I can't have read Redwall in getting on for 30 years, and I've been surprised to rediscover how good it is. Later books in the series are soured in my memory slightly by repetition of plots and themes (and also, let's face it, the fact that your patience for talking-animal series wanes slightly as you age beyond 13 or so). But the first book is expertly paced, exciting, and very charming - even if the main character's overnight transformation from bumbling adolescent into heroic warrior is a bit far-fetched.
What is unusual about the Redwall books (well, one of many things that's unusual about them) is that its characters are of species ranging in size from shrews all the way up to wildcats and badgers, but their size in relation to one another is not defined.
On the one hand, these creatures are all part of the same society and inhabit them same buildings and use the same weapons and tools. While you do get a sense that a wildcat is bigger than a mouse, for example, it's still possible for a mouse to fight one with a sword on a roughly equal footing. So, at times, the different species seem more like simply different humanoid races of basically similar size, each of which is based cosmetically on a type of animal found in the British Isles.
On the other hand, though, when it suits the author, "big" animals (wild cats, badgers, otters, etc.) are suddenly a lot bigger than "small" ones (mice, rats and so on) despite the fact they're all in the same social milieu. You get a badger character all of a sudden being able to pull a cart around for passengers in a way that implies it's as big to them as a horse is to us, for example. You also get predatory creatures like pikes and snakes being portrayed as being roughly as big as you would expect them to be in proportion to a human-sized mouse.
The experience of reading Redwall at a phenomenological level, then, is an odd one. Your brain has to constantly conjure and then re-conjure mental images that are forever changing. On one page, it seems as though everybody's roughly the same size. On the next, suddenly things can only make sense if one character is much bigger (or smaller) than the others. Then on the page after that you're back to having to assume they're about as big as each other. And so on, endlessly.
Strangely, this doesn't affect the entertainment value of the book, and I think this is evidence for the argument that text provides much more imaginative flexibility than art. If Redwall was a picture book, an artist would have to make decisions about how big the different animal species are in relation to one another, and the reader would from that point onwards inevitably adopt that framework in his or her imagination. Because it's not a picture book, we can read it as taking place in a kind of liminal space in which things are as big as they need to be on one page and then as big as they need to be on the other. The visual imagery your own mind comes up with is consequentially contingent and subject to never-ending revision and reassessment and review. And that's okay.
I had a similar feeling about the architecture. Early on I wasn't sure if the abbey was mouse sized or human sized. Later it became clear that it was human sized, but other buildings I still wasn't certain about, and where were the builders? Why did no one mention them?
ReplyDeleteAnd yet I can't say it detracted from my enjoyment of the novel.
Yes. I felt exactly the same thing. The church of St Ninian's is the same: is it a mouse-sized church or a human-sized one? At one point a rat picks up a spiked railing from the church yard to stab somebody, which implies it's mouse-sized. So then why is the abbey human-sized? Or is it human-sized at all? If it is, how do they ring the bell? My head hurts.
DeleteBut still a very fun read.
As I recall, the earliest book had a horse in it, albeit briefly. That tipped the scale completely for me - once I pictured that, the flexible scale of the other animals utterly vanished because it was so far outsize that size bracket.
DeleteThe architecture point is a good one - in the first few books, climbing to the top of the Abbey is meant to be the equivalent of scaling the Matterhorn, not to the top of your parish Church. It gives a far different feel to proceedings, on some level vaster and more mysterious.
Yeah, the horse is definitely horse sized and the rats riding the cart it pulls are definitely rat sized. Which means the cart must be human sized. But in the exact same scene another cart carrying a few mice (presumably mouse sized) is being pulled by a (badger sized?) badger! My head hurts. Again.
DeleteThe Abbey is such a weird one. If it is human-sized how could an army of rats possibly lay siege to it? The walls themselves would put the Wall in GoT to shame. And yet the characters just climb up and down them like they are built to their scale.
I think it's pretty clear (at least insofar as anything concerning size is "clear" in the Redwall context) that the abbey is massive, but mouse sized.
DeleteThe Abbey, after all, was built by mice. Martin the Warrior and Abbess Germaine laid the first stone!
I remember feeling that the sizes of things shifted over the course of the series. There are always a lot of fluctuations, but from what I recall of being very concerned about this issue as a grade-schooler, animals are very generally animal-sized in the early part of the series, animal-sized-but-roughly-as-big-as-each-other in the middle, and human-sized at the end. Asmodeus the viper is like a dragon to Matthias, but by one of the latter books in the series we're at "whoops I, a mouse, almost stepped on that snake while walking in the garden!" territory (age follows this trend as well, from Old Abbot Mortimer in Redwall being a few years old to just swapping "years" for "seasons" so that you can have a young animal "in his rebellious teenage seasons"). Architecture is always both animal-sized and human-sized at need - it's probably good that the horse in Redwall never gets close enough to the abbey to confirm whether our heroes are tiny creatures in a vast architectural space or if somewhere in Fantasy Britain there's a 6-foot tall mouse church by the side of the road.
ReplyDeleteFoxes are the one exception here, I think. Redwall must have some very small foxes.
Haha. I think I only got about as far as a book or two after Salamandastron so I never noticed that shift as much. I totally forgot about foxes. What's the one in Mattimeo called? Slagar? But also the wildcat in Mossflower simply can't be much bigger than a mouse if Martin is able to fight her.
DeleteI suppose the series is great evidence for the argument that an entertaining series can be written without any attempt at making things internally consistent. Nerds everywhere take note!
Yup. Shifting and warping sizes has had a big effect on me. Good write up.
ReplyDeleteBut illustrations definitely help me "think outside the box"! Trying to translate some image to text is one of my favorite things to think about. "How the hell do i word [this scene](over-saturated first-person scene with blink effects, ringing sound and fishbowl lens of panicking friend aiding) using only 75 letters?" is a rewarding game.
I tried to capture the effect of shrinking and growing and split custody and losing pages of text because the window was minimized and the transition from 1-teacher schooling to multi-teacher schooling in this story: https://photos.app.goo.gl/T5i7557kVhgm7kRf8
@Tom In Mouse Guard, foxes are Shadow-of-the-Colossus terrifying, so great example to bring up!
Great post!
ReplyDeleteI haven't read Redwall (but am thinking about getting hold of it for my kids after this post). But this technique surely comes from The Wind in the Willows, does it not?
In that book, a badger and a toad are roughly the same size - and a toad can drive a horse and cart AND disguise himself as a (human) washerwoman. And so on.
That slipperiness of scale is one of the things that makes The Wind in the Willows such a tremendous book - for all the reasons that you outline in your last paragraph here.
True, although the size of the animals in W in the W doesn't fluctuate from page to page - they're all basically human sized, right?
DeleteNo - they do change from page to page. For example, at the start, Mole and Ratty emerge from riverbank holes and appear to be the same scale as the rabbits, otters, etc. Yet later, they're apparently human-sized. And then later still, they're scared of things that might emerge from holes in trees and find badger's front door in a snow bank. So they seem to be just as elastic as the Redwall animals.
DeleteOh yeah. I wonder if that was deliberate in Williams' part. Something allegorical maybe?
DeleteI'd guess that it's more about the unrestrained nature of pre-formula fantasy. It's probably fair to say that fantasy writers before Tolkien were much less conscious of trying to achieve a sort of unreal realism and much keener to be wild and bold.
DeleteIf you think about Toad in The Wind in the Willows, he's much more like Gogol's eponymous Nose than a hobbit or an orc. He can be mistaken for a woman yet identified as a horrid toad; he's of a scale with riverbank animals yet also with humans; he's threatened by weasels yet can also drive a car. And, despite being recognisably a toad, he has hair to comb!
That's where I see a similarity with the Nose in Gogol's story. How can a nose belong on a man's face, yet also drive a carriage around St Petersburg and wear a uniform? It can't - but then this is fantasy.
Where are they getting the cheese from? What, or who, are they milking and is it consensual?
ReplyDeleteThis is a question of the utmost importance.
DeleteThere are horse-sized horses with horse-level intelligence. So we have to assume there are cow-sized cows with cow-level intelligence. But if this is the case...the mice must be human sized. In which case, the rats are human sized. In which case, how can the horse which pulls them around be horse sized?
My head hurts, Patrick.
Its kind of Alice in Wonderland on the down-low isn't it? People and things are whatever scale they need to be to match each scene, within relative limits, and a kind of dream-logic prevails.
DeleteI wonder if any child psychologists have ever looked into at what point in development scale seems to really matter. I seem to vaguely recall some point at childhood it became very important that the toys I was playing with had *the same scale*, to the extent that it bothered me if it was "wrong". Maybe I had moved from a kind of Early-Redwall animism where scale was fluid to a Late-Redwall world-modelling stage where I had to build a coherent reality.
Haha -- this is an old one. I remember having furious arguments about on this on the playground as a 10-year old!
ReplyDeleteHeh, reminds me of Danny and the Dinosaur. In one illustration the dinosaur is taller than a baseball stadium and in another he's as tall as a lamp post.
ReplyDeleteFor Redwall it's a fun worldbuilding exercise to assume that all animals are the same size as in our world and that the Abbey is human-sized. What changes? Well the Abbey is freaking huge so a conventional siege won't work but it's very size makes the mice defending it get stretched really thin so if the rats can find a way in...
Also the idea of living in a place with a Matterhorn-sized tower is badass.
Also that makes the woods completely terrifying for mice and when you combine that with their massive birth rate you have to assume astronomical death rates to keep the population steady. Which is rather grim for a kid's book but fine for D&D.
Yeah, Redwall in a world in which humans have just mysteriously disappeared, with everything its real size, would be really cool.
DeleteBosh - I don't know the tower is literally mountain sized, cool though that would be. Still, it's meant to be a pretty big deal that a mouse climbs it.
Deletenoisms - As I recall there was a series roughly on that premise - the Welkin Weasels, Gary Kilworth. Rather more prone to moments of outright high fantasy and humour deriving from cultural references than Redwall, but certainly comparable (as the marketing made clear).
In terms of pictures... were you aware that Redwall was turned into an animated series 20 or so years back?
ReplyDeleteHad no idea. In the US?
DeleteCanada is where I saw it.
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12cabZUMdL4
Wikipedia says it's "Canadian-British-French" but aired primarily in Canada. I remember watching it as a kid but it was shown to my class in school after we read one of the books. I don't remember seeing it on tv at home.
ReplyDelete