Episode 285: The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, “Mowgli’s Brothers”

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast: Episode 285 – "Mowgli’s Brothers" from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book

Released on July 15, 2025

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Introduction to "Mowgli’s Brothers"

In Episode 285 of The Literary Life Podcast, hosts Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks, along with lifelong reader Cindy Rollins, delve deep into Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, specifically focusing on the story "Mowgli’s Brothers." This episode offers a comprehensive literary analysis, exploring the rich themes, character dynamics, and cultural contexts that make Kipling’s work a timeless piece of literature.

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Hosts’ Personal Connections and Backgrounds

Angelina Stanford begins by sharing her long hiatus from reading Kipling, explaining how negative school experiences with Captains Courageous led her to distance herself from his works for over four decades. This personal revelation sets the stage for her newfound appreciation and redemption of Kipling’s The Jungle Book.

Cindy Rollins discusses her extensive familiarity with Kipling, highlighting her family's engagement with his poetry and stories. Growing up with a collection of Kipling’s poems and reading his tales to her sons has fostered a deep-seated respect and love for his literary contributions.

Thomas Banks complements the discussion by recounting his own interactions with Kipling’s works, including memories of listening to recordings of The Jungle Book in his youth and his ongoing appreciation for Kipling’s ability to craft compelling narratives.

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Literary Significance of "Mowgli’s Brothers"

The trio explores "Mowgli’s Brothers" as a quintessential beast fable, a genre deeply rooted in ancient literary traditions such as the Panchatantra and Buddhist Yataka tales. Angelina emphasizes the importance of understanding the story within its mythic framework:

"Reading Kipling’s work without modern assumptions allows us to engage with the stories as they were intended, rather than projecting our contemporary biases onto them." (17:03)

Thomas Banks adds that Kipling’s narratives often transcend simple storytelling, embodying universal archetypes and moral lessons akin to those found in traditional myths.

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Themes and Analysis

Duality and Identity

A central theme discussed is Mowgli’s dual identity as both human and part of the jungle community. This duality is symbolized through his nickname, "Frog," representing his ability to exist in two distinct worlds:

"Frogs are dual-natured animals because they can live on both water and land. They are recognizing that he is of two worlds and doesn't fit into either one." (64:00)

This duality mirrors mythical figures like Moses and Hercules, highlighting Mowgli’s struggle with belonging and destiny.

Law and Order vs. Chaos

The hosts analyze the depiction of the jungle as a microcosm with its own laws and order, contrasting it with the potential chaos brought by external threats:

"The law of the jungle, which never orders anything without a reason, forbids every beast to eat man except when he is killing, to show his children how to kill, and then he must hunt outside the hunting grounds of his pack tribe." (58:26)

This rigid structure underscores the precarious balance between civilization and nature, emphasizing the delicate order that Mowgli must navigate.

Leadership and Betrayal

Shere Khan, the antagonist, embodies the threat of disorder and the misuse of power. His manipulative tactics and ambition to kill Mowgli introduce themes of betrayal and the fragility of trust within the jungle community:

"Shere Khan is a bully, working behind the scenes, plotting to kill Mowgli. He is a worm tongue, stealing power slowly through whispers." (60:35)

This portrayal serves as a critique of authoritarianism and the dangers of unchecked ambition.

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Kipling’s Reputation and Modern Perspectives

The conversation shifts to Kipling’s complex legacy, addressing the modern criticisms of his work as imperialist propaganda. Angelina cites C.S. Lewis to argue that Kipling’s narratives are often misinterpreted when viewed solely through the lens of British imperialism:

"Kipling is more interested in the people who do the unglamorous jobs that are necessary to make the world work. Nay, it is a love letter to India, pulling from the literary tradition of British India with genuine affection." (37:56)

Thomas Banks supports this view by referencing George Orwell’s appreciation of Kipling, suggesting that critiques labeling him as a proto-fascist are unfounded:

"Even George Orwell, whose politics were very different from Kipling's, wrote of him appreciatively, saying it was wrong-headed to stereotype him." (78:22)

The hosts emphasize the importance of separating historical context from literary merit, advocating for a nuanced appreciation of Kipling’s contributions.

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Character and Plot Dynamics in "Mowgli’s Brothers"

Mowgli’s Journey

Mowgli’s exile and eventual confrontation with Shere Khan serve as pivotal moments in his coming-of-age story. The discussion highlights how Mowgli's development is intertwined with his acceptance of responsibility and his evolving identity:

"Mowgli cannot just hang out with the wolves forever; he must embrace his human side and fulfill his destiny." (69:15)

Supporting Characters

Baloo and Bagheera act as mentors, guiding Mowgli through his challenges. The hosts note Baloo’s dignified portrayal versus the more playful Disney adaptation, appreciating the depth Kipling gives to these characters:

"Baloo is more dignified and wise, a stark contrast to the clownish version in Disney's portrayal." (21:11)

Akilah, the mother wolf, exemplifies strength and maternal instinct, deeply caring for Mowgli and willing to sacrifice herself for his safety:

"Akilah prepares to fight to protect Mowgli, demonstrating unwavering loyalty and strength." (52:19)

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Mythic Elements and Symbolism

The podcast delves into the mythic structures within "Mowgli’s Brothers," drawing parallels with classic myths and fables:

• Hero of Mysterious Origin: Mowgli’s unknown lineage and survival in the wild echo legendary heroes like Romulus and Remus.
• Dual Nature: Represented by Mowgli’s nickname "Frog," symbolizing his connection to both humans and the jungle.
• Predestined Fate: Mowgli’s prophesied role in confronting Shere Khan aligns with mythic heroes destined for greatness.

Angelina Stanford connects these elements to broader literary traditions, enhancing the understanding of Kipling’s intent:

"Mowgli is an interloper, a character torn between two worlds, embodying the struggle of identity and belonging." (51:04)

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Conclusion and Final Thoughts

In wrapping up, the hosts encourage listeners to engage with Kipling’s works beyond surface-level interpretations. They advocate for a deeper literary exploration that acknowledges historical contexts without dismissing the enduring value of his storytelling.

Thomas Banks suggests that new readers, especially those unfamiliar with Kipling, might find The Jungle Book an accessible entry point into his literary universe, complemented by his poetry.

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Notable Quotes

1. Angelina Stanford on Reading Without Bias:

   "Reading Kipling’s work without modern assumptions allows us to engage with the stories as they were intended, rather than projecting our contemporary biases onto them." (17:03)

2. C.S. Lewis via Angelina:

   "If we universalize these attitudes as though they were platonic realities... we turn history into a mirror of significance to us only." (19:49)

3. Thomas Banks on Mythic Structure:

   "Mowgli cannot just hang out with the wolves forever; he must embrace his human side and fulfill his destiny." (69:15)

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Timeline Highlights

• 00:18 – Introduction to the podcast and hosts.
• 03:07 – Cindy Rollins shares personal updates and background.
• 14:54 – Discussion on commonplace quotes and their significance.
• 30:00 – Detailed exploration of Rudyard Kipling’s life and influences.
• 37:56 – C.S. Lewis’s perspective on Kipling’s imperialism.
• 58:26 – Analysis of the law of the jungle and its implications.
• 69:15 – Mowgli’s destiny and coming-of-age themes.
• 78:22 – Modern perspectives on Kipling’s reputation.
• 85:48 – Conclusion and final reflections.

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Note: The episode concludes with a satirical poem by Thomas Banks, offering a humorous take on Kipling’s style, further showcasing the hosts' deep engagement with the literary material.

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Further Resources

• Cindy Rollins: Morning Time for Moms
• Angelina and Thomas Banks: House of Humane Letters
• Supplementary Reading: The Well Read Poem podcast with poet Thomas Banks.

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For a complete understanding and appreciation of the discussions, listening to the full episode is recommended.

Transcript

[Angelina Stanford]

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the science, skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and I am here with my life partner in crime, the increasingly transparent Mr. Banks.

[Thomas Banks]

Thoroughly transparent.

[Angelina Stanford]

Thoroughly transparent. And we are today in the presence of someone who is the opposite of transparent. Well, maybe. Maybe because she has a glow. There's. There's a. She's not transparent. What's the word I'm looking for? The radiant. The radiant. And I feel like I'm a Charlotte.

[Cindy Rollins]

I do have a window behind me shining. So it does give me some radiant.

[Angelina Stanford]

If I wasn't building up the suspense enough. You heard her voice. Today marks the return of the blonde bombshell herself, the Farrah Fawcett of Charlotte Mason, Cindy Beach Girl Rollins. I feel like. Now, are you ready to rumble with that introduction?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, I am. And I'm actually considering just going gray, so I may be something else.

[Angelina Stanford]

You heard it here first, folks. The blonde bombshell might become the gray goose.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, there we go.

[Angelina Stanford]

I don't know.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'll be Mother Goose. No, I really think that would be really horrible.

[Angelina Stanford]

So Cindy has very graciously agreed to take a break from her break, take a short mini sabbatical from her sabbatical, and join us for this series on Rudyard Kipling's the Jungle Book. Cindy, everyone has missed you, and why don't you catch us up? What's been going on? And I mean, obviously you have your other podcast that you've been working on and you Summer discipleship course, but catch us up. Everyone's missed you.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, the biggest thing that happened in my life, well, there were several big things that all converged at once. So it's been a busy year. But our son in January, who had two little girls, ended up having twin boys. And because my husband Tim was retiring on disability, all of a sudden we woke up one day and we thought, oh, we can go wherever we want to Go. And our son said, we need help with these twins. Please come help us. So it's like all hands on deck with the twins. It's like her parents are here, we're here. It's just. It's a lot of work, but it's been really, truly wonderful. So we moved to Kentucky, so we live in the Bluegrass, and it is gorgeous. We have this neighborhood where there's fields on all sides of our neighborhood, and there's horses and cows and lots of things that make you sneeze and your eyes water and that sort of thing, but otherwise, it's. It's been very, very nice.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, that's huge. You move to another state. More grandkids. Of course, part of the reason that you wanted to take the sabbatical in the first place was to have more time for your grandchildren. And so, yeah, we always were in awe of how much time you spent on the road traveling to other states to make sure you never miss a dance recital or awards ceremony at the end of school. Like, you.

[Thomas Banks]

You.

[Angelina Stanford]

You and your miles, man. That's how you get all those audiobooks in. So.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, well, this year I haven't had that, so my reading count is very low this year. It's the lowest it's been probably since I had kids, but it's just really hard to move and also hold TV all the time and read.

[Thomas Banks]

I think that's a very, very good excuse. Yes. I remember when. Yeah, when we moved also, my. My reading count definitely dropped that year.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think it's just. Yeah, it just wears you out in all these ways. But. Yeah, so you're more centrally located to all the grandkids now, though, right?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. So we have eight in this area. So it's been Sunday afternoon. Ice cream has been a lot of fun in my house, so it's.

[Angelina Stanford]

That is fantastic. No. Yeah, no, we're. We're. We're thrilled for you and the move and have been really excited during this whole process for you.

[Thomas Banks]

You said you're in horse country. Are you. Have you ever gone to the Kentucky Derby? And if not, would you ever consider doing so?

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, yeah, I hope to do that. My son has gone several times, and of course, in. In Lexington, they were near where we live. They have Keeneland, which is a big racehorse and race racetrack. And then I. And then the Derby is the big thing in Louisville. But I have not been. I have been to Keeneland before. They have. You can go in the mornings when they're training the horses and watch them, and they open it up to the public. And it's a lot of fun to just go early, 6 o' clock in the morning, 7 o' clock with your toddlers who won't sleep anyway and watch the horses.

[Thomas Banks]

That sounds like a grand time.

[Angelina Stanford]

So in addition to all of that though, I mean I seriously, we don't even know how you, how you, how you do all that you do. So in addition to all of that, you're still plugging right along with your business and you've got yet another back to school conference coming up. Tell us about that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, so we're going to have something annual, I think seventh annual back to school conference. It's this year. I'm really excited about the title. It's called Educating the the Radical Freedom of a Charlotte Mason Education. We have, I've opted for very real life speakers who are going to speak honestly. People who have used Charlotte Mason and that know what you can get away with and what you can't get away with. And so our speakers are. Our main speaker is Caitlin Beecham and that would be Lynn Bruce's daughter. Caitlin just has such a down to earth kind of natural, organic way of approaching Charlotte Mason as a second generation Charlotte Mason educator. So she's so wise for her years. And we just love when she talks. We just.

[Angelina Stanford]

I was really excited when I saw that she was gonna be your main speaker.

[Cindy Rollins]

I mean every. I'm always quoting her from just the couple talks she's already given in the past with us. I'm still quoting from those talks. So that's going to be really good. We have my aide de camp, Dawn Duran will be speaking. Jamie Marstil will be speaking. Jamie's so good about the high school years. I mean, she just really caught the gist of that. And Kay Pelham, who is very, very good at understanding Charlotte Ma and the principles. And then I will be speaking on what it means to have freedom when we're having a Charlotte Mason atmospheric discipline in life in our home. So we're very proud of these back to school conferences and we're expecting this to be just very life giving. And if you have friends who are thinking about Charlotte Mason and are unsure, this might be the conference to send them to.

[Angelina Stanford]

What are the dates for that?

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, it is July 30th through August 2nd. We will have four days, five speakers, five speech talks. And you can go to my website, morningtimeformoms.com and look up how to sign up and be a part of it.

[Angelina Stanford]

I was also very excited that Kay is going to be Speaking Kay Pelham, of course, a graduate of the House of Humane Letters Literary Fellowship program. And Kay is just so, she's just so rock solid. She has so much wisdom.

[Cindy Rollins]

She does. She's. She's such a thinker. And for her to be able to organize her thoughts and get out there and share them, I think it will be. I've already know some of the things she's going to talk about, and I'm.

[Angelina Stanford]

Excited because I personally know all of your speakers. I'm chuckling to myself that this is almost like the deliberately anti influencer conference.

[Cindy Rollins]

Like it is deliberately anti influencer. It is absolutely. That we thought about it. Do we go for a big name speaker? Do we find someone? And I thought, I really, really wanted this to be a practical and philosophical. You know, you can't get away from the philosophical with Charlotte Mason. But you also need some, you know, a lot of moms nowadays really need some practical help. And I wanted it to be both. And I felt like this was the way to go.

[Angelina Stanford]

Absolutely. That's going to be an awesome conference. And anybody who's listening, thinking, wait, didn't, didn't Angelina and Cindy used to do this conference together? Yes, we used to do both conferences together, the Literary Life Conference and the Back to School Conference. But as Cindy and I like to joke, we became victims of our own success. We. For a long time, we were able to do our businesses together, but we just grew and grew and we held on for so long. Cindy did.

[Cindy Rollins]

And. Yeah, it's absolutely just. It's been great for me to see the way the Literary Life Conference has morphed and grown and, and it takes a lot of pressure off me not to have to speak there because I, you know, it's just, it's just great to see the speakers you do have. So I think it's been like a pruning that's caused growth in both directions.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, it really has been very good for both of us and for both of our businesses. But it was still sad because those, those early years when it was me and you, even before Mr. Banks was on the podcast and we were just grinding it all out together or before I. Well, it was. Yeah, before we sold out and had nepotism. But no, that was such a special time. And I, I'm. Yeah, I loved all those years. I loved all the conferences we did together, but it just, it was becoming impossible even to just figure out a day we could podcast together because we were so busy and.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. Our schedules, Our schedules.

[Angelina Stanford]

I know our schedule. And as much as I love the back to school conference and loved speaking there, and honestly think some of the best talks I ever gave, I gave for your conference.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, you did?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, that once we decided I wasn't going to do it anymore and you weren't going to do mine, I felt so much relief because I have to. I do my fellowship retreat right before that and it was so hard to prep for that and then to turn around and write a conference talk. So we're still good friends. Whatever. Whatever the rumors might be. There's been no falling out. We still are very much in each other's lives. Just business wise. We. We had to separate a few things just because we were. We were growing and it. Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

It was just getting all tangled up in different directions and it needed to be like the strings needed to be.

[Angelina Stanford]

It was getting harder and harder to tend our gardens because.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So blended together. But, oh, I. I love seeing everything you've got going on and so anyway, yes. We're glad to have you back on the podcast to talk about the Jungle Book.

[Cindy Rollins]

What are you doing right now? So you. I'm. I'm signed up for one of your classes, the Jason Baxter poetry. I couldn't resist that. But that's all in July. But you have other things coming, right?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. So we've got Jason's class, which will be Mondays in July. So if you're catching on to that late. No problem. You can. You can easily get caught up to that and jump in. We had the first class last night and it was. It was fantastic. It was fantastic. And he's just so great, so I already forgot what that one's called. How to Read Poetry.

[Thomas Banks]

How do you call him? Like C.S. lewis.

[Cindy Rollins]

C.S.

[Angelina Stanford]

Lewis and fall in Love with Poetry. Yeah. So that was really good. I finished my summer class on Harry Potter, which I honestly think is some of the best work I've ever done, and just killed me. So I'm glad. I'm glad it's over because basically I had to prepare. I prepared like six Comfort Talk conference talks for that. For that class I did something I had never done before, but it was very well received and I'm really proud of it. And you just finished up Mr. Banks?

[Thomas Banks]

I just finished up a Victorian Lives class. Yeah. Which was. It was a lot of fun for me. It was a lot of fun.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, everybody's raving about it, so I think you did a great job with that. And then coming up a class we're very excited about August 4th through August 8th. Addison Hornsher is going to be giving us her much demanded mini class on Alice in Wonderland and through the Looking Glass. And that. That she, last January had her webinar on Alice and Lewis Carroll, which just absolutely blew everyone's mind and people were begging for more.

[Thomas Banks]

And that really amazed me. I mean, I wasn't surprised that she did well, but, like, to be that young and be able to teach with that kind of authority.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, well, she's very gifted. She's very gifted and she did fantastically. I officially, I was in there with her, but I could see right away she. She did not need me. She was doing all the heavy lifting herself. And Lewis Carroll is. He's just so important. You know, the whole thing started with we read in a Northrop Fry book where he says just kind of offhandedly, well, Alice is at the heart of the literary tradition. And we were just like, what? How? You don't understand? And so that started the rabbit trail. And so in our. In trying to answer that question for ourselves, it really did just blow up the whole literary tradition for us. And. And yeah, so we made the decision to start presenting some of this stuff. But we're really. We're really excited about that. So, yeah, for Cindy stuff, go check her [e-mail] and if you want to see our summer schedule and, you know, all of our classes are recorded, so if you're like, wait, I missed the Harry Potter class, not a problem. You can grab [e-mail] all right. We were joking before we started recording that we might not even remember how to do a podcast anymore. So, Cindy, would you. Do you have a commonplace quote to share before we officially jump in with Kips?

[Cindy Rollins]

I do. I have a. I've Mr.

[Angelina Stanford]

Commonplace quotes. I want you to know that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, yeah, well, I haven't been compiling them as diligently like the like with the podcast in mind. So it's. It was like, oh, no, I've got to start thinking like that again. Which I found the best quotes when I was doing that, but I found one yesterday. Just accidentally ran across one when I was preparing for my talk at our summer discipleship. I was using this book, Seeking God by Esther de Waal. And Esther, this is the Way of St. Benedict.

[Angelina Stanford]

We.

[Cindy Rollins]

We talked a little bit about community in the summer class. Don't. We did not talk about. We didn't say how to have the perfect community. We just like, we were the anti community kind of summer class where we just said, you know, how do. How do sinners interact with one another. But The Rule of St. Benedict really goes along well with that because he, of course, was talking about how to live together with each other. But in this particular quote from Esther de Waal, talking about Benedict, she said, he assumes that the whole of the body, and thus the whole of the person, is engaged in the act of reading. Words are tasted to release their full flavor, weighed in order to sound the full depths of their meaning. It is not only that it was customary to pronounce the words with the lips in a low tone so that they were heard as well as seen. They were also learnt by heart in the fullest sense of that phrase, which, again, we have lost, but which means with the whole being. So the scriptures are mouthed by the lips, understood by the intelligence, fixed by the memory, and finally, the will comes into play, and what has been read is also put into practice. The act of reading makes the reader become a different person. Reading cannot be separated from living.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's really good. That's really good.

[Cindy Rollins]

That was a good quote.

[Angelina Stanford]

That was a very good quote. All right, Mr. Thanks. You had a hard act to follow here.

[Thomas Banks]

I do. I. I have. I have a short poem I was.

[Cindy Rollins]

Hoping you'd have something pithy.

[Thomas Banks]

It's by. Yeah, it's from Kipling. The poem is Little Tin Gods. It's all of four lines long. It's pleasant. It is for little tin gods when Great Jove nods. But little tin gods make their little mistakes in missing the hour when Great Jove wakes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, well, that's good. Yeah, that's good. All right. My commonplace quote, if you guys caught the episode we did a couple weeks ago with Jason Baxter, you heard me talk about a book I'm reading by a medievalist, D.W. robertson Jr. This is a book called A Preface to Chaucer Studies in Medieval Perspectives. And it's absolutely fabulous. And he talks a whole lot about things, you hear me say on this podcast all the time, about how important it is, if you're going to read an old book, to read it without carrying over all of your modern assumptions, because that gets in the way. And what ends up happening is instead of interacting with the actual book that's been written, you're just interacting with a version of it that exists only in your mind. And so this is a, this is a. This is a quote from him in a chapter on the difference between medieval and modern art. And I just, I read this out loud to you the other day, Mr. Banks, because I, I like. I like his, like, his snark so he's talking about how we in the modern age. And he wrote this in 1962, so it's even worse now. But we in the modern age, we have a perspective on reality that is very particular to our place and our time, but we don't realize that it. And so we imagine, he says, we. We turn it into platonic realities, like universals. Like, everyone has thought like this. And then when we encounter old books, we project that onto that. So here's what he says about that. If we universalize these attitudes as though they were platonic realities and assume that they have a validity for all time, we turn history into a mirror which is of significance to us only insofar as we may perceive in it which. What appear to be foreshadowings of ourselves, but which are actually merely reflections of ourselves arising from reconstruction of the evidence based on our own values. When this happens, history, although it may seem to flatter us with the consoling message, thou art the fairest of all, becomes merely an instrument for the cultivation of our own prejudices. We learn nothing from it that we could not learn from the world around us.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, wow. That's really good.

[Thomas Banks]

I think I might have to steal that book from you now.

[Angelina Stanford]

So good. I loved when he said, when we do that, we. We're flattered by the idea that we're the. We're the fairest of them all, man. That just.

[Thomas Banks]

Could you have chosen a more cutting metaphor?

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. I could have a whole episode just about how we do that. We read to be affirmed that we are the best people who have ever existed. We are the most enlightened and. And the most free and the most loving and the most just that has ever lived.

[Thomas Banks]

That scholar you quoted, D.W. robertson, was North Carolina guy, wasn't he? At Chapel Hill, just down the road?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, eventually, yeah. He. He was at Princeton for a while, but he died in Chapel Hill. And the. His collected manuscripts are over there. I'm gonna drive down there and actually take a look at that. That's one of my. My goals. All right, so let's turn our attention to Rudyard. Just kidding. Rudyard Kiffling's the Jungle Book. And I thought we could start off maybe talking a little bit about each of our histories with Kipling, because I.

[Thomas Banks]

Wanted to begin that way, too.

[Angelina Stanford]

This particular series came about because my husband could not believe that I had never read the Jungle Book.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Or you haven't read much Kipling at all.

[Angelina Stanford]

No. So not only have I never read the Jungle Book, I Also never saw the Disney movie.

[Thomas Banks]

You've never seen the Disqualify?

[Angelina Stanford]

I've seen bits and pieces of it, like walking through a room, but I've never watched it because, of course, one of the strange things about me is I was a kid who didn't like Disney movies. I never saw any of those. I also am a kid who doesn't find talking animals charming. And so I'm very. I was not good.

[Thomas Banks]

Can I tell a funny story? Okay. Once I thought this would be a fun couples movie for us to watch because I had liked it. We sat down to watch the Winnie the Pooh, the. The Christopher Robin movie where Christopher Robin has grown up and played by Ewan McGregor, and the animals from the Hundred Acre Wood track him down and basically camp out at his house, and Pooh is spilling honey everywhere and basically ruining his life. That's. I thought it was charming. I thought it was a winsome movie. I think you were about to have a panic attack watching this happen.

[Angelina Stanford]

I made you turn it off, remember?

[Thomas Banks]

Because Pooh was terrifying to me.

[Angelina Stanford]

I said, he's terrifying to me. And he was an agent of chaos. And I genuinely could not handle how chaotic it was. There was nothing charming about. About it.

[Thomas Banks]

So this is like forcing you to watch a horror movie, basically.

[Cindy Rollins]

And now they've made horror movies about Pooh just since he came out of. No, they really.

[Thomas Banks]

That's right. Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, yeah. So it's getting worse. It starts with just you and McGregor, and the next thing you know, you're on the slippery slope to horror movie.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Like, who is spinning more quickly in his grave, A.A. milne or Tolkien? Now with. With the Rings of power and all that.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's a tough call.

[Thomas Banks]

Right?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. Now that you've outed me as a total freak who can't watch children's movies and can't handle talking animals. So my only exposure to Kipling was in the eighth grade. So in my literary life, Evangelina Stanford episode that you guys heard, I talked about how in the eighth grade, in my literature class, we read the Hobbit, and that was like a transformative moment for me. I. I lost myself in the book, and I wanted to be in that world. And it was just everything you hope from a literary experience for your child. But then they followed it up with Captains Courageous.

[Thomas Banks]

Ah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Which was horrible experience.

[Thomas Banks]

Horrible experience.

[Angelina Stanford]

They gave us no guidance. It was written in this hard dialect that none of us could understand. And then they gave us a bunch of reading comprehension quizzes on it, which I made an A On. Because I went and got myself an adapted version. So I. I was the only person, literally the only person in the class who had any idea what was happening in the plot, because I. It was adapted and the dialect was explained for me, and I didn't tell the teacher. I'm outing myself now. I read an adapted version of Captain's Courageous. So I pass the reading comprehension test. Yeah. I was asking you yesterday, why do you think my school made me read that? And the only thing I can think of is they were. Maybe they thought it would toughen us up or teach us how to be disciplined or something. It was a horrible.

[Thomas Banks]

Just in case later in life you fall off an ocean line.

[Cindy Rollins]

Maybe it was because it was a boys book and they were like. They were heavy on Little Women and Anna Great Gables or something, and they.

[Angelina Stanford]

Wanted to do that. Nope, we didn't read anything like that. Nope. We read. Literally, we read the Hobbit and Kevin's Courageous that year.

[Thomas Banks]

And was it just a book that.

[Angelina Stanford]

You have to be fond of? No.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

In fact, they never taught it again after that year. We were the oldest students. They never taught it again after that year. It was a disaster.

[Thomas Banks]

That's interesting.

[Angelina Stanford]

So the one thing it succeeded in doing was making me never pick up another Rudyard Kipling anything, ever.

[Thomas Banks]

Wow.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm 53 now, so I had a good four decades where I did not touch Rudyard Kipling.

[Thomas Banks]

It's amazing.

[Angelina Stanford]

This is part of the reason why I'm always so passionate about what you give your kid to read. You can, like. You can turn them off to something forever.

[Thomas Banks]

I love Captain's Courageous as a kid.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. My boys, like.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Have to take the read.

[Thomas Banks]

That's the difference. I picked it up on my own. It wasn't. It wasn't ever taught to me. I just. And I read it. I was probably in fifth grade or so, sixth grade. I don't know. Something like that. When I read that one, I liked it a lot. Yeah. I think that was one of the first real.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm here to be redeemed. Okay. All right. So, Cindy, what is. Now that I have just confessed all my sins right here. Father, forgive me. Here are my literary sins. But I. I'm gonna redeem myself here. I'm. I'm gonna. Kipling will be redeemed in my eyes with this series. But, Cindy, what's your history with Kipling? Because I'm guessing with eight boys, you got a lot of Kipling in your house.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, we. We do. We have, like, I think we have a complete set of all his poems. And the boys. We had that poem book that was. My grandmother might remember me talking about it. It was like a 1923 edition of 101 Famous Poems. It was edited by Roy C. Cooke. It had poems and at the end it had speeches. And we memorized so many of the poems in that book. Well, they had three or four or five Kipling poems. Requiem. They had if and some others that aren't as popular anymore. But they were. The boys love those poems. They were very man. And it was. So I knew his name from that. I knew his name from my other literature book that I had. That was my mom's high school English literature book. They had his summer Kipling stuff in there. And so. And I had a large set of children's classics that I had gotten as a group. Well, my mom had gotten for me. And they had the Jungle Book and just so stories, which I read as a child. And then. And then, of course, I read them to the boys. The boys went on to read lots of Kipling, Captains Courageous, Stalky and Company. And I read Stocky a couple years ago just to see what the. What it's like British boarding school book. So I guess it's, you know, pre Harry Potter, lots of punching and fighting amongst the boys and. And my guys liked it a lot. So I'm. But I'm a big fan of Kipling's poetry. He.

[Angelina Stanford]

He.

[Cindy Rollins]

I think it's like reading Thomas Hardy. He's very, very good with cadence and meter and it's a. Makes it fun to read his poems.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well. Very good. All right, Mr. Banks. I know. Well, okay, so I know one thing about you with Kipling that you love just so stories, because I bought you.

[Thomas Banks]

That I do really like the Justice.

[Angelina Stanford]

Vintage Illustrated, that really nice edition. Yeah, that for you.

[Thomas Banks]

That was a book that I fell asleep to many nights when I was very young because my. Yeah, my parents had. We had that on cassette. We had a. It was. It had this really weird 80s world music. Like in between the stories there were these interludes of. I can't remember who it was. I want to say it was like Paul Simon or someone like that in his world music phase. And it was. It was just this bizarre recording. And I remember Jack Nicholson read the stories in this really kind of sarcastic voice and. But no, it was funny. And the book. And then. I know we had. Let me see what else. I read the Jungle Book. I know for the first time when I was probably about 8 or 9 and it really surprised me because I thought it was going to be really funny and kind of, you know, clownish and sort of farcical like the Disney cartoon was, but it's really quite. Quite different. Baloo is rather more dignified, and that disappointed me. But I know the Jungle Book, I think I had to wait to reread years later, really, to enjoy. But, yeah, he was always a part. I don't think there's ever been a part of my life where Kipling wasn't sort of part of the literary background. So, yeah, he's an author. I revisit pretty constantly. And I've. It's kind of strange. I was thinking I had him in school at some point. I know, but the only Kipling I remember being assigned in school was in sixth grade when I had to memorize if. And. But other than that, yeah, my education was largely Kipling free, I think. So it's really. I think maybe the fact that I like him so much has to do with not thinking him as a set author the way that, you know, you sometimes have to reconcile yourself to, you know, independently rereading that book, to rereading Moby Dick or the Scarlet Letter or something that you had to read at one point in your life and sort of testing its merits on your own. But Kipling I never had to rediscover in that way.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I bet if you got online, you could find a nice workbook. If the family's listening to us today, were wanting a workbook for the Jungle Book. They didn't, you know, we weren't enough. The book wasn't enough. If, you know, they needed to remember, they could. They could go out and buy a workbook for reading the Jungle Book. Don't you think that they could.

[Thomas Banks]

I'm sure there must be something on.

[Cindy Rollins]

The market, then they could hate it, too. And that would be kind of popular because Rudyard Kipling, he kind of takes a beating on some of his. On Modern. Like, you were reading about the modern sensibilities.

[Angelina Stanford]

And we're gonna. We're gonna talk about the beating his reputation has taken.

[Cindy Rollins]

And I was just joking about all that with my dry sense of humor. Like, people who know me know. But if you don't know, that was a joke.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. If this is like somebody's first podcast episode they ever heard from us, they're like, wow, who's this woman pushing workbooks? Mr. Banks, why don't you tell us a little bit about Rudyard Kipling? Put him in the literary tradition. Where.

[Thomas Banks]

Where does he fit so Rudyard Kipling is born in 1865, son of Victorian parents. His. His mother was a woman named Alice MacDonald and she was a member of a family whose sisters were considered some of the. They were kind of like the model set of sisters in their period.

[Angelina Stanford]

And they were like the Kardashians.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, no, no, no, no. I mean, like, they were just very accomplished. They were charming and winsome and well spoken and well educated and, you know, good hostesses. They were the it girls. Yeah. And one of the sisters married Edward Burne Jones, the pre Raphaelite. So. So, yeah, Edward Burne Jones was. Kip.

[Angelina Stanford]

I forgot. Kipling was really.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, Kipling's uncle. And actually the Burne Jones household during his childhood was sort of a safe haven for him during the years he was being educated in England, because his school days, again, there's a great tradition of this in English amongst English writers. His school days were absolutely miserable. That was. He was sent back to England, I should have mentioned this earlier. He was born in Bombay or Mumbai, I guess we say now, and India really was more home to him than England was. So he has English parents. His father is a, what, teacher of. I think he's an art teacher and sculpture in one of the local schools in Anglo Indian schools in Bombay. And when Kipling is sent back home, which isn't really home to him, he feels absolutely alienated, miserable. I think he had. I think he was living with a family where the mother took charge of his religious instructions sort of without his parents permission and would force him at the end of the day to enumerate whatever sins or offenses he had committed. This is when he's seven, by the way. And Kipling, of course, is driven into hysteria and anyway, so not a happy childhood. And the Burne Jones, you know, household where he would get to go on holidays was sort of a, sort of a haven for him when he grew up. He. He didn't have the means of getting into either Oxford or Cambridge really was not, not much of a student. He liked to write. So he went back to India and worked for the. He got a birth and this is when he's a teenager, by the way, writing about local crime stories and intrigues for the Civilian and Military Gazette in Lahore in British India, which I should say is now Lahore, Pakistan. And yeah, so he got to write about murders and political scandals and, you know, this, that and the other sort of thing when he was, you know, 18, 19 year old kid and he started writing, you know, fictional short stories, you know, in. In addition to his reportage and became kind of an overnight success, I think, when he published his first book. Again, he's very young. I think he's 21 or 22 in plain tales from the Hills appears in print. And he becomes kind of sort of like Lord Byron said, I woke up and found myself famous. That was his sort of success and the succeeding years of his life. And he writes the jungle book in 1894 during this period. So he's still in his 20s when he writes this. Newly married. And he married an American woman, Caroline Ballester, and lived. She came from a New England family. They lived in Vermont together. And if you live in or near, I think it's Brattleboro, Vermont. The Kipling house is still there. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

There the whole time.

[Thomas Banks]

Several years, I think six or seven years. I know that their first daughter was born. Josephine, his first daughter, who died tragically when she was very young, was born while they were living there. And he really enjoyed America. It's kind of interesting. Like, he seemed to have been kind of at home as a permanent globetrotter, which is an important thing about him. He's kind of in some ways more a citizen of the world than a citizen of this or that country. But he left, evidently, his wife. He doesn't mention this in his own autobiography, Something of Myself. But a subsequent biographer pointed out that his wife had. His wife Caroline had kind of a loutish brother who was given to drinking and borrowing money from the brother in law that he. Kind of a cliche situation that he didn't necessarily pay back. And Kipling had a falling out with him. I think he threatened Kipling's life. And also American fans were flocking to the house to haunt him down and seek autographs and that kind of thing. So he basically just didn't have any privacy and they had to decamp and move in his later years. I think they finally settled in England and go.

[Angelina Stanford]

Did he live in India?

[Thomas Banks]

I don't think he ever lived in India after his marriage. So he was in his childhood and his. And his formative years as a writer up to the time he's in his, what, early twenties, I guess maybe mid twenties.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay.

[Thomas Banks]

But yeah, but India. India figures largely in both his life and in his fiction. And it's kind of interesting. I. I was reading a C.S. lewis essay, which I know you read as well. And I remember sort of having this odd impression that most of Kipling's India stories deal with soldiers, you know, like war stories and things like that. There are a few of those. But he writes more about, like, civil servants, guys doing the boring administrative work of running an empire in some far flung outpost in, you know, on the edge of civilization. And Kipling is. Yeah, he was more interested in the people who do the unglamorous jobs that are necessary to make the world work. Not necessarily even an empire work, but just to make the world work in an orderly sort of fashion.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, I thought that was super interesting. Cindy, are you Familiar with that C.S. lewis essay, Kipling's World?

[Cindy Rollins]

No, I am not. I mean, I may have read it years ago, but I don't remember.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, Mr. Banks told me to read it, so I did, and it was very interesting. He. So. So, you know, speaking of Kipling's reputation, you know, we live in the era of looking to the past through a lens of power and oppression and finding it because we're looking for it. And it has become fashionable to criticize Kipling and to say that he's just a propagandist for British imperialism because he was. Is a child living in British India and writes stories about India. And so one of the things I found so interesting was even C. S Lewis is taking that by the by the horns. And it's interesting because at the time, right now, we say he's the mouthpiece of British imperialism, and we mean that as an insult, but originally it was meant as a compliment. And Lewis argues that this is not true.

[Thomas Banks]

And I would agree.

[Angelina Stanford]

And he quotes from Chesterton, who says, this is. This is not true, that you are misunderstanding Kipling if you think her stories are just about imperialism. And I was shocked, shouldn't have been, but was shocked to see that some people read the Jungle Book as an allegory of British imperialism. It is totally not that I. I saw that right away, that. That's a terrible misreading. But, yeah, so I appreciated Lewis's perspective here. And, you know, to your point, I thought this was. This is the kind of observation C.S. lewis makes. And this is. This was really good. He said that before Kipling. So writers like, you know, Hardy or Dickens or Elliot are, you know, the Brontes, that mostly what happens in a British novel is what happens in the leisure hours. It's falling in love. It's, you know, things like that.

[Thomas Banks]

Not what is done on the job.

[Angelina Stanford]

Not what is done at the job. And he said, even if somebody goes to the office in Dickens, the point is not let's look at how office workers are, but that that was the very important role that Kipling played because he shows work and the lives of workers. That's very true. Even of, like, American television. Like, the. The plot of the show is always.

[Thomas Banks]

Like, what do they do in their apartments? You know? Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

After work. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. What did they do for a living on Friends, after all?

[Angelina Stanford]

Friends is a great example. The whole show is in their leisure hours, and there might be some tertiary connections to work, but it's not really about what they do at work. There's so many shows that I watch, and I think, what exactly is this person's job? What do they do?

[Thomas Banks]

If it's a 90s show, they're a.

[Cindy Rollins]

Graphic designer on their hand so much.

[Angelina Stanford]

You live in New York City, you. It's expensive. How do you have so much leadership?

[Thomas Banks]

But do you remember that in, like, every 90s show, someone is a graphic designer?

[Angelina Stanford]

No.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. I think one of them was a graphic designer. And Friends, at least it seemed like that was like the fashionable TV job at the time.

[Angelina Stanford]

To be emailing us right now, I don't. I don't know.

[Cindy Rollins]

But would you say the Office is the Kipling of sitcoms?

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yes. Yes. No, that's it. That's really good. Because that is never about what happens in their leisure hours. It's always what happens at work. That's a really good observation. Yes, it's that sort of thing. And Lewis points out that Kipling is interested in.

[Thomas Banks]

Professionalism. Discipline.

[Angelina Stanford]

Professionalism, Discipline. Brotherhoods at work.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. The particular sort of guys on the job, particular sort of fraternity that is born of belonging to a particular set of professionals.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And just. He does do military, but not just military.

[Cindy Rollins]

So, you know, respect, I think, is a big, big theme that he has a lot.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

Lewis also says the theme of the cub being licked into shape, like the new guy who has to be sort of broken and, you know, fitted to the mold of whatever the work demands of him. And you see that with Mowgli here, and it's actually kind of put turned on its head in a way with Mowgli, because, I mean, Mowgli is the cub who's being licked into shape and, you know, learning how to be a wolf. But obviously he's not a wolf and he doesn't have a permanent place here. So the cub who is not a cub.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. The guy who doesn't fit into any world is very. That comes through really intensely in the story.

[Thomas Banks]

He did that again once or twice. I'm thinking of. Have you. Or I guess you haven't Kim. Have you read Kim?

[Cindy Rollins]

I have read Kim, but it's so long ago that I Don't. It's weird. I must have read Kim first because I have it in my head that I read it, but I have very little recollection of. Of what happened in that book.

[Angelina Stanford]

When I was reading about the Jungle Book, it was very often paired with Kim when they were. Would be talking about it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, right.

[Thomas Banks]

Who doesn't really have a place in the world, who through a series of adventures and hardships, finds one?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, let's turn our attention into the first story, Mowgli's Brothers. I knew so little about the Jungle Book, I had no idea it was a series of short stories. I thought it was a novel. I had forgotten nothing.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay. I hadn't forgotten the structure and the basic plot, but I had forgotten how formal the language is.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I loved it, just to be fair. Yeah, I absolutely loved it. I wish we would have read that instead of Captain's Courageous in the eighth grade. I loved it.

[Thomas Banks]

One thing about Kipling, if you pick up any of his, for lack of a better term, more grown up short stories, you know, like from Plain Tales from the Hills or Departmental Ditties, he uses slang a lot and cockney dialect and that kind of.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, he does that.

[Thomas Banks]

The style in this story is like a little bit more elevated and, I don't know, dignified.

[Angelina Stanford]

But I can. I think I know why that is. So if you'll allow me.

[Thomas Banks]

Please do.

[Angelina Stanford]

Just as a general rule, as a reader, it's very important to me, before I even open the first page, I have to know what kind of story I'm reading. Right. Form informs, right. It sets the expectations. And I thought it was a novel. So I just did a little bit of quick research on what kind of story is the Jungle Book and quickly realized that it was a very deliberate beast fable. And I got super excited because I thought, oh, beast fable. I know how to read beast fable. Okay. So I did some research about that. Kipling is very open about that and says, yes, I'm writing beast fables. And he was influenced by two ancient works. So first he's influenced by, I'm gonna butcher these names, the Panchatantra, which is a series of Indian tales. They're Hindu in nature. Well, Persian slash Indian, I should say. And it's considered to be even, like right up there with Aesop's Fables in terms of. Ah, okay, yes, it's, it's, you know, you get into trouble when you say things like, it invented the beast fable. You know, because when you're talking about very old stories, who knows what Came first. But it's a very, very old. Right up there with Aesop's.

[Thomas Banks]

I should have mentioned this. Kipling, when he was very young, the family had Indian servants, of course, and evidently, like a lot of the stories that he heard as a kid were from. What's the word? His aya, his nanny. And. Yeah, and he alluded to these himself. And he. I think somewhere he jokingly said that. Yeah, basically I just, you know, stole the stories I'd heard from, you know, this or that person, you know, around the household as a child and retold them as my own.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's exactly it. The. The Panchatantra was also a big influence on the Arabian Nights. So that's one of the sources that he's pulling from, is those. Those Hindu tales. And the other that he's pulling from, I probably should say that we have a. A graduate of. Of House of Humane Letters who has gone on to study Persian and Indian literature. And so, of course, I messaged her and said, tell me all about these two. These two collections. And she did so that really oriented me very well for the Jungle Book. So that's one, the Panchatantra, and the other is the Yataka tales. And so the Pacha Chantra is the beast fable tales and the Yaraka tales are Buddhist tales that focus on rebirth cycles. And you can see that he's pulling from both of them in this story. I got really excited as soon as she said rebirth.

[Cindy Rollins]

I was like, the frog. The frog.

[Angelina Stanford]

I know why he's called a frog. I get it. Which I will explain in a minute. So, no, he's not writing allegory about imperialism. What he's doing in the tradition of beast fables is these characters are all human archetypes. And in particular, CS Lewis talks about this. Like, some writers reach the state of myth when they're writing, and that is what he does. Like when I was reading yesterday, there's a very strong consensus that in the Jungle Book, Kipling achieves myth. He becomes a mythic writer. And Mogwi is up there with, like, Reynard the Fox and Brer Rabbit. You certainly see that with kind of the trickster thing that he does at the end. So when you understand that he is pulling from the literary tradition of British India because he is delighted with it, that really undermines the whole idea that this is some sort of imperialist allegory. What it is is a love letter to India. He loves these stories and he's doing what so many writers do. Let me. Let me See if I can put my hand to this. Let me see if I can write a story like this. And it's really interesting because if this was an imperialist story, Magui would be a white British child, and he's not.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And. And Mowgli and I actually was listening to an interview, several Kipling scholars, and this is from years ago, and they interviewed certain members of the Kipling Society of Lahore in Pakistan. I guess there are literary Kipling fan clubs there still. And some of these guys. And most of them were older men. Yeah. Didn't find Kipling's. They didn't find him to be a burden that they had to shake off. They thought that. No, I mean, he lived here. He's part of the local scenery, and he kind of. He kind of belongs to us maybe as much, if not more than he does to the British in some ways, which I thought was actually an interesting perspective.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, I love. I love that. I love that I probably need to keep my mouth shut about all the things I could say about that patient we have for people who are not locals to presume there's oppression when the locals themselves don't feel any of it. I did not know that this book inspired the Boy Scouts movement.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Kipling was friends with. What is his name? Thank you.

[Cindy Rollins]

Baden Howe.

[Thomas Banks]

Baden Powell, yes. Thank you. Yeah. And I think actually the rank system. The Cub, I think that's named.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, that's right.

[Angelina Stanford]

They have.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Cubs. Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. Wolf.

[Angelina Stanford]

So he was, like, I guess, really good friends with Rudyard Kipling. And then this book inspired the Boy Scout.

[Thomas Banks]

Kipling was friends with or knew kind of everyone. And actually, it's kind of fun that he really enjoyed America, at least most of it. And when he visited for the first time, he had a set list of things he wanted to do. He wanted to see the Rocky Mountains and go fishing in the Rocky Mountains, and he wanted to meet Mark Twain. And Mark Twain was like, basically God to him. This is like shaking hands with God when he met Mark Twain.

[Angelina Stanford]

So that's amazing. That's how George McDonald felt, too. Or I guess I think it went the other way. I think Mark Twain was in awe of George McDonald. That makes no sense.

[Thomas Banks]

He was a fan. Yeah. Which actually surprised me because there's.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's super surprising, very different writers, that Mark Twain and George MacDonald would not inhabit the same literary universe. But. But when you realize that Mark Twain was a huge McDonald fan and Mark Twain said Tom Sawyer was his version of the Princess and the Goblin. And if you read them Back to back. You can totally see it.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, that's fascinating.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, you know, that's why you have to see that. Oh, there's a cave.

[Cindy Rollins]

I know that much.

[Angelina Stanford]

All the stories are talking to each other. Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah, that's right.

[Thomas Banks]

They have the cave. Yes, they both. Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

There's monster in the cave and all the things. All right, so let's start in then, with this particular story. So again, I came in completely cold and was just absolutely delighted. Enchanted. I liked how far that was. My point about why it's formally written and not dialect is because he's writing a myth. In fact, our student said that it reads like a Persian tale, language of a Persian tale. So he really is capturing the feel.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Of those. Those.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. It doesn't have, like, the usual kind of demotic, slangy style that he. He uses elsewhere.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. But it's very charming.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yes, it is.

[Angelina Stanford]

It really. I, I really. I. You know, I like that. I like that kind of stuff, though. I prefer that over, like.

[Cindy Rollins]

And it's kind of believable. It feels very believable. Like, it. It just. It's like he captures some real truths as he's going along describing things.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And. And again, the animals would be.

[Cindy Rollins]

I mean, not that it really happened, but. But that you believe the characters.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. You believe it's the sort of thing that could happen.

[Thomas Banks]

I'd agree.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah. No, yeah, totally, totally. So the first thing that comes to mind, we. We have an orphan here who is being raised by wolves. I mean, I'm thinking Romulus Remus. This. This is major myth.

[Thomas Banks]

I thought of that as well. And also that it's. You're living in a, you know, a nature, a jungle which is kind of a commonwealth. It's almost like. I don't know, it's almost like a state which has sudden somehow been disturbed by a. Not a usurper. Exactly, but a violent outsider. Yes. Who doesn't belong there.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's so interesting that you said that. It feels like a commonwealth, because what our students said about these kinds of stories, that in them, the jungle is always a microcosm chasm. So it is a miniature world in and of itself.

[Thomas Banks]

And. Yeah. And the animals are not just animals, like you said.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. So we've got power struggles, we've got leadership issues, we've got. I like the mother wolf, by the way.

[Thomas Banks]

We have parliamentary meetings, the formality. It's almost like they have a copy of, like, do they have the jungle's Robert's Rules of Order or Something. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

The law of the jungle, which is.

[Thomas Banks]

And where that's ignored, then. Then, you know, the mere merely predacious or the merely powerful get their way, which is the end of everything.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. That's exactly right. But Cindy, I loved. I loved the mama, the mother wolf, so much. Like. Like when. Like when you find out she was called the demon.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

And, yeah. And it wasn't just the cutesy name, but, like, that's how tough she is. And then when. When she's. When they're having the parliamentary procedure about whether or not this baby's gonna live and she thinks the meeting's going the other way, and she prepares herself to fight, and she's like this. I'm gon. But I'm gonna die fighting for this baby. Just. Ah, so good. That's so good. That's so good. So, yeah, just. Let's. Let's. Look, I'm just gonna throw out a bunch of the mythic things that I saw. Once I understood that this was a beast fable and he's basically writing myth, I was like, okay, I see what we have here. So the first thing we have is a hero of mysterious origin. Right. We don't know who his family is, and he's a baby, and essentially he's. It's like almost like. Like, it's almost like a fairy story. He's gone into this other world that he doesn't belong in.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

So two things instantly came to mind. One, Adam. And this is a sort of Eden, because he can talk to the animals. And. And the. And he's also in a state of innocence still. And so I was thinking, is there going to be some kind of fall, something to. To. To knock him out of his state of innocence? And the other thing that I thought about a whole lot was Moses. So you have a foster child raised in a second culture who ends up getting rejected by.

[Thomas Banks]

He has an enemy who has marked him out to kill him from the moment he's born.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, yes. And. And the I. And the idea that he gets twice exiled, just like Mowgli gets twice exiled. I don't know how the other stories go, so I don't know if the Moses thing will carry out, but that. That really struck me there. And then, of course, they. They recognize his dual nature by calling him frog. So in. In literature, Frau, in the fairy tale and the folk folklore symbolism, a frog is a dual natured animal because it can live on both water and land. So they are. They are recognizing that he is of two Worlds. And he sort of doesn't fit into either one.

[Thomas Banks]

A lot of the names here, by the way, some of them actually do have a. I guess you could say a more resonance significance. Some of them, though, I found out that Baloo and Bagheera simply mean bear and panther, respectively in Hindi. I thought they must have been, because they're such cool words, especially. Yeah, I know. It's like, oh, okay, well, never mind. I expected something more exotic. Shere Khan, though, there was a historical conqueror. He was an Afghan warlord who invaded India and made himself master of Bombay. Some what, I think in the Mogul period. And he was. Yeah, kind of a, you know, predator conqueror. Sort of a Tamerlane type of guy. So I think that's also a really well chosen name. And, yes, I had to look that up.

[Angelina Stanford]

So he has. He has these foster parents, but he's also got this protector. The panther.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, the panther.

[Angelina Stanford]

And who seems to be extremely wise.

[Thomas Banks]

Very. Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

Actually, that's almost the one thing that is a real. Like, why is this panther here? And why does he protect Mowgli and. Yeah, and Baloo, obviously.

[Thomas Banks]

And, I mean, it seems that the animals who protect him do so just because it's the right thing to do and because it wouldn't be right just.

[Angelina Stanford]

To ability to these.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And also, I was reading an essay about this that pointed out that this is not a Darwinian world where every character is simply struggling to survive and animals are acting like animals. It's. It's a world with like, kind of an ethical code written into nature itself. And. Yeah, and, you know, standing up for something that's small and weak and can't stand up for itself is just something, you know, they do it because that's what they ought to. And he keeps talking without making a.

[Angelina Stanford]

Big deal about it, the law of the jungle. And he contrasts that to madness. Right. Madness is the most disgraceful thing that can overtake a wild creature.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, that's two paragraphs in.

[Angelina Stanford]

So there's something. There's an intense impulse toward order and civilization, even in the jungle, which you.

[Thomas Banks]

Don'T expect that and which requires a kind of vigilance at all times. You get the impression that this order, even though it's something that everyone acknowledges as a obvious good, is kind of precarious and could be threatened from. Well, from any number of directions. I mean, one of the reasons why they don't like having Shere Khan around is not just because he might start eating, you know, the wolf cubs or Mowgli or something, but because if he starts preying on the cattle from the nearby village, then the men might come, bringing fire into the forest and chase everything away.

[Angelina Stanford]

So you get that sense that there's a border and there's dangers in the jungle, but then there's dangers outside in the village as well. And we need to be peacefully coexist.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

With the villagers. And we can't be doing things to.

[Thomas Banks]

They have their side of the street and we have ours.

[Angelina Stanford]

And, you know, to bring them in.

[Thomas Banks]

Never the twain shall meet. Which also, of course, is a Kipling.

[Angelina Stanford]

Place, like a dual interloper kind of thing. So Mowgli is an actual interloper. He's a villager who's come in.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

But Shira Khan is also the one who has disturbed the peace of the jungle because he runs off or kills the parents. We don't know in this story. I haven't read the rest, so I don't know what happened to his parents, but he destroys this family and now this baby is lost because of what he did.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, the whole. The whole scene where they decide, you know, basically, I vouch for him. We need two voices and. And I'll vouch for him. Yeah. So I liked this. The law of the jungle, which never orders anything without a reason, forbids every beast to eat man except when he is killing, to show his children how to kill, and then he must hunt outside the hunting grounds of his packer tribe. The real reason for this is that man killing means sooner or later the arrival of white men on elephants with guns and hundreds of bound men with gongs and rockets and torches. Then everybody in the jungle suffers.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And in the end. I'm not in the end, but, you know, at the end of this meeting, Akilah says, you know, we don't know, he may be a help in time. And that's a little foreshadowing that, you know, this is going to be a mutual arrangement. There's something in it for them.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. No, exactly. So that was really interesting and. And felt almost like Hercules, speaking of mythic things, that we have a baby here who is prophesied that he's going to grow up and slay the tiger.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. I mean, the fact that he has a sort of assigned destiny which he doesn't choose himself, is again, something that's sort of at odds with our time, you know, and also are just. Everyone ought to be able to choose their own future and that sort of thing that. That, well, you know, forgivable, perhaps, but at the same time, not Very realistic modern assumption. That's not true of Mowgli here. Mowgli cannot just hang out with the wolves and, you know, enjoy himself with them and be an honorary member of the family into in perpetuity. He has things he has to do and they involve leaving, leaving this place behind at some point.

[Cindy Rollins]

And he's trying so hard just to be carefree and enjoy himself, but the, the animals that love him are trying to warn him that that's, that isn't your destiny.

[Thomas Banks]

You can't self identify as a wolf. It just doesn't work.

[Angelina Stanford]

So then 10 years go by and Shira Khan has been plotting this whole time. That was a really fascinating. Again, I love these fables. I love how they show exactly how human beings are. So you have this, this really good leader, but he's getting old and Shirakan has the ears of the younger wolves and he knows it's just a matter of time before.

[Thomas Banks]

And he's talking how to hunt babies.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, supposedly. Yes. Right. So he's.

[Thomas Banks]

I kind of thought of Animal Farm here because. Do you remember in Animal Farm, the, The pigs take the, the cubs, the. Or the puppies from the mom, whatever her name is, and indoctrinate them to, you know, attack whoever the pigs tell them to. Yeah, that's something. Shuriken has kind of a demagogical feel about him.

[Angelina Stanford]

Got a little mob here.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, he does.

[Angelina Stanford]

Of followers. And, and they're, they all. Because he, he's like, I'm, he's mine and I'm gonna get him in 10 years. I can wait 10 years to get him. So the, the tension builds there because of that.

[Cindy Rollins]

And he's a worm tongue. I mean, he's just, you know, working behind the scenes. Like I thought of Absalom, you know, and David, he's. He's stealing, trying to steal the kingdom slowly through whispers.

[Angelina Stanford]

And we see that he's a friend to the animals. So he doesn't. The interesting thing about man is man is the weakest animal in the jungle, but yet he's also the dangerous one.

[Thomas Banks]

Because he can contrive technologies and things and he has fire.

[Cindy Rollins]

And I love, I love when they said, you know, if you eat man, your teeth and your hair fall out. You just. It's not a good, it's not healthy. They're not, they don't. They're not good for you.

[Angelina Stanford]

They had. And of course then he. This again feels very Aesop. He's pulling the thorns out of the pads of lions. You know, he's actually, he's a hell.

[Thomas Banks]

I'd wonder.

[Angelina Stanford]

I. I think it's very Edenic with this sort of threat as well.

[Thomas Banks]

Do you know the story about St. Jerome and the lion?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

So there's the story. I think it occurs in one of the medieval saints books, like the Golden Legend or something, that St. Jerome, after he took up a monastic life in the city of Bethlehem in a cave. He was sitting there at his writing table one day and a lion limped into his cave and he saw that the lion was hurt and it had a thorn in its paw. So he removed the thorn and the lion became his pet. So that's why when you see Paintings of St. Jerome by Caravaggio or whomever else, he's often depicted sitting at his writing desk with a lion at his feet. Anyway, all that aside, so which came.

[Cindy Rollins]

First, the aesop or the St. Jerome?

[Thomas Banks]

Must have been the Aesop, I guess.

[Angelina Stanford]

I would think it was the Aesop's Fable.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, I say Aesop.

[Angelina Stanford]

Just kidding.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm sorry, I'm being very silly.

[Angelina Stanford]

And then of course, we get, we start to get to the sad part here, the bottom of the U of the short story, right. So the panther's like you. You need to understand, you can't live here forever. This, this isn't going to last. They're. They're plotting against you and dangers coming and, and, and Mowgli is in so much just childhood innocence. But these are my brothers. Everything's fine. Why would somebody want to.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes. The only family he's ever known.

[Angelina Stanford]

After all, he's like, you know, you have to understand, Akilah is coming to the end any day now. He's not going to get his kill. And then they're gonna, they're gonna kill him and make a new in a.

[Thomas Banks]

Spine of the fact that you've grown up with these wolves. You can't rely on their loyalty because if it's convenient to them to do so, they might sell you out.

[Cindy Rollins]

And maybe, you know, the mother, Mowgli is her favorite. So maybe that plays into obviously psychological, making this psychological, but, you know, because it's hard to understand. Why would these little brothers, like, so easily turn on him?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, what could easily be jealousy. I mean, I guess in terms of like, what is the story presenting to us? It's presenting that he doesn't fit in. He doesn't belong here.

[Cindy Rollins]

And obviously they can never really accept him because he doesn't.

[Angelina Stanford]

And the tiger feels like there's something unnatural about this boy being in the jungle. And so then the Black panther says you need to go get the red flower so you can protect yourself.

[Thomas Banks]

Which is, I mean, not just arming him, but also arming him in a specifically human way.

[Angelina Stanford]

But it's also very Prometheus, right. You're going to get the gift of fire. And now you're going to have like the power of a God. You're going to be able to have power over these animals. So he gets a little bowl of fire. Fire. I was not exactly sure what was happening with the bowl of fire, but I thought the thing was so neat about you have to feed it.

[Cindy Rollins]

And somebody gets burned.

[Angelina Stanford]

Somebody gets burned. Yeah. I guess if I was in India, I would know exactly what they're describing here. With the bowl of fire.

[Thomas Banks]

No, it was, it was a clay pot of some kind. Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Does it just have hot coals?

[Cindy Rollins]

I think that, you know, that is the tr. That is a thing where they had, you know, you kept one coal and you had it buried in the ash and then it just is smothered, but it's still burning. And then when you need a fire, you blow, you know, you move it around, blow on it and it turns into a fire and you could travel with the coals. Oh.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that makes a lot of sense. So fire is obviously a huge threat in the jungle.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

So then they finally have their, their thing, right? Akilah doesn't make his last hunt. And that whole section was so sad. He's just like, listen, they're gonna kill me any day now. They're coming for me. I'm old.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. But he does offer to sacrifice himself. From Mowgli. Yeah, he, he says that if you let Mowgli go, I won't, you know, fight back when you, when you inevitably kill me, but if you. Otherwise I'm gonna, you know, kill as many of you as I can.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, right. So, yes, that was also very mythic that, that self sacrificial death there. I'm willing to die for him. But then Bagheera tells Mowgli, you have to, you have to save Aquila. You have to make that a condition of, of you leaving. So he gets the fire and you know, he, he has his moment. And the, the tiger is really a coward. He's a bully. And he's just like Cindy said, he's a worm tongue. Right. He's behind the scenes. But if you want to say all.

[Thomas Banks]

Bark and no buy, but maybe all meow and no bite, you know, and it even kind of signals that in the beginning when it mentions that he what? His mother rejected him because he was born with a. With a limp in one paw.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right.

[Thomas Banks]

And he's kind of. He's weaker than a tiger ought to be.

[Angelina Stanford]

Is that why he's picking on babies?

[Thomas Banks]

He's not on the. A team of.

[Angelina Stanford]

Of.

[Thomas Banks]

Of tigers. Yeah, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Put them complaining about the way he hunts and that he makes a ton of noise.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

He's kind of like the neighborhood loser.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. A bully, but only to things that are smaller and weaker than he is.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I think that tracks with him being able to manipulate the younger wolves. The older. The older people have too much sense. And so they remind, of course, in that meeting when they're calling for. For Mowgli's death, they remind him that there was a pledge. And they're like, that was 10 years ago. Who cares? That was a long time ago.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, you paid us. You know what? You said you would pay us, but, I mean, why should we care about a ox that we had 10 years ago?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. So then Aquila offers, if you let him go back to his. His own people, then I. I won't fight. And then Mowgli jumps in, and he's got the fire, and he fights him off. That was a great scene.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I thought that was very well done. It's hinged.

[Angelina Stanford]

Jungle cat.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, It's. I mean, it is a child's book. At the same time, what I like about this, and which I think a lot of modern writers of children's books are, like, maybe too reticent of, is it's hospitable to the idea of danger and that there are a lot of things in this world, whether you're in the jungle or not, that that could kill you. And that's.

[Cindy Rollins]

If we had more books like this, we wouldn't have to have all these horror movies or horror books like that might be true.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

We take all of the danger and fear out of our daily lives, so we need to be scared in the.

[Thomas Banks]

Theater in sensationalistic sorts of ways. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

There's also this. You know, he. He uses his wits here, and he's got his mentor, and. And there is something kind of trickster about him, something Brayer Rabbit, something Reynard the Fox that he. He outsmarts.

[Thomas Banks]

He's not stronger, but he is. Other advantages that he makes use of.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And so, yeah, we have our bottom.

[Thomas Banks]

By the way, I should pause here. I. I don't get tired of hearing it, but it's become predictable. In my various classes when I'm teaching Students who have had you as a teacher and say, jacob outwits Esau. And we're reading that in Biblical History. A student will say again, I can almost, like, set my watch by it. As Ms. Angelina says, what is. What is the line? Deception is the weapon of the week. So as Ms. Angelina says, I lost track of how many times students quoted that in the chat box.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's a folklore principle. Pretty much the weapon of the week. You know, Shaharazad, Penelope and Mowgli, you know, you have to outsmart by your wits. And so you have this kind of victory at the end, which is incomplete.

[Thomas Banks]

He doesn't kill Shere Khan or anything like that. And he knows he's gonna see him again.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. That's right. But my point is. But it ends with his tears, right? And that is something that separates him from the animals, too. But he's heartbroken because although he's saved his life, and he saved Aquila's life, he is exiled. So the story both starts and ends with him being in exile and having lost his family. Yeah, it really ends on that. On that sad. That sad note, because he's crying as if his heart will break.

[Thomas Banks]

It's kind of a coming of age story in two separate ways. I mean, it's Mowgli growing up and having to take responsibility for himself as an adolescent and no longer a child, but also as a human being and no longer someone who saw himself basically as one of the tribe, one of the animals.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, too. Because at the beginning, they're talking about when the cub is a cub. Everybody agrees not to mess with the cub, but when the cub gets old enough, then.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, it says after a certain age, you can. One wolf can kill another under certain circumstances. But it's. Yeah, it's. It's, you know, it's. It's a hard world that he lives in, and it's a hard school.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, that was the law. I thought, well, that's rough. I mean, you can just kill a baby if it's.

[Angelina Stanford]

Once. It's old, Cindy, what's it?

[Cindy Rollins]

Old? Yeah, Age of accountability.

[Angelina Stanford]

There you go. And then he says, well, I have to go say goodbye to my parents. And he. And it's really sad. Will you forget me? And they say, no, no. Even if you're gone, just come to the edge of the jungle and we'll. And we'll see you. And they say, come back. Come back. So he has to leave at the end.

[Thomas Banks]

He now has a mission. So he. So he says, last thing he says I will surely come, said Mowgli. And when I come, it will be to lay out Shirakan's hide upon the council rock.

[Cindy Rollins]

Very nice.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, that's right. Do not forget me. Tell them in the jungle never to forget me. But then it ends with the dawn breaking. So that's a good sign. The dawn was beginning to break. So the story actually starts off, he's in the spring. He's a spring baby. And so, like I said, he's pulling from that collection of beast fables, which obviously this is a beast fable, but he's also pulling from those Yataka tales, which are Buddhist tales of rebirth. And that's in here too. Right. So he's a spring baby. Spring is the time of rebirth. He's also a frog. Frogs are the same sort of image as a butterfly. It's a metamorphosis image. You, you, you turn into something else. And this was a story in which Mowgli has to turn into something else. He can't just be this cub. He can't be a frog. So he's a frog because he's dual nature. He's in two worlds, but he's also growing up and metamorphosizing. The other thing about frogs is that frogs are also in folklore, almost always used as a Christ image. Again because the dual natured.

[Thomas Banks]

Seriously, that was a new one on me.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yep. Oh, you see that in fairy tales, like the Frog Prince.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yeah. Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because they're dual natured.

[Thomas Banks]

I was trying to think. Can I even think of a fable with a frog in it?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, the frog prince is the one. He's the Christ figure in there. Okay. He's. He's dual natured. So. Yeah, so we have a lot of that. He's the Spring child of destiny. So I'm presuming these short stories are like. They form like a cycle. We're going to continue this story.

[Thomas Banks]

I mean, the characters sort of come and go. Not all of the characters are in all of the stories necessarily. Like, we haven't met Ka yet. Who's one of the characters. We haven't met the monkeys yet. And I think Kipling wrote these books fairly quickly.

[Angelina Stanford]

He. They were published serially.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And I think they came out in book form in 1894, actually. Interestingly, the. The illustrations for the original book were done by his father. Yeah. His father was. Was, amongst other things, a book illustrator, John Lockwood Kipling.

[Cindy Rollins]

Wow.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I know the next story kind of goes back in time and, and tells some, which makes a lot of sense. Like, I've set the stage now. Let's go.

[Angelina Stanford]

We're going to get a backstory.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, not a backstory, but, I mean, a back in the middle, earlier part.

[Thomas Banks]

Of Mowgli's childhood, growing up years.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, okay. Oh, is that, like, what the movie is taking from most?

[Thomas Banks]

So the movie takes from, I think, three or four of these stories and what, there's what, eight altogether? Eight or nine altogether. And, yeah. And, yeah, the movie. I mean, I don't mind them, like, not doing the whole, you know, run of the stories. Obviously, they only have 90 minutes or whatever. But the one thing that's, I think, tonally a major change is that, I mean, it's a Disney movie and like, they introduce, like, farce and just kind of a general atmosphere of clownishness. Yeah, this is, like, dead serious, this. And actually. And Kipling, it's not because he wasn't humorless. He can actually be quite funny in other books style.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I think that mythic sense.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. It's interesting that Disney even thought of doing this story.

[Thomas Banks]

And I have to say, I like the cartoon for what it is. That was almost the first movie I remember watching. Almost the. I think the first movie I saw in a movie theater. So I have, like, a sentimental attachment.

[Cindy Rollins]

And it has great music. The songs, you can't hardly forget them. I still sing them.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yeah. They do kind of stick in your head.

[Angelina Stanford]

Did either of you see the newer.

[Thomas Banks]

The new one was weird.

[Cindy Rollins]

I didn't watch it. I didn't have the heart for it.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, it was. It was. It was kind of forgettable. It had Bill Murray voicing Baloo. So once again, Baloo is kind of clownish and like the lazy slob who's fun to hang out with. He's like your lazy uncle. That's the Disney version of himself.

[Angelina Stanford]

Thinking about the bear in the Chronicles in Arnia, wondering if he was a cousin to this bear or the bear.

[Cindy Rollins]

And that hideous strength.

[Angelina Stanford]

Or the bear in that hideous strength.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't really thought about the ways in which C.S. lewis may or may not have been influenced by Kipling, but I. Maybe it's there. No, it's something he said. He's been reading him all his life.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. He did say that.

[Thomas Banks]

He says, okay, he's not my favorite author. I can't just read him in any mood. But I have been reading him since I was very young, and he considered him a very, very great artist.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, we know that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Exactly. His language skills are just that. When we Talk about language and how important it is for our children to hear the cadences of language. Kipling is one of the places where we're going to find that in spades.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, absolutely. And he can write in a lot of styles as well. So I think our sort of stereotyped image of him is, you know, one story after another of an adventure in India amongst British soldiers. That's, that's one side of Kipling who's much more, much more many faceted than that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think it is difficult for us as modern people to know what to make of stories that are set in colonialism. Right. So he's an Englishman living in India and writing about India and does that automatically mean he's an imperialist? And I think it's just more complicated than that. I mean, first of all, he was a child and he, in these stories he's so clearly delighting in, in their culture and not trying to colonize the culture, not taking over it and doing his best to introduce those kinds of stories to a broader audience.

[Thomas Banks]

I think the, whatever one wants to call it, the paternalistic or whatever, the offensive side of Kipling's imperialism, which, which does exist, I think, like if you're going to go hunting for that in his fiction and poetry, you have to hunt farther than you might anticipate. And even George Orwell who, whose politics were very different from Kipling's, wrote of him very appreciatively and said, you know, this is in 1936, 1937, after Kipling died, that in the attempt to stereotype him as a kind of proto fascist is really quite wrong headed and founded on false impressions of what he actually represented. And even Kipling himself in his later years when the swastika started to be identified with Nazism and early on, yeah, it's a Sanskrit symbol and I actually used to have one or two very old copies from the early 1900s of Kipling's books that had that on the back. He requested that would be removed move. Because it doesn't mean the same thing now. And I don't want to be identified with these goons over in Germany. So. No, I mean he's. Yeah. Like to think of Kipling as some kind of bloodthirsty.

[Cindy Rollins]

I can just see a tick tock now where some young girl is shocked to find. Although I can't imagine it because I can't imagine that person even knowing there's a Kipling, but that if, if she.

[Angelina Stanford]

Could like 10 things you didn't know about Rudyard Kipling This.

[Cindy Rollins]

This. Well, yeah, number three really blows my mind.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, the thing is, you know, we can take the position. I don't even want to. I don't even know if I want to say all of this stuff. You can object to certain historical realities and separate it from the literature and at the time. And we have a hard time with that. And so I think a good example, this is what keeps coming to mind when England was just absolutely. In the Elizabethan period, just being horrible to. To Ireland. Right? Just. Just ripping Ireland apart, destroying Ireland. And. And C.S. lewis is Irish. We forget that he's Irish. He's not English. He's Irish. And Edmund Spencer is English. And he was a secretary to one of the English nobles who got stuck in Ireland, as in. In, you know, it's colonialism. They pulled out the Irish aristocrats and they gave the lands and the homes to English people. Right. That's what they did. And that's a horrible thing, what happened to Ireland. Absolutely. And. And Lewis, C.S. lewis thinks it's a horrible thing that happened to Ireland, and yet he can read the Fairy Queen and say about it, this is a story of a man falling in love with Ireland. And it seems to me that you have something similar with. With. With Kipling here. And you just have to accept that things are complicated. We. We just want to reduce everything in the modern era. And. And Spencer gets attacked for being imperialist and being anti Ireland. And I just keep thinking. But Lewis is an Irishman, and he says it's not. It's not that. And that it's the story of a man falling in love with Ireland. And you just have to accept that life is complicated and you can feel like it was wrong for England to have colonized India. And you can still enjoy the Jungle Book because the Jungle Book is not British colonial propaganda.

[Cindy Rollins]

If you want to read a book. I don't know if Tom's read these, but I really enjoyed them. It's Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, which goes through the Raj period of Indians and takes you into the English, and then it shows you the end, the sunset of that time. And it's a very measured look at it and very just. It's just trying to show you what actually was going on there. And it's heartbreaking. And it's also an excellent, excellent series of books.

[Thomas Banks]

I've been meaning to read those for years, and I never have. I know that. I know that Christopher Hitchens, the late Christopher Hitchens listed those as some of his favorite books, and he said, yeah, A very, very keen eyed depiction of, you know, the British Raj in India and yeah, I should pick those up. Paul Scott.

[Cindy Rollins]

They're very easy to read. I mean they're well read, I mean well written.

[Angelina Stanford]

Just as another example of how complicated things are. I'm not English, I'm French and my direct ancestors story is of the English trying to commit genocide on my particular relatives. That, that whole story, when, when I think about it, you know, I feel like my language has been taken from me, my culture was stolen from me. I, I, I'm a hundred percent, my people are victims.

[Thomas Banks]

Specifically to anyone who hasn't listened to this before, you're talking about your Acadian relatives. Politics.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

The whole in Newfoundland.

[Angelina Stanford]

Akadi.

[Thomas Banks]

Akadi, yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Now Nova Scotia because they gave us, they tried to appease Scotland by giving our land to Scotland and you know, giving us smallpox blankets. What could go wrong? And so when I look at history, yeah, I take the French side over the English side and I think that the English policy to, to native peoples, my own included, have been horrific. And yet I love English literature and it is a gift and those two things are separate in my mind even to the point where I can read Henry V by Shakespeare and I can know that he is presenting the history pro England and I think his history's wrong in there because I'm pro French.

[Thomas Banks]

I actually think that play is more ambiguous than.

[Angelina Stanford]

But my point is this, I don't read it.

[Thomas Banks]

Sure, sure.

[Angelina Stanford]

I love that play because it's a wonderful play and we have to be able to separate these things.

[Thomas Banks]

Here, here.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I am looking forward to coming back next week and re. And just talking about Kaz hunting which I did not know was going to pick up with some of Mowgli's earlier life. I'm looking forward to that. Any final words everybody?

[Thomas Banks]

Not at all.

[Angelina Stanford]

Go ahead to the racetrack. I think so if you've never read.

[Thomas Banks]

Kipling before, I think these stories are a pretty good entry point along with some of his, Well, I would say some of the poems. Read some Kipling poems, by all means.

[Cindy Rollins]

Are you going to read for us a Kipling poem today?

[Thomas Banks]

I'm going to actually read a poem that is a satire on Kipling's poetry. A guy named James Kenneth Stevens who, he was a Victorian, he's not very well known anymore, but he was a Victorian satirist who, who wrote spoof poems on Wordsworth and Kipling and others. Kind of loving ones. But yeah, anyway, fun stuff.

[Cindy Rollins]

Ah, that sounds amazing.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, well again you can find everything that's going on with Cindy at her website, morningtimeformoms.com and you can find out what we've got going [e-mail] and really, you want to sign up for the newsletter because we send out a weekly newsletter with commonplace quotes and stuff about the podcast and the reading schedules and upcoming classes and just other fun stuff in there. So so you'll want to get that stick around to the end. Mr. Banks is going to read us a spoof poem on Kipling. And until next time, keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[Thomas Banks]

To RK By James Kenneth Stephen Will there never come a season which shall rid us from the curse of a prose which knows no reason, and an unmelodious verse, when the world shall cease to wonder at the genius of an ass, and a boy's eccentric blunder shall not bring success to pass, when mankind shall be delivered from the clash of magazines, and the inkstand shall be shivered into countless smithereens, when there stands a muzzled stripling mute beside a muzzled boar, when the Rudyards cease from Kipling, and the haggards ride no.