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The ''Just So Stories for Little Children'' were written by British author Rudyard Kipling . They are highly fantasized Origin Stories and are among Kipling's best known works. DESCRIPTION The stories, first published in 1902 , are fantastic accounts of how various natural phenomena came about. A forerunner of these stories is "How Fear Came" in '' The Second Jungle Book '' ( 1895 ), in which Mowgli hears the story of how the Tiger got his stripes. The original editions of ''Just So Stories'' were illustrated with Woodcut s by Kipling himself, though later editions have included illustrations by other artists. Each story is accompanied by a poem, in a somewhat Ballad style. The poem after "The Elephant's Child" is particularly widely quoted; it opens:
Many of the stories are addressed to "Best Beloved" (they were first written for Kipling's eldest daughter, Josephine, who had died during an outbreak of Influenza in 1899 ), and throughout they use a comically elevated style inspired by the formal speech of India , full of long and improbable-sounding words, some of them made up. As a result, it is a delight to read them aloud, and easy to memorise passages from them. They were a highly popular item on the BBC 's radio programme '' Children's Hour '' in the 1950s . THE ELEPHANT'S CHILD Some sense of the style of the stories may be gathered from the following extract:
THE FULL LIST OF JUST-SO STORIES by Kipling]]
As well as appearing in a collection, the individual stories have also been published separately, often in large-format illustrated editions for younger children. A Video edition has also been released; on VHS tapes it required three tapes with four episodes on each. TRIVIA The "magic mark" inscribed on the stone under the man's foot in Kipling's original illustration for "The Crab That Played With the Sea" is actually an inverted Swastika (originally a sign of peace); Kipling used the inverted swastika as an emblem on his books, for its oriental connections (this was before it was adopted by the Nazi s). The Just So Stories have recently been adapted into Just So (musical) . SEE ALSO
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