Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Letters and Legends. I'm your host, Trevor Maloof. This show is about history, literature, mythology, and everything in between. In this episode, I spoke with Zeb Girard about the Redwall series by Brian Jakes. Here's our discussion. Okay, great. We're going to have a nice conversation here with Zeb about Redwall. Yes. Yes, Zeb, how are you doing?
Speaker: doing doing pretty great because we're going to talk about Redwall. Yes. It's one of those one of those things that I've definitely talked about too much with certain people. And I'm excited that you're excited to talk about it with me. I'm very excited because it's one of those things that I think people don't talk enough about children's literature. And there is that type of children's literature that's like the 20 page picture book
Speaker: And then there's the type that's like teenagers learning about the world literature, which is almost like Boxcar Kids I would put in that category. But not enough is given to this very strange fantasy type literature that's almost adult -like.
Speaker: I was going to say that I'm rereading Martin the Warrior right now and some of my notes here. Somebody is threatening to chop off somebody's paws and make them eat them, which is a game of thrones. Wow. Ancient torture techniques. I don't feel like eight year olds need to be exposed.
Speaker: I didn't even think about it. Is that on Martin the Warrior? Yeah, that's a direct quote from Martin the Warrior. Okay, wow. Why don't we start with what I'm calling the who, what, where? How did you slash we discover Redwall and some of the any kind of stories behind it?
Speaker: Yeah, I think I stumbled into this the same way that I stumbled into a lot of things in my childhood, which is I'm the youngest of three, and I inherited this from my older brother, Carl. So he had started the series. I don't remember why. I don't think he had to write a book report on it, but maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker: Um, and so I think, I think we were talking earlier, um, you might've had to do this for school, but for me, it was just fun. Um, it was, it was something to read over a long weekend. Um, and I, I remember it being my first page turner. Like it's the first thing that,
Speaker: I would read and I was just like, I got to get to the end. I really have to finish this. Um, you're mentioning boxcar children. I did not feel that way about boxcar children. Um, that was probably the first, first books I read. Like when I was, I don't know, five or six years old, um, I have memories of reading boxcar children and thinking, Oh, this is fun. It's fun to read, but not thinking like, Oh man, I can't wait to see what happens next. And I think probably when I was around eight or nine is when.
Speaker: I was reading about mice apparently chopping off paws and making other mice eat them. Yes, I think that when you're reading those other books, it's almost like you're on kind of like, you're at kind of a nice amusement park, like, oh, I'm kind of going around. And this is interesting, they're living in a
Speaker: a boxcar and they have these little adventures and the story is from the 1940s or 50s, but the cover looks like it was painted in the 1980s, so that doesn't make sense. And, you know, you're reading about that.
Speaker: But then you discover something like this and you're completely going into a world that is just sheer madness because it's talking mice and they're fighting and they have like swords that would effectively be, I mean, I have so many questions because effectively they would be like pins that they would be holding. But I was wondering, is this another universe? Like, is this an alternate
Speaker: in the multidimensional multiverse that people talk about, is that where this resides? Or is it literally like in our backyard there is a red wall universe? And would the mice be our size in that other universe? Or are they really like the size of a real field mouse and they're about three inches tall and their sword is a pin?
Speaker: There's so many questions. Yeah, I mean, unlike Watership Down, there's not really, there's not even an allusion to the fact that humans exist, right? So I have to stop myself from every chapter just thinking about this as like that scene in Beetlejuice where like he keeps getting shrunk down and he's just screaming and like I'm just thinking that this is what's happening. Like I could stumble upon
Speaker: like this giant battle of hundreds of mice attacking hundreds of shrews. And it would just be like, just like tiny needles hitting other needles. And me being like, what should I do here? Should I intervene? Should I like sweep them back and be like, it's cool bro, back off. I don't know. But it definitely does seem like A, that's kind of ridiculous to think of.
Speaker: How do they get the swords? Apparently the badgers make them in a volcano. They make so much food, but where did they get the wheat? They have bread products. How did they get the wheat for that? They picked dandelions. Sure, they picked berries. All I'm seeing is a hunter -gatherer society.
Speaker: complex exchange of goods that would that would make these banquets possible that would make like giant kegs of ale that they somehow how do they make wouldn't the how would the wheat be wouldn't wouldn't the wheat be too large for their head or for their mouth like the grains of it maybe that's the answer like
Speaker: If I'm thinking of dandelion tea, I'm thinking of how many dandelions I would need, but they just need the one. If they had one dandelion, that's probably enough for a dandelion tea. Well, how big is a tree? Four or five mice. Right, but maybe they're living in a universe where it is at the size that would be in the same proportion to us. The grain is 100 times smaller
Speaker: Because they are walking through, like when Russell Crowe is bringing his hand across the wheat in Gladiator, in like every other scene in Gladiator's Russell Crowe. I mean, nothing makes you want to
Speaker: just make your hands sweep across wheat like being a Roman general or something. But I'm wondering, maybe they would take their paw and the paw would sweep across and it would be the same size because they're living in a universe where it's the same size relative to us. That's the kind of questions that I would have even as a kid. Yeah, I think when I was a kid, I didn't really ask
Speaker: the same questions I'm asking now. All of these things seemed almost magical. There's just a mouse whose name is Perslane. That's a cute name. And I'm like, oh, that's the thing that I hate in my garden. But it's apparently edible too. So all of the ingredients that they list
Speaker: They're generally like really obscure species. What's like a bank bowl? A bank bowl does not exist in North America. It's exclusive to Europe and West Asia, you know, like I, and I'm looking this up now because I'm an adult. But when I was a kid, I was just like, yeah, of course it's a bank. Well, it's like a bowl that's on a bank, whatever.
Speaker: But yeah, like what are these things because they all exist, or at least if you use the same name, they exist in our universe. And I know what size they are because I can go on Wikipedia and check it out. But are those things the same size for them? If so, they're massive. Like a dandelion is twice the size of a mouse. Like how are they making dandelion tea? That is the equivalent of us like going up to a maple tree and just being like, I'm going to eat that. I'm going to eat that whole tree right now.
Speaker: Right. I mean, there's so many questions with this miniaturized world, but I thought, yeah, we can kind of go back and forth, I guess, about our memories. What I remember is when we met in
Speaker: High school, I we were hanging out in your in your bedroom and I saw that you had like a shelf of red wall. It was like it had it seemingly had every red wall. And I remember thinking like, oh, this is someone I could hang out with and converse with because I was like, I can talk red wall all day because it's there's so many things that are both. It's sort of like
Speaker: progressive rock. Yes, you can make fun of it, but it is also awesome. So it is both of those things. It is both of those things. So that was what I would say is our immediate connection about it. And also we did talk about Redwall. I don't think I kept it to myself. I was like, hey, you have Redwall? Let's talk about this.
Speaker: Yeah, this is not our first Redwall discussion. I think we do it about every two or three years. Almost to the day. Oh, we got to have a Redwall conversation again, because the Olympics are showing. And you told me about the Mad Libs thing very early on, about basically every story, and we haven't even gone into these stories really, and we will, but the Mad Libs where you'll have
Speaker: one character and you replace it with another character and he says the same thing and I'll skip ahead to what I was just going through it today or I've just been listening to it and it had
Speaker: I was only listening to it briefly and the person reading it said, chapter four. I was like, wait a minute, we're already on chapter four? I've only been listening for like 15 minutes. That's what's funny about kid stories is they go really fast, the story.
Speaker: Yeah, and these were massive books to my, you know, eight year old hands, like three to 500 pages. They were not goosebumps books, which I mean, I think that's it. That's a good thing to harp on too. Because when you said you came into my room for the first time and you saw the Redwall series there.
Speaker: in my household, and I think a lot of kids, this is true, but in my household, we didn't go easy on a series, we did a series. So I had like 55 Goosebumps books, 25, 30 Animorphs books, and there were a lot more Animorphs, and I like two or three times that, not to mention the Megamorphs, but like if I liked a thing, I was gonna finish it, and that was true for Redwall, for sure. So like when you saw on my wall, there might have been one book missing,
Speaker: And it's worth noting that Carl and I each had our own copy, which is completely unnecessary, because we have 20 of these books, like, oh, you'll read Moss Flower this week, I'll read Red Wall. It's easy enough to do. But for whatever reason, we as kids thought that we needed to have our own, you know, three or four dollar a piece copy of 20 different books. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: That was a big thing for me, just going through that entire series. And then they started making the new covers. And I was like, ah, now I have a mix. I got some of the old covers and some of the new covers. Well, let's talk about these covers, actually, because they're not your average cover for a book. Typically, a children's book will be just kind of a
Speaker: maybe even a photo or kind of a badly done photo with a photo matte over it with some matte over it. This is that's not this. These are fully rendered paintings of rodents with swords and in in medieval dress.
Speaker: yeah yeah and i certainly liked the i don't know if it's the first but certainly the older design which is basically a tapestry it's like weaving okay so this mouse it like creates kind of a pictograph like this this mouse is facing off against this rat or whatever in this corner and then it created almost like a
Speaker: like a stained glass, I'm saying tapestry, but like a stained glass window with all of these different vignettes painted into it. So like, here's the battle, here's the red wall, here's the mountain, and like all of that. That's my memory of the earlier ones.
Speaker: and then after that it just became like let's have an otter photo realistically drawing a bow yeah i don't like that as much but the the originals had these uh iconographic images of mice and badgers and ferrets where
Speaker: They were representational and they were flat. Like I'm looking at right now of Mossflower, they were sort of flat two -dimensional as if they were invented. This is so silly. Pre -Renaissance paintings.
Speaker: where they didn't have all the techniques of a Rembrandt and et cetera. These are some medieval paintings of a mouse. But then on Masvalor, there's a more realistic painting of a ship. And almost every red wall involves a ship. This is the Mad Lib component. And so that's what I say about the cover.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm thinking maybe I'm thinking of the back cover. So another element is to it is that they'll have these writings like on the edge or on the side, just very intricate writings that take you into the world to make it seem like this is really happening. There really is a place where they have this ornate mouse language or something. Yeah, it draws you in, right?
Speaker: I think that's part of the magic there. Like, oh, it's just an unassuming cover. And then once you open it, you see a map. What's this map about? Which is fairly stereotypical now in fantasy. But like, oh, I kind of want to be engrossed in this world.
Speaker: And then it slaps you right in the face in the beginning with like, oh, this world is full of rodents. Okay. Well, they have a lot of like characters that are sort of biblical in the way they're sold. But then when you kind of hear it, you're not sure. Is this more of an epic character or are they more down to earth type? Or maybe they're both. He's trying to show you both sides of it.
Speaker: I mean, I'll say that I don't remember how I figured, came to Redwall, probably just in the library, found it. But there was a book choice review book. In sixth grade, we had to do a book review, but we get to choose the book. So everyone is trying to, not everyone, but people are reading pretty standard books. And I am saying, I want to read The Bellmaker.
Speaker: the red wall, the bellmaker, and it's long. It's, it's, you said it's like 300 pages. I don't know exactly. At least. At least. So I'm reading, I'm reading this going, Oh, I'll be okay. And not realizing I have no time management at this age, but I'm reading as much as I can. And I remember being in the cafeteria, having lunch, reading bellmaker and thinking to myself,
Speaker: None of you are reading, Bellmaker. I'm reading it. You don't understand how important this is, what I'm learning here. It's about a mouse, and he has to travel across what is presumably a small pond, but to him could take weeks, and there's storms and waves.
Speaker: and all of this stuff anyway i probably only read a third of it by the time the sunday before it was due came about and i'm going oh my so the whole day i just read read read all of bellmaker because i have to write the book review and i had to write the whole thing and uh... i mean i must have done okay because i don't remember otherwise but it's just a very funny memory of mine
Speaker: of reading Bellmaker within a few hours. Yeah. And that was but I see I didn't read the other ones. But I think I now see it doesn't really I mean, I read other ones later. But at the time, that was my first entry. But I feel like they're all kind of the same. Yeah, I think I think that's the big thing that you touched on that that Mad Lib
Speaker: quality that the books have, you know, I'm rereading Martin the Warrior now and I can tell you what happened. But if you asked me my childhood recollection, even if you asked it at the time, I would probably only be able to tell you the mad lib structure. I would say, oh yeah, Redwall, there's a big feast, Clooney's a rat and he's attacking, and like I think there's a bird that's involved.
Speaker: and they have to go somewhere, and so they get separated, and then they gotta go retrieve something important. I don't remember what it is. They gotta retrieve it, then they get it back, and then somehow, like, along the way, one of the groups that was sent out from Redwall coming back allows them to force Kuni out of Redwall, and they win, everybody celebrates, and there's another feast. That's it. That's all I remember. And it's 400 pages.
Speaker: How is the only thing I remember the general structure of a Redwall book? That's all I remember of the Redwall number one novel. So another thing about this is that it has a lot of phonetic language.
Speaker: of different British and English dialects and Scottish dialects that is jarring for a young kid to try and read because, and also the character, I don't know, this is a little bit iffy that the character, different kind of ethnicities or different sections of Britain match up to different animals.
Speaker: Yeah, it's kind of racist in a way. Yeah. The moles tend to be somewhat Scottish, I believe. Mice generally English, right? But the weirdest thing, so they say generally English, but what I mean is they spell the words correctly. But that's probably not how they sound. Nobody says, to her, you say the.
Speaker: How am I supposed to interpret the accent of Martin the Warrior or any of the major mouse characters who, according to what I'm reading, have no accent? I'm using finger quotes here. Like, what is their accent? Everyone has an accent. So, yeah, I don't, it seems
Speaker: Yeah, there's a certain, I think that's the only thing that dips into the human, but there's certainly a really odd speciesism that
Speaker: all carnivores or like omnivores who skew more meaty, they're all bad characters. Every single rodent that eats meat is evil, wants to kill you, wants to steal your children, wants to burn down your town. And that's all they do. And there's not much money in it, it seems like. All they, like, sure they're slaves, or like, if they steal your stuff, then I guess they have your stuff, but then what do you do with it?
Speaker: like you go to the market there's no there's no market there's like how do you take your stolen golden wares and go and actually i don't know um but yeah the it seems like every carnivore is bad every herbivore is good um and then to your point from before like we have this incredibly
Speaker: I gotta say, if I were Scottish, I'd be offended. Like, that's not how Scottish people talk. That's like, let's take all of the, like, odd inflections that somebody who speaks Glaswegian or whatever, what do they say? All of the weird things, just cram it into a sentence, make them, like, forget that the subject of a sentence is I, but the object is me.
Speaker: They went on some long, long screed, like a rant. And at the end, I was just thinking to myself, this is a badger that is saying this. This is a badger covered in armor with a hilt or a sword going on such a big rant. You know what's even more offensive?
Speaker: So I'm going through Martin the Warrior and they have pygmy shrews, which is a legitimate species, but the idea of, you know, pygmies in human history is generally very offensive, right?
Speaker: either A, they didn't really exist, or B, they didn't do all of the things that people put into films and radio and books, you know, claiming that they're cannibals, claiming that they're, like they can't speak right, or that's the role of the pygmy shrews and Martin the warrior, like they're
Speaker: They speak weird. Are they kind of a wild native animal? Yeah. And like they don't understand each other like, Oh, you poke a poke long time. We am like, Oh, this is really, really offensive in 2022. I don't know how they're getting away with this. But then they're talking about shrews. So like,
Speaker: None of them were people. That's interesting. This is almost like the opposite. This is the opposite of Star Trek where Gene Roddenberry said he used aliens as a means to talk about issues of civil rights and so on. This is the opposite. I'm using animals as a way to put down parts of British culture and ethnicities that I don't like.
Speaker: Yeah, wouldn't it be interesting if a mouse said that? Yeah, that seems to be the approach. Yeah, this story would be better, but with mice. Yeah, with mice, it's a little easier to stomach, right? Yeah. I mean, let's say it's probably somewhere in between. He thought he was representing everyone.
Speaker: but the way you're doing it doesn't quite work because you're making
Speaker: I'd be much better off. I would be happier if it was like there were Scottish mice and there were Scottish badgers and there were good badgers and there were bad badgers. So just show like being a good quote person, which is a stretch in this story, but a good being is just inside. That would be to me, the better message to say, hey, you could be a good mouse, a bad mouse. It's about character.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I think for me, you know, my memory of this is, is as an American child. So I didn't know that like summit was a way to say something.
Speaker: It's not a word that I would ever hear. That's another thing. There's no guide. There isn't like when you start the book, you're like, welcome to your first copy of Red Wall. For your reading pleasure, be aware there will be different dialects represented in the text.
Speaker: And you will have to be aware of this. This was not explained to me. And that's like half the book. And it's it is tough. It's like it's like chewing through tough. I don't know. It's like trying to.
Speaker: go through the jungle, like hack through the jungle. I was like, oh, the story's going so well. And then it's like, yarg! Yee go! Darg and find him! Hey! And like, whoa, I have to go through. And it's a whole conversation.
Speaker: It'll be like three pages of dialogue within this dialect. Yeah, and they move between them too. Martin the Warrior has the concept of, it's like Bad Rang, the leader of the Marshank Fort, he'll switch like his natural speech when he's talking to a fellow pirate.
Speaker: And then he has to talk to slaves and then he has to talk to people he respects. There's slaves in this? I forgot about that part. Yeah. And that's probably the first time where I'm like, oh, this economy actually makes sense. All right. So they just they just straight up steal.
Speaker: critters to do work for them, now I see how he built a fort. But otherwise, how does somebody like Clooney, you know, assemble an army of rats and give them armor? And like, they, they're going into battle. It needs to be repaired. Like, there's a lot of stuff here that wasn't really thought through. There's a lot of logistics that go into waging war that we never really see.
Speaker: except for a badger and an anvil and a volcano like that's the answer like oh you just bring your stuff to the badger and the volcano um but yeah there's um there's a lot of switches that that badgering makes because he's talking now he's talking to his old friend now he's talking to somebody else now he's like so like he changes his speech right rindix calls it out
Speaker: that he's going to change his speech now. And I'm like, you can't now. All right. This is even more confusing than if you just had some people have different accents. That's totally okay. I can be like, okay, this is the way that specific shrew talks. Gotcha. So you would like to have an even more Byzantine and bureaucratic discussion about war making between a ferret and, and what otter? What are the, what is an otter? Is he neutral?
Speaker: Otters are generally good. They're good, okay. We need to get a - It should be noted we're talking river otters. I've always - A river otter. Because if we're talking sea otters, then we're almost to the level of this is a human coming in and could just step on all of you. Is he large? He's very large. Yeah, even the river otters are pretty big. It's a river otter. River otter size.
Speaker: Okay. Um, 2 .2 feet is still pretty big. Yeah, I mean, the idea of a mouse be leading an army against is it badgers? What are the main enemies badgers?
Speaker: But who are the main enemies? So, so again, anything, anything that's a carnivore, so like, ferrets, stoats, rats, they're all bad. All right. So we're going to transition, I think, to the setting of Redwall. Yeah. So let's talk about the setting of Redwall, the sort of the weather and the
Speaker: Let's start over. We're going to talk about the setting of Redwall now, the flora and fauna.
Speaker: Or is it just fauna? We've already been talking about the animals. So we're talking about the plants. We're talking about the size of stuff. What's the size of a tree in regards to one of these creatures? Because it seems like they are of human size. It seems, yeah. Trees and mountains and hills, things like that, they definitely seem like they're portrayed
Speaker: that they're human sized. But then they talk about all of the things, like they're not bigger, like a seagull is larger than they are, you know, an eagle is larger than that. So like all of those comparative sizes generally work. But then for whatever reason, a mouse can make a home out of a tree.
Speaker: And you're like, what? How do you get that trunk is like 40 feet wide? How are you in an oak tree? And you're like, yeah, this is my this is my home. This is your home. This is a city. This is your home. I think this is it's like this. This is a bit of the CS Lewis idea where fantasy is fluid. It doesn't have to follow.
Speaker: perfect rules. And so you can both be the size of a real field mouse and the size of a human being at the same time. And I think as I got older, that started to annoy me around maybe middle school, I was like,
Speaker: I don't get it, you know, and have all these questions like that. And if you if that takes you out of the world, then it's not doing its job. But if you're still in the world with that, then it's fine. Yeah, I feel like
Speaker: I read the foreword to A Clockwork Orange and Anthony Burgess kind of talks about this. He regrets hiding behind this sort of street slang and fantastical representation of things because he wanted to tell a real story and make it more relatable. In this sense, it's almost like Redwall
Speaker: it does it intentionally. They want it to be fantastical so that, you know, we buy into it a little bit more. Like we wouldn't, we don't need to ask as many questions when they're like, this, the delightful dandelion tea that Miss Buttersphere prepared, like, oh, cool, you're just putting syllables together. So at this point, I'm bought in, like, what's the story?
Speaker: And I think that that is some of the magic of Redwall is like, they're saying things that are real things. And kind of what we were hinting at before, like these are real plants that they have. They also exist in the human world that they're eating. But they're prepared in such a way that a human would never prepare, you know, that like buttercup flower,
Speaker: Ale, like that's what is that? But for a mouse, it doesn't make sense. It's they really love. They love dandy dandy wine. What is it? They love. Not brandy wine. No, they love some wine. Yeah, they love dandy lion wine.
Speaker: Isn't that what they drink? Yeah, or ale. I don't know. Ale. They definitely have lots of ales and wines. And they come from plants that, yeah, of course, rodents eat. And we generally don't as humans. So that, I think, is part of the magic of it. And same thing with the places. So they built an abbey as a human would.
Speaker: but not necessarily all of the features are human features or features that humans would want in their abbey. Right, like a running wheel in the corner. Running wheel, a slide. A little slide. Sawdust pile. Sawdust pile to jump in. So I would say that this is supposed to be England.
Speaker: It's it's certainly supposed to be Europe. It's a version of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It has to be just based on the the species that are there and the food that they're eating. I think Britain makes the most sense. And of course, Brian, Jake's being from there also makes sense. But yeah, I think it's England. But is it mouse England or is it our England just on a tiny, these are very small state park
Speaker: Our area of natural beauty, I guess it would be in England, where these talking mice are concentrated and we haven't found them yet. Right. I mean, I'll tell you how I bridged the gap of this problem as a kid, as now I remember it. It's that I said that our world exists and they exist within it as little tiny animals, but they're way off in the countryside.
Speaker: Maybe it's a time period where there isn't a lot of civilization. There isn't a lot of cities or cars or anything like that. So that kind of gets your first part off pretty easy about how they could exist. Why are they talking? I don't know. Maybe it's just a representation of talking, but then that doesn't quite
Speaker: It makes sense because they have suits of armor and they have mills and all of that. So I don't, let's just say you take that as given. Hey, that really is happening. These are highly intelligent animals. And then the final piece is that these trees and things they interact with happen to also be just tiny versions of the large things we know of. So a giant maple has kind of like, it's a bonsai maple.
Speaker: and there's a bonsai forest of maple. It still doesn't quite make sense how they are talking and walking around as humans. That's why I think the multiverse thing makes more sense that they're in another dimension. Yeah, it could also make sense if it's, let's imagine some creature doesn't have to be human, but sufficiently advanced to have a science experiment where you just take a one acre chunk
Speaker: of a forest I like where you're going and you bestow upon those critters the ability to speak and then you basically hoist them up or at least their consciousness up into a simulation and they are in that simulation and we're watching it we're trying to figure out what would happen if you gave shrews and mice and birds everything the ability to talk to each other and wield medieval weapons
Speaker: What can that teach us about society? And I think maybe Brian Jakes is just an incredibly decorated professor of neuroscience. And that's why he couldn't reveal his studies because it's top secret. So we put him into these books.
Speaker: This is like a HG Wells kind of, because this is in the Dr. Moreau, Island of Dr. Moreau. I'm taking animals and creating something more. Yeah, it's a Redwall Zoo. Isn't that what it is? As a reader, for sure, that's what it is. We get to see this scene play out.
Speaker: Yeah, that's interesting. That's one interpretation. I think of it as kind of uber coziness is how I would describe it. Because it's cozy to hear about castles and abbeys and adventures and stuff. And animals are also cozy. They're not they make you feel good to pet a cat or a dog or another another type of animal. Yeah.
Speaker: That's what I would say. No, no, no. I never thought about that. But that's like, there's two fantasies in one. Right. So the idea behind fantasy, like it allows you to detach from reality. And yes, I think the best fantasy you should probably have something to say about current society and the way that we interact with each other. But
Speaker: One of the main blessings of the genre is that you've already removed that suspension of disbelief, or sorry, you've removed the need to suspend that disbelief. Like, oh, it's just mice. All right, cool. I don't need to ask any more questions. It's just talking mice. And that makes it a little more approachable for somebody because I'm not thinking about, oh, yeah, but if you stabbed that human
Speaker: with a sword eight times, that human would be dead. And you tell me in this story that the shrew is not dead. I'm like, oh, okay, maybe shrew is a different internal organs. Maybe the sword isn't that big. I don't know. It's a lot easier for me to buy into dandelion wine because it's not anything I'm familiar with. And so I get kind of caught up in that fantasy for sure.
Speaker: But animals are killed and do die in the stories. Yeah, for sure. But the threshold for that could sometimes be preposterous. Yeah, it could be Rick Rimes -esque is what I would say.
Speaker: oh this is the main character so this main character can't die even though like they're surrounded by 15 enemies and this plays out you know in a lot of fiction but in the case of in the case of Redwall I'm not that concerned I've never really found myself being like I mean kind of I do when I think about like oh there's a badger taking on four mice well the mice would just be dead this isn't really a contest
Speaker: But aside from that, every battle, I'm like, oh, and it's going back and forth, and anything could happen right now. And I don't find myself thinking, oh, but that army was 10 times the size. There's no way they could have won. I know I want the good guy to win, but in this case, the good guy totally wouldn't have won. I don't have that thought when I'm reading Redwall. Now, in the interest of having some structure, let's move on to, well, actually, let's finish up by looking at this map.
Speaker: Now, I can just look at the map if you want, but it basically gives an outline. Someone has drawn this together and has said,
Speaker: this is not doesn't quite match in the same way that the Simpsons house doesn't make sense if you actually tried to build it which they did in the early houses for a lottery some lottery game and it didn't really make sense that where the rooms are if you go in this room you go in the other room so the wrong room i say
Speaker: So it doesn't quite make sense in that way, but it does a pretty good job of laying out, for the most part, what Redwall is all about. And I would say, how would we best describe the central piece of it to me would be the Mossflower Woods? Yes. Yeah, the Mossflower Woods. Yeah, the Mossflower Woods.
Speaker: ties it all together. Moss not famous for its flowers, I think, but I'll go with it, right? Yeah, there's, it's a little bit like Middle Earth, also a little bit, here's the thing, it's a little bit like Middle Earth, it's a little bit like Westeros, which is also a little bit like Britain. It looks like Britain. Yeah, it's basically, there's an ocean to the west, and there's an ocean to the east,
Speaker: It's unclear what's to the south, but probably an ocean. To the north, probably an ocean. And then there's a big inland lake, of course. Salmond Dastron over to the west, that's the volcano in which all armor is ever made, according to my recollection of the book. Coss Mordor. Yeah. Mordor.
Speaker: Not a lot of volcanoes in Britain, though. No, no, it's a combination. It's like, I, Britma Iceland, and a little bit of Germany. Let's see, I'm trying to match up some of this stuff. So it's the they go on this long voyage in the bellmaker. And
Speaker: They leave from Redwall Abbey, so maybe that's the next thing we should talk about. Yeah, Redwall Abbey, kind of central towards the south. What's interesting is, there's a castle off to the south, but there aren't a lot of settlements or structures. I guess this map doesn't have
Speaker: What's it called? I can't remember Bad Rings 4, I just said it. But that is not on the map. But the rest of that area is on the map. And it's worth pointing out what I pointed to you earlier. That is upside down of what is in the book. That what is up in this map, which is oriented north, is actually down in Martin the Warrior.
Speaker: So they're definitely, they're inconsistencies in the maps, but if you put them together, yeah, it makes something like this, which is pretty, it's pretty cool that somebody went to the trouble of putting this together. It was not Brian Jakes, right? No. Well, either somebody could be, looks pretty professional, could be a publishing house thing, but I'm not sure. But I'm looking here at the, at the bellmaker,
Speaker: where he says that Joseph, the main character, recruits a hare, a hedgehog, a squirrel, and a four mole to go on this adventure. And I thought none of these animals should be within 500 feet of each other. Yeah.
Speaker: They're not going to put them on the Brendan voyage. When you look at the bellmaker, it looks like they're on a leather shoe going off. They literally were in a shoe. That's the difference. Yeah, they actually are in a leather shoe. They got it a cobblers. They sail on a pond. And that's the question. When we look at this map, are we looking at like 20 feet or 20 miles? Oh, yeah.
Speaker: How big is this zoo? Sorry, I'm gonna stick with it. It is a zoo. Well, we have Fort Latigert, Trag Cave. The Sametra looks like... Sametra. Oh no, that's it. I was wrong. I was wrong. So if you look in the Northeast, that is Marshank. That's what I was looking for. Marshank's there.
Speaker: is oriented the same way that it's oriented in Martin the Warrior. So it's just that the narration was wrong. What's it called? So Marshank's up in the top right right before the Eastern Sea. Oh, Marshank. Yeah. Well, in Bellmaker, I think he goes on the north coast to sail against the wolf fox or the fox wolf because you've got to be two species. Yeah.
Speaker: to, or it is, he's just a fox. I think he's just a fox. He's calling him a fox wolf. A marshank. Why, what is that? What is marshank? Yeah.
Speaker: the fortress that's constructed by bad rang the pirate basically he wanted to settle down you know and stop being a pirate so much okay um and so in order to construct this fortress as a pirate he went around and and picked up a whole bunch of slaves any any small group of undefended so -called good uh critters so mice definitely moles pick them up and then make them build his fort
Speaker: Oh my goodness. That wasn't nice. Also, how much can they carry? A little mouse, what does he carry? I mean, that's the thing, is this mouse carrying a whole block of... I'm confused as, again, we're back to the same problem. How big is the castle? How much can the mouse carry? Like a block, a brick?
Speaker: How big's a brick? Yeah, is a pebble basically a boulder, you know? Right. But like, there are actual boulders, those exist. How big is that? What is the house like? Is his castle the equivalent of like a small shed? Or a small? It can't be for a fox. He wants to have a big castle. There'd be like a maximum size of a doghouse, right? That's probably about the size of Redwall.
Speaker: It's probably about the size of the doghouse. Too much. Okay, what about Castle Fleuré? I don't know, I don't know. Okay, Toadland. There's one that just says Toadlands. Yep. And the Toads have their own way of speaking too, which is also probably offensive if we check it out. I would want it to be something like, Welcome to the land of the Toad. Here you will learn the secret, but it's not. It's going to be like, YEIG! Welcome to Le Toadland!
Speaker: or something like that. Swamplands. I mean, this is a total, this is Swamplands with a volcano. I'm sorry, but this is Tolkien. Then you have the mountains and about that Mount Pit. Isn't that the Misty Mountains?
Speaker: And Mossflower and Redwall are, of course, Hobbiton and the Shire in my mind. Before we call it on the setting, I think it's worth noting that this kind of plays into very well the video game culture of the 90s. It kind of continues today with this sort of world building, kind of like Minecraft does now. Right. You could do with Civilization or Age of Empires. A lot of those games allowed you to make your own map
Speaker: And almost every time this is what I'd be doing, I try to create a map. It's like, oh, you got the mountains over here. And then this is where the foxes are going to come in. They're over this side. Sure, they look like knights, but they're really foxes. That world building is just so appealing, especially as a kid. Oh, yeah, exactly. I made a million maps like this in class or in school when I was bored. And it always looks something like this. OK, there's an ocean.
Speaker: I didn't mean to sound like Beetlejuice, but there's an ocean. Let's move on. We are moving on to characters.
Speaker: Okay, characters. I feel like we kind of covered a lot of the characters already. We basically got animals. The central characters are mice. We could talk about the author quickly too. His name is Brian Jakes. He was English. He kind of was a working class guy. He worked as a truck driver and a mailman or a milkman rather.
Speaker: He did and he was a good writer. And they wrote some interesting ideas. And I read somewhere that he thought mice kind of represented children and that making it about mice, cave children, the feeling like they could be empowered. Yeah, that's that's pretty marvelous, because I think that it's back to what I was saying before, that because they're rodents, I can suspend disbelief a lot easier. I don't really need to think about it.
Speaker: But it's worth noting that they are, I mean, except for the pygmy shrews that were quite offensive we talked about before, they're the smallest of the speaking characters in Redwall. And yet they're usually the main character. So you see that they have to overcome this obstacle. And the obstacle isn't that different from what
Speaker: a child might have to overcome themselves I mean sure like slashing and stabbing it's not something that they should probably be doing but like they need to go and save this other family of mice like but can we actually save this family of mice we're only nine year old kids whatever at a certain point that metaphor gets gets conflated but like I think that's that's something really interesting that both
Speaker: eight -year -old me and a mouse that's you know a tenth of the size of a badger thinks that it can overcome something and a lot of this is like in children's literature is off the wall not possible.
Speaker: It's not like these mice fly. These mice don't have super magic powers that allow them to read otter minds or something. It doesn't have that aspect of fantasy. It's all fairly real world actions. And those actions have real world consequences, even if this is a zoo of mice and ferrets. They're fairly grounded goals that they're trying to accomplish.
Speaker: that a nine -year -old might have. They might just want to save their village. They might want to get their family together or whatever. And there are obstacles that are bigger than they think they can overcome. But that's the idea. That's how you grow. You accomplish a bigger goal than you think you can overcome. Exactly. Yeah, I think that really puts it well, succinctly. I think that the mice represent what is small, what seems
Speaker: that which is put upon or is told what can not be done. And by showing this way of teamwork, whether it's banding together with a squirrel,
Speaker: whatever you need to do. Of course, that is the positive side where you're seeing the multitudinousness of Redwall where I think he was trying to teach about cooperation and working with people who are different from you and speak different from you. And there's nothing wrong too with having a good feast.
Speaker: and taking something that is basically Fellowship of the Ring, but is maybe, I mean, I read Fellowship of the Ring when I was 15, so that's a long time to wait to get this same message of the Hobbit. Hobbits are basically children too.
Speaker: Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. They have to overcome a lot. And it seems from the outset, just physically, they're not going to be able to accomplish the goal of this book. There is a quest they must go on. Both Frodo and Bilbo have this. There's no way anyone could do this. So never mind someone who's two and a half feet tall.
Speaker: And I think that's true here in Redwall. But I believe Frodo, kind of the ideas from what I remember of Gandalf and the crew was like, if we give this little guy the ring, no one would ever think that we would do that. No one would ever consider that we would give him the ring. So it's actually safer.
Speaker: if we give it to him, and the same way no one would think that a bellmaker in a walnut ship, I don't know if it's something tiny here, but in a tiny ship would take on the fox wolf. Something so formidable, it's two species in one. I'm wondering what it would look like. I'd love to see an artist's rendering of a fox wolf.
Speaker: I'm sure it exists and if not, we have the technology to make it for sure. Now what we could, moving on from instead of plot like ABCDE, because we don't have a lot of time to sort of work all that out, we could give a general feeling of what these characters are doing. You know, you just said earlier a breakdown of it.
Speaker: of a general plot. So we could do that and kind of throw in like, what is in a feast? What is in a battle? Because we've already kind of talked about what a plot kind of looks like. And then we could throw in the general mythology, which is, I'll just start off right off the bat. There is a place called Redwall that is literally a abbey of monk
Speaker: of a mouse monks, right? They live in a walled fortress that I think was built for sort of a military defense, like a Hammurabi's Babylon or something. It's like a shielded abbey that cannot be overcome by a fox wolf. He can't jump over it.
Speaker: Yeah, I think what's interesting is, so it's called Redwall, but most of these books don't actually take place in Redwall, or it's only kind of tangentially like a book that involves the Abbey. But when you said Abbey, it really made me think before, like, it's not
Speaker: there's like there's an abbot and there's like maybe one or two there's like friar a couple people but then there's like 120 other randos who are just there you know raking the gardens um so it's not it's not just an abbey in the sense that you know if if this were let's say ninth century england which might be a good comparison to draw that's a whole bunch of monks
Speaker: that live there. A few hundred maybe a thousand monks are in the same place. They're writing down records to make sure things are safe and they're putting away valuables and they're making their food and they might have some sort of support for the surrounding community but they are not themselves the surrounding community. They are just a whole bunch of monks in the same place. So that's interesting that like it's centered around an abbey. You know that there's this basically
Speaker: in every book, even if it's not Redwall itself, there's that idea of civilization that whatever the main character is needs to save that civilization almost always, maybe always, by leaving that civilization. They have some quest they need to go on to save that civilization.
Speaker: So either the abbey or some endastron, like some place needs to be saved, some civilized, whatever place, however we define that, needs to be saved. And the best way for us to do it is to go into the woods.
Speaker: right or charter a small leather shoe to get in and and go to some other coastline and talk to those people about oh i don't know a feast but but uh the stakes are i don't know how many of these we didn't look it up but let's just say there's 20 books there could be more we'll look it up so
Speaker: of these books, the stakes are not always the same. And I would say that's sort of like three or four books that are like high stakes. And those are the ones that keep getting with these sort of epic characters, sort of Moses -like, Joan of Arc,
Speaker: these figures that he's drawing from, he's drawing these characters from history. And anyway, those books that I would say, if anyone's listening for bibliography to explore Redwall, it's the original book, that's kind of high stakes, then Martin the Warrior, Mossflower,
Speaker: Those are the three that I come to, maybe Salomon Destron. Those kind of, those fill the mythology of Redwall within that era, because you get this idea that it's this endless history going back in time.
Speaker: through the mists of, mists of Mossflower time, mists of Redwall time. And he does a really good job of creating that. I think Mossflower, I did a very basic Mossflower is, is that supposed to be the absolute first book, even though it was not the first written Redwall was the first written. Oh, do you mean chronologically? Yes.
Speaker: Well, no, because Martin the Warrior is about Martin the Warrior, right? Maybe we need to look at the founders of Redwall, right? We need to look up the technology. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think it would be good to put them in order, like publishing order and then in chronological order and talk about it.
Speaker: It sounds like we may have to do that in a future session, but I think that's, that's a, it's a worthwhile thing to talk about for a few minutes. Yeah. Well, we could throw out the, it says Lord Brocktree, the legend of Luke, Martin the warrior, Mossflower. So I was, I was pretty off, but I was, it's, it is a beginning. Yeah, it was one of the beginning, but that was me going off of my memory from.
Speaker: a while ago, the legend of, okay, outcasts of Redwall, Mariel of Redwall, the bellmaker, Salomon Destron, Redwall, Mattimeo. I do remember that, the bellmaker was a prequel. Oh man, it just keeps going. But I think we got the general idea that Martin the Warrior is the guy who takes on
Speaker: Is he the first one in history to take on the fox wolves or is he one of many that have come before?
Speaker: Yeah, that's I think a good thing from Tolkien's work too, that kind of rings through in Redwall, that these are all echoes of things that have happened in the past. And a lot of that is just word of mouth, like legend. Oh yeah, Martin the warrior was this, all they have left is the sword. That's all that's actually left of Martin the warrior. They don't even have
Speaker: you know, any real writing from that time. It's just, I think the beginning of Martin the Warrior is, you know, one of the abbots or I don't know, one of the older members of Redwall is like, well, have you ever heard the story of Martin the Warrior? Boom, open Martin the Warrior. All right. Which is a very fun approach to fantasy because it could go on forever. You could keep echoing those stories
Speaker: And I wouldn't really get bored because now you get to reinvent it anew with the same rules, the same feasts.
Speaker: Well, they could each end up at a feast. And at the feast, that person then says, or that animal says, have you heard the story of? And then you hear that story. And within that one, they're at a feast. And he says, have you heard the story of? So we're like 40 feasts in. We're never going to get back to the beginning to hear. And at some point, some animal's going to turn to someone and go, I don't know what is happening. Do you know where we're fighting and who?
Speaker: It's kind of like that, that's that Futurama episode where they have the box or whatever, the inner dimensional box that they jump into, which creates a new dimension. And each time they do that, they create a new dimension. So how are they going to get back out to their original dimension once they lose the rope that they were holding on to? It's exactly what leapfrogging. It's like Twister with dimensions.
Speaker: Oh no. Okay. I'm now having to learn about, and I have to say at a certain point, I felt like as a reader, I don't know if I can hear any more about Moss Flower. I felt like, you know, I felt I had got so much of it. I was full and now I realized, but what happened then was I always wanted more. No, I wasn't going to sit and read. You know, I had moved on, but that's why our discussions were fun. Like I always wanted to return to this world.
Speaker: Did we have so did we want to go over the the plot line? So you said it usually starts in Redwall not always but usually then there's a guy a mouse Typically because they're the main characters who have to go on some journey to save everyone. Yep
Speaker: And it could be a cross, a pawn, and a leather shoe. And then they don't necessarily have any weaponry, but they have to get the weapons along the way. 20 pages in, we cut to the baddie who's a large ferret. And he has boots on his tiny little paws.
Speaker: And he has a giant cutlass and he's talking in a crazy dialect about, and as a reader you're going, I don't know what's happened. I'm really nervous about this. I don't know what he's saying. He's so angry at everyone and he wants, he's greedy. He wants power, money, wealth, fame. We don't know. It's some combination. And then eventually there's a feast before he goes on the journey.
Speaker: there's a fee somewhere in between there's many fees and these fees have dandelion wine and or dandelion juice i don't know yeah and there's usually a separation at some point right so either
Speaker: Sometimes there's two that set out from different places, but usually it's a main group goes out. They have to assemble the squad. That squad goes out and there's some challenge that forces them to be separated. Either they're in the ship and the ship goes down. They're in a fight and like they run away, but they run away in different directions and they can't find each other. And so now you have two stories that can go parallel to each other. And the third one of whatever back home is,
Speaker: So it allows you to create that kind of soap opera dynamic that you can jump between these different places, and the reader still understands the linearity of the narrative. There's a lot of talk of how much supplies they have left. I have four loaves. I have half a loaf. Then there's typically a big battle, a one -on -one with the baddie, and then you've got to go back to Redwall and have another feast.
Speaker: And it's very soothing because you're watching little furry animals go on an adventure and you kind of feel like there's sort of a claustrophobic element like we're trapped on this boat or we're hiding in a small hideout. And it makes you feel kind of scared but cozy because you're not actually hiding out.
Speaker: Yeah, and you don't know how it's going to end. You know that good is going to triumph over evil, but some goodies might die along the way. Some baddies will die along the way, and maybe half of Redwall burns to the ground. I don't know. It gets real. It gets real. Everything is perfect. But yeah, you come back to whatever civilization you left.
Speaker: Someone will get run through by an otter. No, by an ox wolf or by a wolf hound. Someone will have a cutlass go through and they go, whoa. I mean, like I said, I remember reading this in the cafeteria going, this is crazy. I can't believe this is I'm allowed to read this. Yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker: Someone once said this to me, and I feel like a bunch of people have said it about the difference between European and American television, that American television has this weird aversion to sex, which pretty much everyone does or at least wants. And then there's like violence on the other hand, which pretty much no one wants to happen to them. No one wants to be shot. No one wants to be stabbed. And we just show it all the time to children that we're like, yep.
Speaker: And this, okay, here it is. No moral, well, to be fair, do you want to read about Fox's mating? I mean, there's literally a movie, there's literally a Redwall book called Moral Fox. Yes.
Speaker: Have you read it? It's a rock, right? The next thing will be not some other time. I'll just be quizzing you on red box. Go get your free red wall. Yeah. I mean, there's no way we could cover
Speaker: theoretically we could go book by book that would be a different thing this is an introduction to Redwall you could go I don't know if I have it in me to read many Redwall yeah 22 is too much I think yeah I think one book though you know we could do one book like you written maybe I could do Martin I'm starting with the first one I have to say it goes quick
Speaker: Yeah, well, I mean, that's it. And if you've done Redwall, I've done Martin. So I think we can we can reconvene when I finished Martin and you finished a book. Yeah, that'll be put a punctuation mark on this. Yeah, I think we will have we have filled in the Redwall. I think that's about about it for now. OK, thank you, Zeb.
Speaker: Yeah, this is great. Yeah, let's do it again. I think, I think we've done more than scratch the surface. But I think if we, if we come back and do one more, one more Redwall session, I think we've got some really good content here. Some really random things that just bubbled to the surface. Didn't even think about since I was a kid.
Speaker: Thank you, Zeb, for joining me in this discussion of Redwall. And thank you for listening to Letters and Legends. This podcast is produced by me, Trevor Maloof, Copyright 2022. Tune in for more soon. Goodbye.
