A follow-up question to yesterday’s post about alternate worlds with sentient animals: is the Redwall universe coterminous with our own? That is to say, do humans exist somewhere near Mossflower County? Are the scattered animal strongholds of Salamandastron and Redwall Abbey more like the Shire in Middle-Earth, which is populated exclusively by non-humans but perfectly aware of the existence of humans, or are they more like The Wind in the Willows, where humans have been entirely replaced by anthropomorphic animals?
In the majority of the Redwall series, there is no mention of humans or even the possibility of them. Mice, badgers, pine martens, rats, hares and monitor lizards have managed to develop a (roughly) feudal society without any infrastructure or history provided by a lost human civilization. And yet, in Redwall, Cluny the Rat is described as being possibly Portuguese, suggesting that Europe (or the memory of Europe) still exists somewhere. Moreover, he rides upon a hay cart pulled by a horse. What is to be made of this?
The high, warm sun shone down on Cluny the Scourge.
Cluny was coming!
He was big, and tough; an evil rat with ragged fur and curved, jagged teeth. He wore a black eyepatch; his eye had been torn out in battle with a pike.
Cluny had lost an eye.
The pike had lost its life!
Some said that Cluny was a Portuguese rat. Others said he came from the jungles far across the wide oceans. Nobody knew for sure.
Cluny was a bilge rat; the biggest, most savage rat that ever jumped from ship to shore. He was black, with grey and pink scars all over his huge sleek body, from the tip of his wet nose, up past his green and yellow slitted eye, across both his mean tattered ears, down the length of his heavy vermin-ridden back to the enormous whiplike tail which had earned him his title: Cluny the Scourge!
Now he rode on the back of the hay wagon with his five hundred followers, a mighty army of rats: sewer rats, tavern rats, water rats, dockside rats. Cluny’s army – fearing, yet following him. Redtooth, his second-n-command, carried a long poll. This was Cluny’s personal standard. The skull of a ferret was fixed at its top. Cluny had killed the ferret. He feared no living thing.
Wild-eyed, with the terror of rat smell in its nostrils, the horse plunged ahead without any driver. Where the hay cart was taking him was of little concern to Cluny. Straight on the panicked horse galloped, past the milestone lodged in the earth at the roadside, heedless of the letters graven in the stone: “Redwall Abbey, fifteen miles.” Cluny spat over the edge of the cart at two young rabbits playing in a field. Tasty little things; a pity the cart hadn’t stopped yet, he thought. The high warm sun shone down on Cluny the Scourge.
The argument can and has been made that most references to human civilization exist in Redwall only and are expunged from later books; however, one of the primary ingredients in hotroot soup (featured both in Triss and Salamandastron) is mare’s tail, an aquatic plant so named for its resemblance to the tail of a horse. Whence this name, if horses no longer exist?
Also consider: there are no goats or cows in the Redwall universe, and yet Cluny’s second-in-command is named Cheesethief. What madness is this? The mice of Redwall has a Cellarmaster who brews “nut-brown ale” and various cordials; have mice developed the ability to metabolize alcohol?
Another question: while it’s perfectly reasonable for a fantasy novelist to give his characters names like Matthias or Martin, to call a long-lived mouse Methuselah suggests that the mice have a still-working knowledge of Biblical tradition. Is this the human Bible, or a mouse Bible that oddly mimics our own? Is the “Portugal” of Cluny’s possible birth a rats-only version of Portugal? Does this universe exist in a place where multiple animal species evolved in a manner that oddly mimics human development in our own?
Another disturbing point: the largest animals (leaving out the horse from Redwall) that exist in the Redwall universe are the monitor lizards and the wildcats. The remaining species in the series include mice, dormice, shrews, bats, seals (!), hedgehogs, porcupines, voles, squirrels, otters, rabbits, ermines, ferrets, bees (non-sentient, by all accounts), foxes, pine martens, snakes, sables, the occasional pike, sparrows, ravens, and a pleiosaur. There are no apex predators; there are no animals bigger than a few feet long. What mass extinction event preceded this?
Finally: Why are there churches and abbeys but no organized religion, or reference to a god or gods of any kind, in the entire series? Why not just build a farm, or communal housing, or a village? If there is no god in the Redwall universe, why is the snake Asmodeus named after the Christian devil?
Take a position and defend it in the comments. Include footnotes if at all possible.
[Image via The Long Patrol]
Tags: alternate universes, animals, brian jacques, fantasy, redwall
The Long Patrol Club was founded on August 15th, 1996.
OH MY GOD IT’S MY VERY FIRST FANDOM COME BACK TO HAUNT ME ON THE TOAST
IS THAT A BBS I SEE BEFORE ME
Aw man. Suddenly it’s 1997 and I’m logging onto telnet to play a squirrel on Redwall MUCK. Oh Redwall, how many impressionable young people did you innocently introduce to the horrors of furry fandom? (“Oo, hey, there’s fan art on this website OH WHAT THE FUDGE IS HAPPENING.”)
Oh my gosh, it was my first fandom too. I haven’t read those books in years but I remember them so vividly!
as a dweeby maybe-autisms teenager i tended to get really obsessed with things and let me tell you i was in redwall fandom straight up til i was like 16. FLASHBACKS
OH GOD THE MEMORIES
Dibbuns Against Bedtime! Redwallia! I even had my own fansite called Fortress Moonflash. Good lord.
I think this was the second generation of Redwall fansites, and yes, it was my first fandom, and yes, it introduced me horrifically to softcore furries.
“Cluny was a bilge rat; the biggest, most savage rat that ever jumped from ship to shore.”
Who was sailing these hypothetical ships? Not to mention building them?
There’s quite a lot of shipbuilding in the Redwall universe! Martin’s father Luke was a shipbuilder; the otters and shrews build watercrafts; there’s a whole slew of corsair villains; there’s even an island in the middle of the goddamn ocean where a bunch of tropical stoats or some shit live.
There’s probably a list of all the boats and ships in the Redwall universe out there somewhere. Oh wait, of course there is.
But if mouse-sized animals are building presumably mouse-sized ships, why are rats living in their bilges!?
As established in such later novels as Pearls of Lutra, the established sentient creatures such as stoats and pine martens build ships and take to piracy.
But would these ships still have bilge rats – wouldn’t they just be crew, and there would be bilge fleas or something proportionally much smaller?
Bilge fleas would be hilarious.
There was def a villainous beast hierarchy most times, and rat underling types. Maybe Cluny being referred to as a bilge rat meant that he clawed his way up the ladder to become Big Bad? It’s been awhile since I’ve read the actual Redwall (most of my faves were later books).
Regarding apex predators, I think there was a fox villain (in the Bellmaker, maybe?) who wore a wolf skin as proof of how vicious and tough he was and he told everyone that he killed the wolf in a fight, but really he just found a dead wolf in the snow and skinned it.
(Are wolves apex predators? I don’t even know. Do bears eat wolves? Were there any bears in the Redwall universe?)
Edit: Also, I haven’t read all of the Redwall books, but I did read a lot of them, and I don’t remember ever seeing any other wolf characters. Was the wolf sapient, or feral? I feel like we should assume sapient, right? But then wearing his skin if you’re a fox seems exceptionally gruesome in that case. Would it be more analogous to a human wearing a gorilla skin, or a human wearing a human skin of different ethnicity than their own?
And wasn’t there a walrus in Pearls of Lutra? (Or maybe it was a sea-lion?)
Yeah, I think there could easily be all kinds of larger animals living in their own version of civilization that rarely interacts with that of the small animals whose lives are the focus of the books.
now I’m just picturing Randy Orton showing up in a Redwall book. #iveseenwrestling #shamefulsecrets #hewouldbeaheelobviously
It’s not the main point of your comment, but yes, wolves are apex predators, and no, bears don’t eat wolves. Most bears don’t eat a lot of meat at all.
The rats of NIMH began to spread their word, which melded with human Christian tradition as the animals became more educated (idk, maybe it’s easier for them to access religious texts). Gradually, an evil, zealous rat faction organizes and spreads, recruiting the other minor predators, and begins to systematically take out humans and other large predators. They orchestrate some sort of apocalypse that only small animals can survive, and a few years later, their kind, as well as the peaceful mice/squirrels/etc, have spread across the globe, forming their own hodgepodge culture.
Also, just thinking about these books makes me hungry.
literally all I remember from these books is how unreal the food sounded. Like, meadowcream, get at me.
Right? I had no idea what it was, but I wanted it.
Dude, I just realized: this is the Internet, so THERE IS PROBABLY AN ENTIRE BLOG OF REDWALL RECIPES THAT ACTUALLY WORK OUT THERE SOMEWHERE! 😀
My friends and I once cooked a Redwall feast using various recipes from around the internet (incl the official Redwall cookbook WHICH IS A THING), and it was amaaaazing. The version of meadowcream we used is equal parts cream/butter/honey, mixed with some sugar. So. Good.
I tried to make some of the food from the books once. It didn’t work very well. The one that always sounded so good to me were honey cakes, but somehow I could never replicate them in real life.
My brother and I were big Redwall fans as kids and had a Redwall-themed dinner once. Our version of seaweed grog was just chopped lettuce in water. Nobody could stomach the hotroot soup.
Even as a kid, I recognized the face that he was just attaching beautiful nature words to food words… of course, that didn’t make me any less hungry.
also WTF was up with the October ale? Wasn’t it described as sweet? Didn’t the Dibbuns drink it? Were they all constantly drunk, just like all the humans were in the Middle Ages?
oh my god. redwall was also my first fandom, i’m having flashbacks now about how people wrote entire articles debating interspecies romance and digitigrade vs plantigrade feet
mallory what have you done
Oh my God flashbackssss. My obsessive ten year old self was also haunted by the cheese question (it’s not just the guy named Cheesethief, cheese also plays a lovingly-described role in all the many feasts.). I believe at one point there is a mention of pounding tubers or grass or something to produce “greensap milk,” which presumably they turned into cheese. So was all that delicious sounding stuff actually depressing vegan cheese?
Or, horrifyingly, were they making it out of abbey members’ breastmilk??? If modern hippies can do it, I guess those mice, moles, etc. could.
Also, for anyone who hasn’t seen it, one of my favorite things ever: an imagined correspondence between Jacques and his publisher about the racist undertones in the divisions between good and evil in the Redwall universe: http://www.somethingawful.com/news/bargain-book-b…
yeah, like, what exactly is the “cream” part of meadowcream??
That somethingawful is so great. It’s the first thing I thought of when I saw this post.
Oh man I’d never seen that somethingawful link. DAY MADE. “I can’t say I’ve felt like this since the late Kingsley Amis ‘upper decked’ my toilet at a cocktail party.”
It’s the “Your letter made me very alarmed and hungry” line that always gets me.
hahahah omg that somethingawful correspondence was incredible. I also let out a hearty guffaw (maybe rather mole-like?) at your breastmilk suggestion.
There was a plesiosaur in Redwall?? I must have outgrown these books too soon. But I mean there were badgers living in a volcano, which I am pretty sure is not the badger’s natural habitat, so questions indeed.
ha ha I think you all probably know by now how VERY HERE I am for this thread.
Aren’t there motherfucking badgers? Those are scary predators of the non-chatroom varietal.
There *are* humans in Wind In The Willows.
Are there??? Lord, it’s been ages. What do they do?
Put the Toad in prison (judges, police etc.). Help him break out again (gaoler’s daughter, washerwoman). Clearly the normally-accepted scale relationships are more or less chucked out of the window – among other things….
I was just coming here to say that Mr. Toad stole a motorcar from two humans, which was how he ended up in jail!
For me, though, the big question *I* took away from Wind In the Willows was HOW BIG ARE THESE ANIMALS? Like, Mole lives in what I assume was a mole-sized hole, but then the characters are apparently big enough to drive cars? IS TOAD ACTUALLY HUMAN SIZED? (This is oddly terrifying for me to contemplate.)
PS I used to own an illustrated version of WITW where the artist had apparently gotten fed up with the unanswerable question of how big the animal characters were supposed to be and drew all the animal characters realistically and as real-animal-sized in the human world. Which made Toad’s jailbreak even more unbelievable, as how could he possibly borrow a human’s clothes at this size? http://bradney.com/joblogs/wp-content/uploads/200…
That scale issue seriously threw me for a loop when I reread The Wind in the Willows as an adult. Especially because Rat’s house is a hole in a riverbank, but Toad lives in a giant mansion.
The other thing that freaked me out was the scene where Badger offhandedly mentions that oh, yes, there were once humans who built a great city that now lies in ruins under what became the Wild Wood, but they went away centuries ago, no one knows where. For a moment, despite the fact that I *knew* there were humans in The Wind in the Willows, I wondered if maybe the entire novel was secretly a post-apocalyptic fantasy in which only sentient animals survived whatever killed the humans off. (I’m still trying to figure out how to turn that idea into fanfic.)
“(I’m still trying to figure out how to turn that idea into fanfic.)”
I am waiting patiently, that sounds *awesome*.
CURSES, YOU BEAT ME TO IT
I had been under the impression that the Redwall books take place in an alternate universe where humans do not exist and small animals live in a manner that happens to resemble human civilization in some ways. “Portugal” is not necessarily a rats-only version of Portugal, but most probably a non-humans-only version of Portugal. Do we have any reason to believe that horses, goats, cows, and other large animals do not exist in a some area of Redwall-world that has never been explored in the books? And clearly there must have been some foundation of Redwall culture that involved or resembled Christian ideas and traditions, but the relevant dogma has been abandoned and lost, perhaps because small animals tend to be more chill and enlightened than humans.
Those are some good points, but I think it doesn’t make sense to say ‘there might be goats far off’ if cheese is being regularly served at Redwall feasts. They have to have a milk supply, or else they’re cadging cheese and dairy products from humans. Right?
I wasn’t imagining the mice milking goats or cows, but they seem so self-sufficient, I can’t imagine them stealing food from humans, either. They could theoretically be milking any animal that produces milk, but I can’t remember whether the feasts ever included meat — if not, it seems likely that they are vegan, given their apparent enlightenment and low position on any conceivable food chain, and that the cheese is therefore vegan cheese as antigonewiththewind suggested above.
They do eat fish, though. There’s even that very cool grace that ends “silver fish whose life we take only for a meal to make.”
Hmm, good to know. I think the milk and cheese would still probably be vegan, though, since as far as I can tell the smallest possible milk-providing mammals are tiny bats and shrews, which seem like they would be viewed as fellow citizens rather than food sources. Plus if there were a little bat-dairy somewhere I think that would have been worth mentioning at some point.
maybe they milk aphids, like ants
this is definitely the answer
I’m actually trying and failing to remember if there are any non-sentient vertebrates in the books. Insects, probably? But no beasts of burden. And I never recall anyone getting, uh, milked. *Sits down to have a long hard think about the books of her childhood.*
I was never clear on whether the pike in their pond was actually sentient, or if they just interpreted its natural predatory tendencies as malicious.
OH MAN I’ve been waiting for this for about a decade.
Theory I’ve been developing since middle school – Redwall takes place in a post-human society, in which remnants of human civilization/religion have been adopted as a sort of not fully understood or questioned mythos. Presumably, something occurred to lead to the extinction of all large creatures (not sure if this makes sense evolution-wise, maybe Gal Scientists can help on this one?) (Also, humans, in the years nearing their extinction experience an abbey-based religious revival.). However, certain sects of mice, having grown used to living in abbeys and, in later stages, mimicking certain aspects of human ritual in them, identify the abbey with a sort of pre-apocalyptic home. Perhaps following the death of all humans, abbeys became a sort of ideal area for unattended goods that the countryside full of vermin didn’t offer?
Certain aspects of human life – horses, Portugal, cheese – became part of Redwall lore. They don’t get all facts correct – Cluny is probably not for Portugal and the mice are probably just eating some sad excuse for cheese – but the words have been fully incorporated into Redwall language. At certain times there is increased reliance on the myths of human civilization, overlapping with reliance on other Redwall myths, such as in Redwall where there are the greatest number of references to humans as well as the most mythical interpretation of Martin the Warrior’s sword.
Also, mice can definitely get drunk now.
Wait wait I got it. “Abbeys” are what the doomsday preppers came to call the fortresses that failed to save them from sharing the fate of all other large vertebrates in the apocalypse. They were stocked with bibles because of course, so some of the imagery/names got incorporated into animal society. They keep living in the abbeys because they’re secure. The cheese & other inexplicable foods come from leftover supplies, & the booze comes from leftover supplies that fermented (& also from leftover booze, because who wouldn’t have that in their doomsday abbey).
I love this! Sort of the “Canticle for Leibowitz” interpretation.
OH MY GOD
YES
this is wonderful and yet also terrifying!
Well that’s your NaNoWriMo done then.
There are no apex predators in Redwall because the arc of the universe bends slowly but inexorably toward good friends enjoying simple pleasures in bucolic settings.
Ok, religion in Redwall. I figured it was like a sort of lay Anglican community, like the Little Gidding community (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Gidding), built out in the countryside, living according to its precepts, with organized worship of some sort or another taking place off stage between the feasts and the fighting off of invading armies.
My main line of thinking on this comes from reading T.S. Eliot in class years ago and having to sit on my hands to keep from jumping up and shouting “It’s JUST LIKE REDWALL!” If anyone knows more about the Anglican lay religious tradition, I’m all ears.
Ooooh okay I spent a good amount of my childhood thinking about this too. The main thing I’ve noticed is that there are way more human-civilization concepts mentioned in the first Redwall book than in later books. As far as I can remember, horses and references to real-world places (Portugal) never occurred after the first book. Ditto with any mention of Redwall Abbey as a religious institution. Most of the stories just use the Abbey as a big, (mostly) safe building where all of the characters can live together in some sort of communal utopia, occasionally taking breaks from feasting to solve mysterious puzzles carved into the walls. The first book definitely gives you more of the impression of religious order – one of the characters is a novice of the order or something, and has to be reminded to behave in a more monastic/holy way, if memory serves. Subsequent books definitely moved away from this – apart from being led by an abbot/abbess, there’s really no other religious connection. I guess that Jacques’s vision for the Redwall world evolved between books, which is good for him but super frustrating for the rest of us.
The cheese thing definitely still puzzles me though – little me assumed they kept goats out in Mossflower woods somewhere?
HI, FIRST FANDOM. Hi hi hi.
It always fills me with awe when I remember how close I was to falling head-first into furry fandom when I was in elementary school, what with all that fanart I was looking at. and yet it never happened, thank god. (“why do all those foxes have boobs.” “what does…. yiff mean?”)
YES SAME. I drew a lot of anthro art back in the day as someone in the Redwall fandom, and then I found the seedy underbelly…
Holy crap, this thread. I’m not the only one who, as a child, got completely sucked into Redwall fandom and innocently sought out / drew a lot of anthro fan art? *Breaks down and cries with relief and understanding!*
SAME. I had to explain it to my housemates recently, how I could have been ‘into’ anthropomorphised animals & fanart for so long but was honest-to-god never a furry. It was just the way we all drew! Like Disney’s Robin Hood! IT WASN’T WEIRD I SWEAR I WASN’T A FURRY
As far as I can remember, the horse in that single opening scene of Redwall was the only horse that showed up in the series. I believe it was also the only beast of burden. In the end I just chalked it up to being the first book in the series, and in subsequent books Brian Jacques expanded the world more than he had originally planned. Sort of like how in the later Oz books, Toto was retroactively able to speak when he arrived in Oz, he just “preferred not to”.
Yeah, I’m fair certain that we’re in the realm of Star Trek physics here. The Occam’s razor answer* is definitely that Jacques didn’t plan everything out systematically at the beginning, and was writing for kids who wouldn’t notice or care. Well, clearly that joke’s on him.
*Also the “enemy of fun” answer, I fully realize.
::settles in with enormous bowl of hotroot soup::
These questions have haunted me since I was a wee Dibbun. Do you all remember the book where the Redwallians tried to adopt one of the evil species (maybe a weasel?) and raise him well, and he still ended up being totally horrible? Gives you some insight into Jacques’ perspective on nature vs. nurture. Also the point at which I realized these books might be sorta racist.
On a lighter note, and to continue the theme of freaking Mallory out by discussing sexy anthromorphic animals, those otters were the total equivalent of good-looking but shallow dudebros. An animal version of a lacrosse and/or rowing team, perhaps.
Finally: Redwall as baby’s first George R.R. Martin (the warring factions! The perspective-switching! The FOOD!), yes or no? Discuss.
Wait, though, okay, because while I am perfectly willing to entertain the “racist/xenophobic Brian Jacques theory,” the animals he labels as evil ARE ACTUALLY EVIL IN REAL LIFE. Weasels and stoats and ferrets suck and snakes. They are sneaky and they murder baby animals! SNAKES LIVE IN GIANT WRITHING PITS UNDERGROUND.
Weeeell but badgers eat hedgehogs and small mammals and are in the same family as weasels and such, so why do they get a pass? It seems more that Jacques decided that animals that historically creep us out are somehow inherently malicious and hateful when they can think like people.
I guess I see him as being the same kind of racist as Tolkien, which is to say that he isn’t actually talking about the inherent evil of ACTUAL races, but there is something icky about deciding that one’s genetic background determines one’s moral compass.
But also I still love Redwall, so :-/
The best book to read for “Jacques doesn’t think through the implications very well” is Taggerung, which inverts the Outcast plot AND cribs a lot from the tradition of the Sargon the Great/Moses archetype…just with an otter raised by the “vermin.” Who of course turns out perfectly decent despite being raised as the prophesied pirate king…
Still upset that he didn’t end up leading a band of similarly decent weasels and ferrets to the bounties of Redwall, instead of defecting and causing a Juska civil war. 🙁
OTTERS ARE TOTALLY EVIL TOO. There’s a couple that live at a dog-walking park in my hometown, and they occasionally lure dogs into the deep water, swim underneath them THEN DISEMBOWL THEM. Don’t trust the little fuckers.
this is terrifying and will be a great plot point for the new Redwall of Thrones fic that I am writing, thank you
I remember that plotline with the orphaned weasel or whatever. It’s nice that you bring up George Martin, because I was thinking that that plotline was analogous to the character (o, CANNOT remember his name, the skeevy tortured guy) in Game of Thrones (I haven’t read the books, just seen the show, and am a casual viewer even at that, so take this with a pixel of salt) who’s raised by the Starks but then betrays them and turns out to be evil? Not that that couldn’t, in itself, be taken as a sort of genetic predisposition to evil, but that I imagined it to be more about the way that the (even kindly-intentioned/patronizing) comprehension of difference or not-belonging could warp someone’s mind and make them feel unwanted and hence eventually vengeful and evil – cognitive dissonance and all that, because as I remember that character had a kind of Gollum-esque struggle between the kindness of his adopters and his genetic heritage (he is an asshat growing up, but doesn’t he sacrifice himself at the end?).
Oh aaahh this is such a good point (and I never thought about the Theon connection before, nice). I guess pubescent me decided that the weasel being evil = Jacques making an argument for it being in his blood. Now I want to reread!
I definitely do not remember that the adopted weasel/ferret’s name was Veil and Jacques used that opportunity to make the very clever wordplay that the mice hoped that “evil so vile would not live in Veil.” Nope. Do not remember that at all.
He turned out horrible BECAUSE everyone except his foster mother/sister/nurse was constantly looking sideways at him expecting him to do rotten things. How would you like it if you grew up in a hidden enclave where no one looked like you and all the people that did were called “vermin”?
That’s right, you wouldn’t like it very much and would probably do at least ONE rotten thing to get back at them.
I am an Outcast apologist and NOT AT ALL SORRY.
Yeah, this is a really good point and (as I said above) one I hadn’t considered at the time. BRB rereading all my old Redwall books.
I remember that book! His name was Veil! Which anagrams to VILE and EVIL, and I am pretty sure that Veil discovering the anagrams was actually the catalyst for him turning evil, because he was like, “Well, Evil is basically my name, so why resist temptation?”
Also, how are mice physically capable of cutting down trees, growing crops, etc. with only Medieval-era technology? A mature stalk of barley is many times taller than a mouse. Surely they are not entirely reliant on badger labor. If the relative sizes of plants to mice are roughly the same as they are to humans, then that presents an interesting refinement to the post human apocalypse theory: all the plants shrank.
Well, and when you think about the size differences between the average fox or badger, say, vs. a mouse – it’s like humans building alliances with teacup poodles or something. There must have been some kind of size-equalizing thing happening, where the bigger animals are still bigger, but not so big that they can’t fit in the abbey.
Imagine a cat that would be the real-world size to a mouse attacking the Abbey…
As a kid I always got the impression that there was a basic size inconsistency going on here. In redwall, is the abby mouse sized? or are the mice people sized? They talk about harvesting apples, and Matthias has an armful of hazelnuts, which seem about maybe apple sized to him, but then it takes constance the badger and some other folks a long time to catch a 2 pound trout that feeds them all. Also constance can pull a cart big enough hold a whole mouse family. If the 2lb monster trout lives in a pond deep and big enough that when matthias falls from the top of the abbey he lives….that means the abbey must be quite small, right? But if the abbey is much taller than the trees…and jess squirrel is a tiny speck climbing it….and she crawls out on the weathervane- which no weathervane I’ve ever seen is big enough for a human to crawl onto. The sparrows live in the attic of the abbey and I think the implication is it’s a nest of sparrows in an attice so big and remote no one even notices, not the equivalent of anne frank’s family living secretly up there being really quiet.
Also remember when matthias goes to meet the cat and the owl? They live in an old barn and I get the impression it’s a human sized barn, because otherwise how can you be flying around in the rafters?
I think there are some underlying assumptions here that we need to tease out to get to the heart of the matter. I’m specifically approaching the problem that the possible world the Redwall creatures inhabit has ‘cheese’ but does not have ‘cows’, ‘sheep’, or ‘goats’, but I think this might help solve the overall issue. So far I’ve got:
1) The sentient creatures of Redwall are sentient in the same way (in some sense) that we are sentient.
2) When a creature of Redwall says ‘cheese’ they mean the same thing as I mean when I say ‘cheese’. The same can be said for ‘cows’, ‘sheep’ etc…
3) The possible world of the Redwallers shares many of the laws of nature ours does (detail needed here)
Following from these and a few details from the books we can see that the in possible world the Redwall creatures inhabit (call it Redworld) the redwallers talk about and eat cheese, what we mean by cheese, but do so in a world where cheese (as we and the Redwallers know it) can only exist if not produced by cows, sheep, goats. This seems implausible to me. It’s not necessary for cheese to be produced by cows etc… but I find it counter-intuitive how Redworld has many similar laws of nature to ours, cheese the same as ours, but it is produced in a way entirely different to ours. I would propose denying either or both assumption 1&2.
Is it possible that although the language Redworld shares the same words as ours, the meanings are in some cases radically different? Is it possible that a Redwaller means something different when they say ‘cheese’ then when I say it? These are questions that need addressing. I think a lot will hinge on how much narration is 1st person and how much is 3rd (I can’t remember for the life of me). It could be argued that a 3rd person narrator gives us reason to believe that we share the meanings of our language with Redworld, whereas if the books are mainly 1st person it could be that the subjective experience of the characters is entirely different than what we take it to mean.
Please bear in mind this is very, very rough. But I hope it gives more points of conversation.
Surely you can make cheese from the milk of just about any mammal. Maybe Cheesethief is a thief of hedgehog cheese. Jacques has already said that meadow cream is actual cream flavoured with meadow herbs. That cream is coming from somewhere (or someone). I’d be prepared to accept that in Redwallian the word ‘cream’ means something else; but that doesn’t explain why Jacques used the word cream when describing, on the internet not in a Redwall book, what meadow cream is. Someone in the Redwall universe is definitely getting milked.
This post has drawn me out from lurking because I HAVE MANY THOUGHTS about Redwall and the continuity thereof. This is probably because I was introduced to fantasy with the likes of C.S. Lewis and L. Frank Baum who sort of threw their books together without a great deal of forethought and so I grew used to making sense of worlds whose authors didn’t care to do all the thinking for you.
Fortunately for EVERYONE, my first draft of this comment was lost in a Chrome crash, so I will hopefully stay more focused on the actual questions this time and spend less time typing phrases like “the Matthean line of heroes.” Ahem.
Everybody’s covered the “are there humans” and “apex predators” questions pretty well–although I can’t help but be a little disappointed that no one remembered the fucking WOLVERINE from Rakkety Tam (aka that awesome one with Highlands squirrels who carry basket-hilt CLAYMORES), but I digress. I wanna talk about Redwall and religion.
It’s true that there’s not a very developed theology in the Redwall world. Also true that there doesn’t seem to be a God or gods, aside from Martin the Warrior, but I think he’s more of a legendary saint than a deity and that’s OK. So why an abbey and why an abbey not named for any patron? Here are my justifications/thematic ruminations that DON’T require interacting with the mess that is the Loamhedge Continuity. (Because ain’t nobody got time.)
In contrast to the lords of Salamandastron, the various pirate kings and emperors, and even the wildcats who first built a red sandstone castle in the Mossflower Wood, the abbots and abbeses of Redwall keep no standing army. Their vocation is of peace and not of war. They at various points (mostly early on in the series) seem to command some sense of feudal loyalty in the surrounding forest dwellers, but this is the result of wisdom and kindness, rather than military might.
To that point, I think the texture of Jacques’ first three books, inconsistent with the later books though it may be, is far more credible than the latter ones. (I’m pretty sure that by the time Taggerung was written the character of the Abbey had changed so much that the Juska were TOTALLY justified in wanting the Abbey mice gone gone gone.) Keep in mind that at various points in British history, abbeys and church installations did own a great deal more land even than kings. Our first extended interactions with Redwall in Redwall and its direct sequel Mattimeo are seasonal harvest feasts, with the local peasantry bringing their bounty inside the walls for the winter to celebrate another year of “church” patronage and a fine harvest.
The walls. The high stone walls of protection. Redwall Abbey is named for the very stone that holds the region together. It is named for no mouse–neither Abbess Germaine the Builder nor Gonff the Mouse-Thief nor even the mighty Martin the Warrior. As a haven from the outside world, a warm cavern hole of inclusion, a Great Hall of feasting, and a scriptorium of learning and lore, how better could it be named than as a reminder of its permanence in a world of storm and predation?
There is no god in Redwall, and but one legendary Christ–a figure who hung up his sword at the pinnacle of his career, to take it up again only in defence of the weak and weary. There is no god in Redwall, but there is a faith: faith in the Abbey itself to endure and to shelter from age to age, world without end, Amen.
hi please write for the Toast
I have a few pitches but I don’t know if they are ready. Or if I am ready.
Send them anyway?
This is fucking beautiful. And also pretty on point, I think. But if you want to tell me your thoughts about Loamhedge, I would read them.
THIS WAS MY FIRST FANDOM OH MY GOD FLASHBACKS
P.S. I am fairly confident in my position that the snake named Asmodesusssssssss is forgivable because of the sheer amount of sibillants in the word itself. Though I may be wrong!
Further postcript to say that I once made a (non-vegetarian) version of “hurr hurr Turnip’nTater’Beetroot’Deeper’n’ever Poi burr aye” and it was delicious! Possibly because of the butter and the chicken. And yet.
I am SO MAD that I have to do work for the next hour instead of just camping in this thread, talking to everyone about deeper’n’ever pie.
One of my very first RP characters was a Redwall-world otter named Summersong. She was mute and beautiful, because of course she was.
Upon further reflection, I’m pretty sure she also had golden fur, because I just had to have a golden-ass otter running around being tragic and lovely.
I dont really consider the first book to be ironed out in a separate universe. It’s almost an in between to committing to a full out fantasy land with borders and history and a fun little fairy tale located in a land far away. Cluny and Asmodeous (and the religious overtones) take place in the first book and kind of phase out. The lore-making books weren’t written yet (Martin the Warrior and the Badger sagas….)
SPEAKING OF BADGERS
I don’t think it’s necessarily that there are no apex predators, i think they are just few and far between. Like the wildcats and the wolverine etc. Its almost as if the numbers are supposed to match the number of mice vs the number of the bigger predators in the wild.
Why does know one seem surprised, though, when a badger shows up out of nowhere in…. shit. One of the books.
Also, all of the larger animals have some innate divine right or right of might or whatever like the position you occupy on the food chain is your actual social position in that world. Maybe God is a lion?
omg so into the nerdy neurons reconnecting in my brain right now in the “alternate world fantasy: lore” section
I always assumed the larger animals were the same size as they are in our world but the smaller animals had evolved to be somewhat larger, though still in some sort of predictable proportions where mice can be reliably be expected to be smaller than badgers, for example. This was how I drew them, b/c my battle scenes made no sense otherwise.
I also assumed there were no humans and imagined it as a separate universe or perhaps post-post apocalyptic Earth. I thought that the haycart had had an animal driver that Cluny had killed when he comandeered it. Doesn’t explain the lone horse, I admit.
I wondered about the cheese but kind of glossed over it b/c imagining how the feasts tasted was more important. #priorities.
There’s a scene where the female badger who lives at Redwall hefts a whole dining room table about in a tantrum, when Cluny and his lieutenants come to deliver terms.
I think Matthias was my first literary crush. I imagined myself as Cornflower, and I would just skip over the part at the beginning of Redwall where Matthias is dreaming about her silky fur and fine whiskers.
Also, I always thought of Salamandastron as being located in California.
whispers DOES ANYONE REMEMBER REDWALL FANDOM SURVIVOR CONTESTS. DOES ANYONE REMEMBER TERROUGE. FUCK. I AM ACTUALLY SHOUTING
Oh man this is too much for my brain to take. I have such visceral memories of all of this, though not as detailed as some of you all’s! First of all, fandom – yeah, if you could call it that. Total raging obsession. My friends and I ran an online newsletter. We collected fan fiction and poetry and recipes and pictures. And, I believe, some color commentary. I think we had about three issues. Oh Lord I can’t even begin with this stuff, too much …
Soooo … I never cared about the continuity of horses and cheese, nor can I really summon up much of an opinion now. However. I was, precocious young High Church-WASP that I was, rather interested in whether religion was, you know, REALLY a part of the Abbey society. I noticed that it was never, ever, ever explicitly mentioned. Except exactly ONE time, when one of the rabbits said “Lord.” As like, an expression. That was the one time, I promise. I didn’t read some of the later books, but as far as I can tell, there was exactly one slip.
I think the “peace” focus is, yes, about as far as the religion in the books gets. Rather Buddhist, really. It all sounded fantastic to me, and frankly I’d probably still get on board with a nice, sweet abbey with nice abbots and abbesses who serve no particular purpose beyond being nice.
“Rakkety Rakkety Rakkety Tam, the drums are beat’n braw
Rakkety Rakkety Rakkety Tam, are ye march’n off ta war…”
That was the first Redwall book I read, and I was immediately hooked. The cadence I sung that to has echoed through my head since that day. I drew a map, once, that correlated every event I could get my hands on in the overworld of the books to each other with as much of a degree of accuracy that I could summon in my ink pen. Oh, to have that time today… or to still have that damn map.
The day I heard that Jacques had passed I mourned. I met him once (and made an /absolute/ fool of myself) and a signed, well-worn and well-loved, copy of Redwall of that day accompanies me to and from college. The reason the imagery is so memorable and distinct is because Redwall was written by Jacques to read aloud to a school of the blind in Britain. The whole thing just kind of… cascaded.
One thing about theology in Redwall is mentioned by the Long Patrol in war. They speak of Hellgates, the entrance to the Dark Forest, and how, in the coming battle, they would fight their way there and then return victorious. But it’s not obviously religious, and Jacques made sure of that. Whatever this world is, it’s one without a human theology, more obvious matters of honor and faith than eternal judgement and damnation. Survival is more important than the portrayal of your patron god. And whenever Matthias shows his shiny metal tail, the reader’s never sure if he actually is present, or if the character is just acting on intuition and a form of religious fervor to give power to their sword or mind…
Frankly, as much as an interest as I had in worldbuilding as a child, there was too much diverse information to process in those books. I entertained notions of a post-apocalyptic setting, but in the end, I don’t believe much more than Jacques drawing on common themes to create a world from scratch with what he had. It’s an understandable world, one that is easily relatable and has an enormous amount of depth to it. I just- read, and knew, and was there. I’m honestly not surprised so many others came along with me. That was a rich world, and it flavored much of my subsequent enjoyment of fantasy.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go reread some old friends.
(There’s an RPG called the Mouse Guard that I have a feeling many of you would be interested in. Give it a looksee when you have a minute…)
Oh that’s right, there’s kind of an afterlife. Sort of “the force”-y. I can’t remember specifically.
OH MY GOD YES that was it!!! Sitting on cushions was one of my favorite things to do!
Redwall fans grappling with questions of governance and theology and other issues in the books might want to look up a North Korean cartoon series called ‘The Squirrel and the Hedgehog’ — in which the inhabitants of the peace-loving Flower Hill (populated by squirrels, rabbits, and other creatures at the bottom of the food chain) are embroiled in a war to free themselves from the threat of the neighbouring weasels, crows, wolves, and other predators. It’s essentially the modern dystopia version of Redwall, with tanks, grenades, machine guns, and a disturbing amount of unsubtle anti-American/Japanese/South Korean overtones.
(Here’s part of an episode with fanmade English subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OeY4JNdKv0)
Presumably all of these heroic characters have had enough to eat and certainly don’t need any more to eat right now, despite the lies their own stomachs are telling them.
I cannot BELIEVE it never occurred to me to question the fact that there was cheese in a world where there exist neither cows nor goats. From whence the soft round cheese? The yellow ones peppered with bits of carrot and celery? The white ones studded with chestnuts and acorns? HAS MY WHOLE LIFE BEEN A LIE?!
Think on this; Jacques has confirmed that meadowcream is just actual cream flavoured with herbs. Somebody in the Redwall universe is being milked, and if it’s not cows then I want to know who.
Personally, I always just imagined that Redwall existed in a world where there were humans, but we just never saw them because they were never relevant. In a sparsely populated world, I bet mice could build an abbey small enough to go unnoticed.
I cannot BELIEVE it never occurred to me to question the fact that there was cheese in a world where there exist neither cows nor goats. From whence the soft round cheese? The yellow ones peppered with bits of carrot and celery? The white ones studded with chestnuts and acorns? HAS MY WHOLE LIFE BEEN A LIE?!
My childhood friends lived on five acres of woods, and we made dirks and quarterstaves and draped large piees of felt over ourselves and played Redwall out among the trees.
Can we talk about the bloodlust thing, though? Like, freaking Lady Cregga Rose-Eys. ROSE-EYES.
I also recall being bugged by the lack of female warriors (Mariel was my favorite– whyyy didn’t she get to wield the sword of Martin?!) and the way the Dibbuns were so obviously recycled from one book to the next.
Captain Snow, the owl, is a predator of mice and shrews at one point, though I believe he is eventually reformed.
Oh my god. I distinctly remember seeing this art sometime during my middle school years and loving it. time warp – bizarre. Needless to say, loved your work!
I just got embarrassed by the number of personal breakthroughs in my draft for this comment
and so am going to go sit with my (regular-sized) cat and think about giant churches and giant horses and God
Completely agree!