The Wind in the Willows has turned 100!!!!!

Well, since you asked so nicely - I must say I have a great deal of affection for it.

Oh? And why?

I didn't actually read it until I was an adult. My first contact with it was on what was then I think still called "Disneyland" on TV, when I was probably 11 or 12. Disney ran their animated version of it, kind of kid classic-lite, and I was completely mesmerized by their version of the chase scene where Toad sneaks back into Toad Hall and the weasels catch him at it. Forty-odd years later, someone was selling a pretty well-used videotape of it at a flea market for a quarter, and I still remembered the chase thru Toad Hall fondly, so I bought it. First time I'd seen it since. Pretty well-spent quarter.

I think that my present obsession with water and boats is ferom Ratty"s observation that there is nothing, absolutely nothing better than messing around in boats.

I was always a fan of the various artists interpretations with the story line and I always wanted to do a "Scrimshaw" picture of Rat's observation to hang in thegalley.

DIsney lite indeed.

Do you prefer the book?

Messing about in boats.....indeed.

Do the damn scrimshaw!!!

DONT YELL AT ME!! IM IN PAIN.

Fall from a boat?

house problem ANNNND, My back is killing me. The back thing is an old injury that gets really bad in winter.

If it werent for all the deadly snakes and toxic seafood, Id move to Oz in a minute.

i was an adult when i read the book
loved it

saw a rather good live action special from england a few years back, very well done and faithful to the story

First book i ever read.

Yes.

Yes.

I can still recall the day when, unaided, i found every instance of the appearance of the word "the" in the book. I was very excited. It was the summer before my fourth birthday, and my grandfather was teaching me to read, using The Wind in the Willows.



"There is nothing -- absolute nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply messing-about in boats."

I was attracted to the book because I had seen the Disney cartoon, which centered around Toad. It only took a few sentences to know the book was not the cartoon. I must have been around twenty. I still think it one of the loveliest reads ever.

Here's the beginning of the Salon article that alerted me to the centenary:

Dec. 16, 2008 | There are certain books that become a permanent part of your life, like an old tree that stands at the bend of a favorite path. You may not notice them, but if they were taken away, the world would be less mysterious, less friendly, less itself.

"The Wind in the Willows," published 100 years ago this year, is one of those books. I first read Kenneth Grahame's classic when I was 14, and I have been going back to it ever since. I just read it again, and its wonders seem greater than ever, its colors more glowing, its language more miraculous. Although it is uniquely mixed in style and matter, moving effortlessly from deadpan observation to piercing lyricism to raucous comedy to incantatory mysticism, it is a complete world. And like the old friend that it is, it always welcomes you back.

At the end of the fifth of its 12 perfect chapters, the Mole, who has rediscovered his old home, lays his head on his pillow in utter contentment. "But ere he closed his eyes he let them wander round his old room, mellow in the glow of the firelight that played or rested on familiar and friendly things which had long been unconsciously a part of him, and now smilingly received him back, without rancor." Opening "The Wind in the Willows" again always feels like that to me.



Millions of other people share that feeling. Since its first publication, it has been issued in over a hundred editions and translated into many languages, with annual sales figures running into the hundreds of thousands. With Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland," Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer," J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" and C.S. Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia," it is one of those rare books that speaks with the same eloquence to children and adults -- and is equally beloved by both.

The pleasures of "The Wind in the Willows" are endless. Take the scene where Rat and Mole meet. Mole is shy. Rat rows across the river. Rat invites Mole to a picnic lunch. Afterward, Rat casually says, "Look here! I really think you had better come and stop with me for a little time." Mole accepts, moves into Rat's house, and as far as we know he is living there still. It's an evocation of friendship right out of a fairy tale, where the prince and the princess fall in love at first sight. But it's a fairy tale that Grahame makes real, capturing that moment when two people suddenly realize, without fanfare, that they'd rather spend time with each other than do anything else.

There is the deliciously dry account of what happens after Rat and Mole determine to make sure that Toad, who had shirked all caravan chores the previous morning, does his fair share of work. "In consequence, when the time came for starting next morning, Toad was by no means so rapturous about the simplicity of the primitive life, and indeed attempted to resume his place in his bunk, whence he was hauled by force."

And always, there is the glorious language. It is apples and oranges to compare Grahame and the two other masters of genre-blurring imaginative prose, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Grahame cannot rival Tolkien's epic grandeur, nor does he possess Lewis' double ability to create completely different imaginary worlds and weave vivid and intricate stories. But neither of those geniuses handle English the way he does. Tolkien knows only the high style, and Lewis' solid prose never soars. Grahame is the inheritor of the stately style of Thomas Browne and the lyrical effusions of Wordsworth, with a little Dickens and P.G. Wodehouse thrown in as ballast.

The book opens with a straightforward sentence: "The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home." But then one sentence later we come upon this: "Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing." Divine discontent and longing? It is only a hint of things to come, but just three sentences into the book we know we're about to take a magic carpet ride on words so perfectly weighted, so musical, so right, that they fly all by themselves. The last line of the chapter is: "He learnt to swim and to row, and entered into the joy of running water; and with his ear to the reed-stems he caught, at intervals, something of what the wind went whispering so constantly among them." If that sentence doesn't give you goose bumps as if you were simultaneously riding in a canoe slipping through cat tails and approaching a Wordsworthian vision, you need to tune up your ear and your heart.

Grahame described "The Wind in the Willows" as "a book of Youth and so perhaps chiefly for Youth, and those who still keep the spirit of youth alive in them: of life, sunshine, running water, woodlands, dusty roads, winter firesides." He was right, of course. And yet "The Wind in the Willows" is not the same book read at age 14 as it is at 55. For a child, "The Wind in the Willows" is the fantastic story of the adventures of four unforgettable animals, the Mole, the Rat, the Badger and, above all, the irrepressible Toad. (No discussion of Grahame's book can fail to mention the perfect illustrations by Ernest Shepard, which have delighted generations of children and adults. When he met with Shepard, the aging Grahame simply said, "I love these little people, be kind to them.") Mole's terrible night in the Wild Wood, Rat's huge pile of weapons, Badger's secret tunnels and Toad's wild escapades are simply irresistible. As a child you're dimly aware of the darker, more complex notes of loss and longing and redemption, but those things remain at the edge of your field of vision. As an adult, those haunting notes become an inseparable part of your enjoyment, the way a connoisseur of wine learns to appreciate the subtlety of less obvious flavors. It is a book of happy dreams, and as you begin to realize how many of your own dreams will never come true, Grahame's tale appears lit not just by the brilliant sun of noon but by the golden light of late afternoon.

"The Wind in the Willows" can be so many books during one reader's lifetime because it is more than one book to begin with. It is at once a children's book and an adult book, a wish-fulfillment and a satire, a comic adventure story and a poetic bildungsroman, the rollicking story of Toad and the inward-turning story of Mole. It exists half in the human world, half in the animal: the very nature of its four-legged characters is unstable. And it also tells the secret story of its author -- a story few know, and one as profoundly sad as the book is profoundly happy. You do not have to know anything about Grahame to appreciate his masterpiece: "The Wind in the Willows" is great precisely because it cannot be reduced to either the facts of his life or to its historical context



http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/12/16/wind_in_the_willows/?source=newsletter

After deb's cite, I went to wikipedia and read Grahame's bio and one of their cites--my god, that man had pain. His boyhood river must have been his mental refuge from it all.

I love the English pastoralist writers, like Grahame and Tolkein and a couple others I've read over the years whose names escape me now--the rivers and hedgerows and woods their characters live in are almost human, certainly human-scale, lovingly looked after for centuries, with small peaceful creatures living in harmony amongst people who love what they are and find them endlessly fascinating. Very different from Americans and Aussies. As Farmer and Bill Bryson say, everything in Oz seems to want to kill you or at the very least make you itch. In America, the land seems to dwarf us--forest primeval, mountains to the sky, plains where we're not even a dot on the landscape, it's out of our scale. Maybe that's why we keep paving it over, to bring it down to our size. The Brits seem to slip the land on like a comfortable old flannel shirt.

I'm another "messing about in boats" person! I used to use that quote on my answering machine during my boatie days.

Loved the book when I read it years ago. Have seen a couple of movies, but prefer the book. Your imagination is usually better than the movie.

I think I might drag it out again and take it down the coast for the holidays - now that you've reminded me.

I find the Toad bits kind of tedious.

For me, the illustrator of a book was always at least as important as the content of the book itself, as it informed my imagination. So, for me, A Christmas Carol will always be framed by the images of Arthur Rackham.

Most people would recognize the work of E. H. Shepard from Winnie the Pooh, whether or not they knew the artist's name. But for me, Shepard was he who provided me my view of the world of Wind in the Willows . . . although i could not find the image, Grahame's text and Shepard's illustration of the home of Badger defined my idea of the meaning of the word cozy . . .

Love Shepard.

Our book had black and white, though.....so I prefer that.

Someone once said that the first person to interpret a literary work is the illustrator.