Just So Stories

Summary

Just So Stories is Rudyard Kipling's collection of comic tales that explain, in the voice of a father talking to a child he calls O Best Beloved, how things in the world came to be the way they are. Each story is followed by a poem. The library text contains twelve. In How the Whale Got His Throat a small 'Stute Fish sends a hungry Whale to swallow a shipwrecked Mariner, a man of infinite resource and sagacity, who dances inside him until he is carried home and then jams a grating, tied with his suspenders, into the Whale's throat. In How the Camel Got His Hump the idle Camel answers every request to work with 'Humph!' until the Djinn in charge of All Deserts gives him a hump to live on while he makes up lost time. A Parsee on the Red Sea shore takes revenge on a cake-stealing Rhinoceros by filling his unbuttoned skin with stale crumbs, so that he rubs it into folds. The Leopard and an Ethiopian hunter, finding that the game has hidden in a shadowy forest, take the wise baboon Baviaan's advice; the hunter darkens his skin and presses his fingertips all over the Leopard to make spots. In The Elephant's Child an endlessly curious young elephant, spanked for every question, goes to the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River to ask what the Crocodile has for dinner, and has his nose pulled into a trunk. Old Man Kangaroo asks the god Nqong to make him different and popular, and Yellow-Dog Dingo chases him across Australia until he hops. On the Amazon a Hedgehog and a Tortoise confuse Painted Jaguar with his mother's instructions, then learn each other's tricks and become the first Armadillos. Two stories tell how the Neolithic girl Taffy and her father Tegumai invented the picture-letter, which nearly gets a friendly stranger beaten, and then the first alphabet. In The Crab That Played with the Sea, the Eldest Magician humbles the giant crab Pau Amma, whose comings and goings cause the tides. In The Cat That Walked by Himself the Woman tames the Dog, the Horse and the Cow, while the Cat bargains his way to the fire and the milk but keeps his wild independence. The last tale tells how wise Queen Balkis helps King Suleiman-bin-Daoud teach a boastful butterfly, and with him nine hundred and ninety-nine quarrelling queens, a lesson. Kipling first told many of the stories to his daughter Josephine, who died in 1899; some appeared in magazines, and the book was published by Macmillan in London in 1902 with Kipling's own illustrations.

Top Lessons

• Questions can lead somewhere

  The Elephant's Child is spanked for every question, but his question about the Crocodile's dinner wins him a trunk that helps all elephants after him. The poem that follows praises What and Where and When and How and Why and Who. Curiosity is good, though it should be joined with good sense.

• Idleness gives you the hump

  The Camel will not trot, fetch or plough, so the other animals do double work until the Djinn gives him a hump. The poem afterward says that people get a hump too when they have too little to do, and that the cure is to dig in the garden.

• Pride gets a surprise

  The Kangaroo asks to be different and popular, Pau Amma thinks he is very important, and the Butterfly boasts that he could stamp away a palace. Each proud creature gets more than he asked for and learns a lesson. Kipling laughs at boasting rather than scolding it.

• Pictures and words need care

  Taffy's picture-letter makes perfect sense to her, but her mother reads it as a story of spears and enemies, and the friendly Stranger-man is mobbed. In the next story Taffy and her father make signs for sounds so that a message can say exactly what is meant.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

There is little medicine here, but the tales keep a few traces of the tropical world Kipling knew. The fever-trees that line the Limpopo are named for the old belief, common among nineteenth-century travellers in southern Africa, that the swampy ground where they grow brought fever; the link was later understood through the malaria mosquito, though Kipling's phrase is pure atmosphere. In How the Alphabet Was Made, Tegumai's first useful word is yo, bad swamp-water that gives fever if you drink it, so that the first written message is in effect a warning about unsafe water. The Leopard and the Ethiopian get the Big Tummy-ache from eating rats and beetles, the Elephant's Child's stretched nose hurts him hijjus and is cooled in banana leaves, and the Rhinoceros scratches himself raw from cake-crumbs under his skin. These are comic details, not clinical ones.

• The Elephant's Child

  Kolokolo Bird's refrain about the Limpopo River set about with fever-trees; the Crocodile stretches the young elephant's nose, which he wraps in cool banana leaves.

• How the Alphabet Was Made

  Tegumai draws the signs for yo, bad black swamp-water that gives fever, so that Taffy will know not to drink from a marked pool.

• How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin

  Stale crumbs inside his skin make the Rhinoceros itch, roll and rub until his skin folds.