• Story of the Month

Weland’s Sword
Some instinct—Puck perhaps?—took me back to Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill this week. I’d forgotten that ‘Weland’s Sword’, the story it opens with, is set on Midsummer Eve—only a couple of weeks away as I write. I’d forgotten, too, how truly magical, how compelling, is the writer’s evocation of a perfect summer evening. He is casting a spell. Held by it, readers will leave behind all they thought they knew and all they had been taught, trusting instead to the voice of the story-teller. For child readers, the pleasingly concrete picnic of Bath Oliver biscuits, boiled eggs and salt are probably as powerful an invitation to imagining. What is more, the world of Dan and Una, the children in the story, might fulfil the desire of any heart: their father has written a play specially for them, they’ve been helped with the props and now they are allowed to perform it at Midsummer Eve on their own, in the middle of a fairy ring. At the end of their adventure, their father will be waiting to walk them home. Kipling did try to create a dream childhood for John and Elsie Kipling, the figures on whom the characters of Dan and Una were based. He did indeed cut down Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream for them, even sending to London for a donkey’s head. You might guess that it could have soothed the wounds of his own miserable childhood to be able to create such a different life for children of his own. John and Elsie/Dan and Una wouldn’t need to use their imagination for a means to escape. You don’t need to be a child to enjoy ‘Weland’s Sword’, though the child in you is likely to be delighted. What strikes me today, as a reader, is the satisfying shift of perspective Kipling produces in me. As Puck explains himself to the children, I too learn to connect the gods of antiquity with the beings that haunt woods and streams. To see that the Old Gods, as Puck names them, were arrivals brought by traders and armies, only to dwindle into ghostly local presences. I learn to banish the notion of ‘fairies’ as cheap fantasy and instead to recognise an enduring connection between the land and spiritual forces that can terrify. How did Kipling himself come by this insight? I think the seeds were sown in his very early, very happy years in Bombay, as it was then known. As a small child he was taken about by Indian servants and would observe the rituals of diverse creeds. Looking back, in ‘The Wise Children’ he writes with longing of ‘the wayside magic, the threshold spells’ once part of his everyday life. The poem suggests that these spoke to him of a way of being in the world that was integrated. It recognised there were spiritual forces alive in the natural world, though Christian Europe had no place for them. It was a moment of brilliance when Kipling thought of Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s Puck as a way to retrieve a sense of those spiritual forces for his readers.

Weland’s Sword

Some instinct—Puck perhaps?—took me back to Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill this week. I’d forgotten that ‘Weland’s Sword’, the story it opens with, is set on Midsummer Eve—only a couple of weeks away as I write. I’d forgotten, too, how truly magical, how compelling, is the writer’s evocation of a perfect summer evening. He is casting a spell. Held by it, readers will leave behind all they thought they knew and all they had been taught, trusting instead to the voice of the story-teller.

For child readers, the pleasingly concrete picnic of Bath Oliver biscuits, boiled eggs and salt are probably as powerful an invitation to imagining. What is more, the world of Dan and Una, the children in the story, might fulfil the desire of any heart: their father has written a play specially for them, they’ve been helped with the props and now they are allowed to perform it at Midsummer Eve on their own, in the middle of a fairy ring. At the end of their adventure, their father will be waiting to walk them home.

Kipling did try to create a dream childhood for John and Elsie Kipling, the figures on whom the characters of Dan and Una were based. He did indeed cut down Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream for them, even sending to London for a donkey’s head. You might guess that it could have soothed the wounds of his own miserable childhood to be able to create such a different life for children of his own. John and Elsie/Dan and Una wouldn’t need to use their imagination for a means to escape.

You don’t need to be a child to enjoy ‘Weland’s Sword’, though the child in you is likely to be delighted. What strikes me today, as a reader, is the satisfying shift of perspective Kipling produces in me. As Puck explains himself to the children, I too learn to connect the gods of antiquity with the beings that haunt woods and streams. To see that the Old Gods, as Puck names them, were arrivals brought by traders and armies, only to dwindle into ghostly local presences. I learn to banish the notion of ‘fairies’ as cheap fantasy and instead to recognise an enduring connection between the land and spiritual forces that can terrify.

How did Kipling himself come by this insight? I think the seeds were sown in his very early, very happy years in Bombay, as it was then known. As a small child he was taken about by Indian servants and would observe the rituals of diverse creeds. Looking back, in ‘The Wise Children’ he writes with longing of ‘the wayside magic, the threshold spells’ once part of his everyday life. The poem suggests that these spoke to him of a way of being in the world that was integrated. It recognised there were spiritual forces alive in the natural world, though Christian Europe had no place for them.

It was a moment of brilliance when Kipling thought of Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s Puck as a way to retrieve a sense of those spiritual forces for his readers.

“Weland’s Sword”