Rudyard Kipling's tales of Mowgli, the Man-cub, raised by wolves, are not for children only. They have never been out of print, and they have shaped the English language and the British (and American) psyche to an extraordinary degree. The stories that concern Mowgli's adventures, from his adoption by Mother and Father Wolf to his marriage and taking service in the Indian Forestry as an adult, have been collected, placed in their internal chronological order, and annotated in this volume by the historians GMW Wemyss and Markham Shaw Pyle, the celebrated chroniclers of the Titanic enquiries, the rise of Churchill, and how the US Congress, four months before Pearl Harbor, kept the draft - by one vote. As in their previous noted annotation of The Wind in the Willows, Mr Wemyss and Mr Pyle, the first a British historian, the second, an American historian, have ranged widely in annotating this classic work. It is prefaced with essays on imperialism, dryland farming, the climate and geography of Madhya Pradesh, Kipling's tribalism and his opposition to the Kaiser's nascent imperial adventurism, and the image of the Mother-figure. Over 350 footnotes accompany the text in this second edition, delving into ecology; irrigation; literary echoes from Bunyan, the Authorised Version, Milton, Blake, Chaucer, and Shakespeare; Kipling's literary influence upon Tolkien and Lewis; wergild; snake-cults and Greek oracles; ethnology; mana and tapu; Anglo-German and Anglo-Russian relations; forestry; and any number of subjects with these, Uncle Tom Cobleigh and All. They have given a new generation the knowledge that the initial Victorian and Edwardian reader should have had ... and much more. If you wish to enjoy these tales with deeper understanding; if you wonder what Buldeo has to do with Mr Sherlock Holmes' antagonist Dr Roylott; if you have ever wondered just why a Gond hunter reminds you of the frontman of Jethro Tull; or if you simply want a cracking good read of stories you but half-remember: here is your book.
About the Author: Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936), that scion and poet of Empire - and a man and a writer much more complicated than that suggests - and Nobelist for Literature, was born in Mumbai and never ceased to regard India as his true mother-country; his 1894 and 1895 tales of Mowgli and Bagheera, Baloo, Akela, and Kaa, have made it a heart's country for generations of children who have never seen India. The editors and annotators of Kipling's, as of Kenneth Grahame's classic tales, Markham Shaw Pyle and GMW Wemyss, the partners in Bapton Books, are the co-authors of a celebrated centenary history of the Titanic enquiries in the US and the UK, and editors and annotators of all of Kipling's Mowgli stories in one volume and of Grahame's tales of River Bank and the Wild Wood. Mr Pyle is the historian of how, four months before Pearl Harbor, the US Congress kept the draft by one vote. Mr Wemyss is the historian of the May 1940 debate in the House of Commons that ended by casting down Chamberlain's government and installing Churchill as prime minister - one day before Hitler invaded France. Together, they are the co-authors of other works of criticism and essays on rural pursuits and literature, and of the forthcoming (Christmas 2012) history of that year of portent, 1937. Mr Wemyss lives in Wilts; Mr Pyle, in Texas.