Wonderful style.: The book is a slightly strange collection of tales linked interestingly by a common theme. It deals with two children and their education in England's history and, for want of a better word, her soul. Kipling does this sort of thing perfectly. His love for his subject seems to be visible on each page as he creates wonderful scenes and places. The thing is that it's very hard to tell how much he knows. Here a pastoral and infinitely peaceful country is shown to be built from struggle and war, indeed even the war is shown as an almost friendly affair. One has to wonder what he actually believed, whether the whole thing is a joke and who it might be on. The book is fascinating from one side and immensly peaceful from the other. Kipling's style is almost perfect as always and this is a book with much to offer.

Triggered to read it (this time) by Judith Tarr's Rite of Conquest - hers is the story of William the Conqueror with a large magical aspect to his life, and Puck (the first three stories, of Sir Richard) is the other major source of my knowledge of that period. An interesting difference in the way Tarr and Kipling handled magic (their facts matched just fine) - Tarr writes of an England where the Saxon variety of Christianity is suppressing and destroying magic and the Norman invasion is largely aimed at freeing the magic, while Kipling writes of an England full of magic and the Normans have to adjust to the oddity of it. Then of course I went on to read the other stories - the three Roman ones, Henry VII, and John (it's hard to mark the periods except by who was ruling at the time, even when that doesn't directly affect the story!). And of course now I need to reread Rewards and Fairies. I do love the stories - I remember the plots and events quite well, but when I reread there are all these neat little twists and clever wordings that have slipped my mind. Kipling was a wonderful wordsmith. ( )

Sere other edition ( )

Wonderfully vivid scenes from English history. aside from the first, the only fantasy element is that Puck introduces modern children to characters from various periods of English history ( )

This was one of those books which started in a somewhat disappointing fashion but which largely got better either as Kipling got into his stride or as my ear got into his sometimes quite dreadfully archaic language. Or maybe I gave up thinking how naff it was and chucked in a few mental hey nonny nonnies of my own for the hell of it.

There's no doubt about it - this book is terribly dated, or at least it's a book of its time in the way that the writings of H Rider Haggard and Sax Rohmer were, and it's difficult to blame either book or author for that. You really couldn't write children's books like this any more and that's probably A Good Thing. ( )