Just So Stories

These highly popular stories were crafted by Kipling in 1902 to be read aloud.

He used the 'weights, colours, perfumes, and attributes of words in relation to other words, either as read aloud so that they may hold the ear, or scattered over the page, draw the eye'.

By use of repetition, internal rhyme, and phrasing, the words bound from the page with an exuberance unmatched in other children's stories."The Elephant's Child", full of 'satiable curiosity, wonders what the crocodile has for dinner, and he is sent by the Kolokolo Bird to find the banks of the 'great grey-green, greasy Limpopo river, all set about with fever-trees'.

So many splendid characters fall from the stories, from the Painted Jaguar, who is fooled by Stickly-Prickly hedgehog and Slow-and-Solid tortoise, to the Yellow-Dog Dingo; from the Leopard (who got his spots) to the Parsee 'from whose hat the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than-oriental splendour'; from 'the Cat who walks by himself', to The Most Wise Sovereign Suleiman-bin-Daoud and his Head Queen, the Most Beautiful Queen Balkis, who was nearly as wise as he was.