Many of the stories describe a parental loss or a necessary departure from home followed by the forging of new ties and a rise to heroic status. Mowgli, like so many child heroes from nineteenth- and twentieth-century children’s literature, is a virtual orphan, abandoned by his parents as a toddler when a tiger storms their encampment. Kipling emphasizes this motif of abandonment through repetition. Not only does Mowgli suffer from a desertion when his parents flee the tiger, but he is abandoned twice more, first when members of the wolf pack he has joined resolve to eject the “Man-cub” from the pack and conspire to kill him, and second when the “Man-Pack” subsequently rejects him and likewise plots his murder. Mowgli is thus recurrently prevented from calling a single group or tribe his own.

Critics generally divide The Jungle Books into the Mowgli stories—a series of linked tales—and the other stories, which, though varied, share certain themes. The Mowgli tales comprise more than half of the two Jungle Books, eight of fifteen stories. These are the Jungle Book stories that actually take place in the jungle. Each of Kipling’s stories in the two volumes begins with and is punctuated by a “song,” or poem, many of which were subsequently set to music. Thus the books couple the genres at which Kipling was most skilled, poetry and the short story. The sequence of the stories has never been fixed once and for all. When first published, each book mixed Mowgli and non-Mowgli stories together, with juxtaposed tales complementing or commenting on each other. For the Outward Bound Edition of 1897, Kipling rearranged the stories, clustering the Mowgli tales together in the first Jungle Book and organizing them chronologically. He also grouped “In the Rukh” with the other stories featuring Mowgli. This distribution of tales was repeated in the Sussex edition, organized at the end of Kipling’s life. The first American editions of the two books, reproduced here, correspond to the original arrangement of the stories; however, the language and phrasing both here and in the Sussex edition differ slightly in places from that of the first English editions.

While India remained a dominant focus in Kipling’s writing throughout his life, he never returned to his birthplace after his marriage. Significantly, Kipling had never been to the Seoni district of central India where the Mowgli stories are set. In fact, none of Kipling’s detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Indian jungle were based on personal experience. Kipling wrote to a friend in 1893 that he included in The Jungle Books everything he had ever “heard or dreamed about the Indian jungle.” He used multiple sources for his depiction of Indian animals, including Robert Armitage Sterndale’s Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon and Denizens of the Jungles. Kipling’s interest in tales of children raised by wolves may have been spurred by his father’s popular 1891 book, Beast and Man in India, which discusses the prevalence in India of “wolf-child stories.” Work on The Jungle Books offered Kipling an opportunity to collaborate with his father: Not only did Lockwood offer his knowledge of Indian wildlife, but he also illustrated his son’s volumes.

LAW AND DISORDER

Like his contemporary, American animal fabulist Joel Chandler Harris, whose “Uncle Remus” stories were popular in England in the 1880s, Kipling told animal stories that diverged from the tradition of moral English and American animal tales. In The Jungle Books Kipling generates a new breed of animal tale, one that combines the didacticism of earlier English animal stories with a new vision of nature influenced in part by the popularization of Charles Darwin’s ideas following the appearance of the groundbreaking On the Origin of Species (1859). The wolves that populate the Mowgli stories are not the denizens of Grimm’s fairytales or Aesop’s fables—that is, expressions of human foibles. They are unabashedly lupine: more hungry hunters than crafty deceivers of girls in red capes. Their primary focus in life is food, and food for them means frequent hunting. The Mowgli stories chime with the refrain “good hunting”—the phrase with which animals who follow what Kipling calls ‘Jungle Law“ hail their fellows. Most of the numerous ”songs“ in the books deal with hunting or with another sort of violence. The animals in The Jungle Books (and, in places, the humans) don’t only discuss hunting—they do it. They do so much of it that Henry James, a lone critical voice when the books first appeared, remarked in a letter to Edmund Gosse: ”The violence of it all, the almost exclusive preoccupation with fighting and killing, is ... singularly characteristic.“

Kipling’s wolves do, however, adhere to a strict code of ethical behavior, which Mowgli—and the hypothetical child reader—learn. The violence in the books is tempered by this code of Jungle Law. In fact, what is most striking about Kipling’s depiction of nature is that it is not a place of wild savagery but of sensible adherence to this law.