler's Song." I knew it was by Kipling. But I did not know that it was from PUCK OF POOK'S HILL. The book as a whole slumbered for nearly eight decades without me taking notice. Was it Puck who made me open the book? I do not own a critical edition of PUCK OF POOK'S HILL, nor any learned monographs on its provenance, symbolism and such like. But I have detected at least three ways of reading this 1906 collection about southeastern England and the young brother and sister to whom its tales were told by long dead characters summoned back to memory by England's last faun or fairy or Old Thing -- named Puck. (1) Boy, girls, adults can at the most
obvious level read these yarns of east Sussex County England as
adventure tales. Thus a onetime minor Norse god named Weland cannot
return to Valhalla till a mortal thanks him for a good deed. When that
occurs, Weland makes a singing sword for young Hugh, a Saxon nobleman
of the county. Then Hugh and a Norman knight who was given Hugh's
estates after the Conquest of 1066, are captured by Norse pirates,
become friends of Captain and crew, and sail together to the Gorilla
Coast of West Africa where they amass huge quantites of gold. And on
and on the stories spin their way into our imaginations.
(2) Something inexplicably clicks in the historical imagination of the two young siblings, Dan and Una Reynolds. Their simplest hobbies, classroom activities, their reading somehow trigger deep insights into the Downs, Wealds, marshes, history of smugglers and pre-Protestant folklore of their small part of England. As the siblings rehearse together outdoors a scene from MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM on midsummer's eve, they blunder into a formula that brings before them no less than Puck, England's last preternatural little person or fairy. Wandering by herself on a hill reciting Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome" near her home, Una randomly shoots a pellet from her catapult/slingshot into a thicket. It strikes a fully armored Roman soldier named Parnesius whom Puck had told of the Reynolds children. They learn that his family had lived for 400 years on Vectis/Isle of Wight, visible from the nearby Downs. (3) What is the agent that slowly synthesizes for Dan and Una the wondrous world of Sussex? Within miles of their home is an ancient mill, a prehistoric forge once used by Roman legions, a 4th Century Fort of Britannia's Saxon Shore, a Norman castle, a 76-year old hedger/ditch digger whose ancestors were there 20 generations ago. That synthesizing agent is Puck, Shakespeare's Puck. As "Puck's Song" puts it: "Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,/And so was England born!" Today, mayhap, if only we can find the right formula, there is a Puck invisibly waiting in our own back yard to do the for us what he did for Dan and Una. Two hours walk from my home in the Blue Ridge Mountains are remains of an 8,000 year old proto-Cherokee Indian village. Two hours drive northwest of here Cherokee-reared Sam Houston taught youngsters Greek and Latin. Later he told an artist to "paint me as Marius," the famous Roman general. Need I add: and on and on? Puck, thou shouldst be living at this hour! And perhaps you are. -OOO- http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/review .aspx?reviewid=1865128 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 09/20/2011 title of review: "All people can be wise by reading of books" rating: * * * * review: PUCK OF POOK'S HILL is a grand, happy book for boys and girls. It shows that good things can happen to youngsters who read widely. "All people can be wise by reading of books" (it says in "The Knights of the Joyous Venture"). That is especially true for bright, imaginative young siblings like Una and Dan Reynolds of Sussex, England. From the Downs near their home they can behold the Isle of Wight. in PUCK OF POOK'S HILL Dan and Una learn that in Roman days that island was called Vectis. Thanks to their guide Puck, England's last remaining fairy or Old Thing or Faun or Hill Person, the brother and sister meet Parnesius, a Roman centurion whose family had lived on nearby Vectis for four centuries. Parnesius tells the children what it was like growing up in an affectionate Pagan Roman British family (remarkably like that of Una and Dan). He also tells them of his father's old comrade in arms, Magnus Maximus, who became Emperor of a large part of the Western Empire before his reach exceeded his grasp and he was defeated by the Eastern Emperor Theodosius. Parnesius remembers how Maximus sent him with 30 men on a 20-days march north to the Wall of Hadrian, to guard Britain against the Picts and the Norsemen. There Parnesius became best friend of another young centurion Pertinax of Gaul. Together they hunted north of the wall, mentored and protected by a Pictish prince, who worked reluctantly with Maximus to hold back the sea-faring Norsemen. Lucky for Una and Dan that they study Latin, rehearse fairy scenes from Shakespeare's MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, read Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome" and are thereby able to look around their neighborhood with eyes open to history and lore! They can walk to what is left of a 4th century Roman fortress, stroll about the grounds of a Norman castle, make friends with an old man whose ancestors have lived for 30 generations in their valley. They learn that not just Sussex but all of England has been put together by successive civilizations, and have not seen the last of what the future will bring. Over and over again Puck introduces them to long-gone knights, an explorer like Sebastian Cabot and to examples of how England was created when Normans married Saxons and learned the stubborn staying power of customs and law among those Saxons. And before the Saxons and Norman there had been Britons, Romans and others. And later came Smugglers. PUCK OF POOK'S HILL is mostly a collection of prose narratives. But a surprisingly large number of poems act as a Greek chorus to show the historical and cultural materials in a new light. Dan and Una see Old Sussex come to life again. Its marshes, its proximity to France, once offered great possibilitiies for profitable trade. "A Smugglers' Song" puts it this way: "If you wake at midnight, and hear a
horse's feet,'
Don't go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street.' Them that ask no questions isn't told a lie. Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by! 'Five and twenty ponies, Trotting through the dark -- 'Brandy for the Parson,' 'Baccy for the Clerk;' Laces for a lady, letters for a spy, 'And watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!' * * *' If you meet King George's men, dressed in blue and red,' You be careful what you say, and mindful what is said. 'If they call you "pretty maid," and chuck you 'neath the chin,' Don't you tell where no one is, nor yet where no one's been!" * * * There are depths to PUCK OF POOK'S HILL that require more than one reading to plumb. But even a quick initial romp through its pages will leave you singing for joy. What if you look outside your own window? Might you not stumble, as did Una and Dan, on ways to make Shakespeare's Puck appear and help you unpeel the layers of lore that made your place your place? -OOO- http://www.amazon.com/Puck-Pooks-Hill-Rudyard-Kipling/ dp/0755117336/ref=sr_1_20?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid= 1315302107&sr=1-20 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com 09/21/2011 Review Title: "Be still ... I think for England." Product Rating: PROS: Story-telling unpeels the layers of legend and history embedded in one English valley. CONS: Assumes considerable knowledge of English geography and history. No maps. BOTTOM LINE: Unless you are a very well informed Briton, read PUCK OF POOK'S HILL in a scholarly edition with good backgrounders, maps and notes. Then let Puck be your guide! aohcapablanca's Full Review: Are you set in your ways in reviewing books? I am in mine, I fear. -- (1) For the past couple of years, I have written five reviews of each book that I think well enough of to read to its very end. The first review cuts through the underbrush, is big picture, from memory, without consulting my 3" X 5" cards. After the fifth and final effort, I judge that I know the book reasonably well. -- (2) When I finish a first reading of Book A, I immediately set to rereading it with the help of my notes. -- (3) I may at that time be half-way through a first reading of and-note taking on Book B; I immediately pick up the pace with B to be able to review it soon after my five reviews of Book A. -- (4) At the same time I begin to read Book C. -- (5) I also lay out in rough chronological order the next three or four books for imminent reading (D, E, F, etc.) That habit just described works reasonably well, unless I start reading a monstrously long, dull book like Andrew Rawnsley's first of two studies of the New Labour of Britain's Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Such books take considerable joy out of my reading and tend to force me out of my reviewing pattern, rut, comfort zone or whatever you might choose to call the way I review books. The pace of reviewing slows. There are benefits that some might not suspect, to being involved in three or four books almost simultaneously. The method spins off pleasant unintended sometimes mutually reinforcing by-products of information, slants or viewpoints. This happened to me while preparing to review Rudyard Kipling's PUCK OF POOK'S HILL. This happy, informative book of literary geography for children shows how successive waves of immigrants first invade then are absorbed by England (Romans, Saxon, Normans, et al.), learn old or create new composite languages, adapt their ruling style to the customs of the ruled, and such like. PUCK OF POOK'S HILL, among other things, is a tale of new intra-human CIVILIZATIONS colliding with and then succeeding to old ones. A week or so after I send this review up to epinions, I expect to send in one on John Wyndham's sci-fi novel of 1957, THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS -- a tale of possibly avoidable war to the death between a human and a non-human SPECIES within one sleepy English village. One story invites comparison with the other. Also, not long ago, I also read and reviewed Kipling's STALKY & CO. There, in yarn after yarn three British schoolboys take sometimes cruel revenge for wrongs committed by boarding school staff or fellow students by (a) letting the punishment clearly fit the
crime
and (b) leaving no way their enemies can start a proper endless cycle of feuding and counter-retaliations. I plan to illustrate this Kiplingesque trait below in two of the ten interlocking prose and verse tales of PUCK OF POOK'S HILL. In his early 30s, Rudyard Kipling and his American wife bought their "dream home" in Sussex, southeastern England not far from the French coast. Their children grew up there exploring nearby Roman and Norman ruins, being taught by books, parents and working class people the lore and history of that part of Britain. PUCK OF POOK'S HILL shows the rural, backwater Sussex that Rudyard Kipling shared with his children. Fictional siblings Dan and Una Reynolds are fortunate enough one midsummer's eve to conjure up England's last remaining Fairy, Faun, Man of the Hills or Woods Spirit, Puck aka Robin Goodfellow. This is Shakespeare's Puck, evoked by Una and Dan as they practice outdoors a scene from MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. Genial Puck, in alliance with their home schooled classes in Latin, literature, geography and history, brings their valley alive. The children meet Weland, a minor Norse god who eventually came down in the world and had to work for a living forging horseshoes for local farmers. Una mistakenly hits with a shot from her catapult/slingshot a Roman centurion whose family had lived on nearby Vectis/Isle of Wight for 400 years and who was himself stationed on Hadrian's Wall to fight Picts and Saxons. The same is true of selected Saxons and Normans who gradually -- through marriages, language-learning and the like -- create England after Duke William's invasion of 1066. Gold protected by African gorillas played a role in wresting Magna Carta from King John -- a document later called "The Law" by Puck. The explorer Sebastian Cabot had cannons for King Henry's ships cast in the valley of Una and Dan. And later the marshes of east Sussex were for many decades dominated by smugglers of goods from France. And on and on. Story by story Puck unpeels the layers of turn of the 19th Century England for two young disciples who cannot get enough. The STALKY & CO. revenge patterns mentioned above are fully displayed in "Old Men at Pevensey" and in "Hal o' the Draft." In the latter, Sebastian Cabot and a renowned church architect without honor in his home community foil a plot by a dread Scottish pirate and local minor criminals to steal cannons intended for King George. In the former tale, a Norman baron, de Aquila, and two of his knights (one Norman with a Saxon wife, the other a Saxon with singing sword made in gratitude by the Norse demi-god Weland) use clever wiles to keep post-1066 England free from fresh Norman invasions. Gold earlier won by the two knights in battles on west Africa's Gorilla Coast plays its part in keeping England England. There is nothing that de Aquila will not do to safeguard the newly emerging English culture. The way he punishes one enemy and rewards another is well thought out case by case and is exemplified in his command, "Be still ... I think for England." PUCK OF POOK'S HILL is a model of how to weave fiction and fact to make local history and geography come alive for imaginative young children and readers young and old. And who but clever Puck could pull together so many seemingly unrelated stories? "'Well,' said Puck calmly, 'what did you
think of it? Weland gave the Sword! The Sword gave the Treasure, and
the Treasure gave the Law. It's as natural as an oak growing.'"
-OOO- Recommended: Yes http://www.epinions.com/review/Puck_of_Pook_s_Hill _by_Rudyard_Kipling/content_564596543108 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/kipling_puck.html |