Your basket is empty.
-
- Books
Blog
Katherine Rundell on Her Top Mythical Creatures in Fiction
Our all-conquering 2023 Book of the Year becomes our September 2024 Children's Book of the Month, as Katherine Rundell's mighty Impossible Creatures arrives in four exclusive paperback creature editions. In this exclusive piece, Katherine selects the mythical creatures from children's literature that she adores the most.
Impossible Creatures is the story of the Archipelago: a place where all the creatures of myth that mankind has ever invented are real, and still thriving in immense numbers: longmas, lavellans, krakens and kluddes.
The new exclusive Waterstones collectable paperbacks come with extra information, about four of my favourite mythical creatures – the unicorn, the griffin, the jaculus dragon and the tiny, two-tailed fox-like kanko. I have always loved mythical creatures: for what they tell us about human delight, human hunger, human longing, human joy: and for the way they point us back to the real-life wonder of the real living world.
Here, to celebrate the paperback, are six wonderful mythical creatures in literature:
Tolkien’s Ents
I love Tolkien’s Ents: sentient trees, led by Treebeard of Fangorn Forest. They’re vast, and the most ancient creatures in Middle Earth, and I always longed to meet them. Tolkien said they were inspired by his childhood rage at Shakespeare: his ‘bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare’s Macbeth of the coming of ‘Great Birnam Wood to High Dunsinane hill: I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war.’
Ursula LeGuin’s Dragons in the Earthsea Quintet
LeGuin conjures superb dragons: wild, ancient, with a language that few humans can understand. There is a character is the later books who can shift between human and dragon form, and the beauty and strangeness of it is something that hooks itself into the imagination.
E Nesbit’s Phoenix in The Phoenix and the Carpet
Nesbit was one of the first writers to meld the realist, day-to-day domestic detail of a story with mythical beauty. I love the Phoenix in The Phoenix and the Carpet: proud, vain, capricious, unpredictable and powerful. He has lived for thousands of years and, as a result, understandably, is constantly on the brink of being mildly furious.
The Plentimaw Fish in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories
The Plentimaw Fish (‘there really are Plentimaw Fish in the Sea’) are not, perhaps, exactly mythic, but they are magnificent inventions. They drink the stories from the ocean: inside their fish-bodies, the old stories shift and transform, and the fish spit out new stories. Rushdie writes: “Nothing comes from nothing; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old – it is the new combinations that make them new.”
The Unicorn in Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse
I read The Little White Horse when I was seven, and was captivated by it. Published in 1946 and written just as the war was ending, it feels like a reaction to the privations and horrors of wartime, in that it dwells so vividly on marvels: on feasts, biscuits, fresh milk, beautiful clothing, riotous flowers. The unicorn is just barely glimpsed, seen through the trees: a vision of something miraculous, right on the outskirts of our consciousness.
The Harpies in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy
Pullman’s harpies guard the entrance to the realm of the ghosts. They are memorably vile: ‘Her face was smooth and unwrinkled, but aged beyond even the age of the witches: she had seen thousands of years pass, and the cruelty and misery of all of them had formed the hateful expression on her features…Her eye sockets were clotted with filthy slime, and the redness of her lips was caked and crusted as if she had vomited ancient blood again and again.’
They allow Lyra to pass because she tells them a true story: a true story of being alive. I also adore the harpies in Eva Ibbotson’s The Secret of Platform 13: they, too, are vile, but they carry handbags.
Related books
Related articles
Sign In / Register
Sign In
Download the Waterstones App
Would you like to proceed to the App store to download the Waterstones App?
Comments
There are currently no comments.