The Gruffalo
The Gruffalo is a children's picture book by the English author Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Axel Scheffler. It tells the story of a mouse strolling in a wood and encountering a series of predators culminating in the fictional 'Gruffalo'. The Gruffalo was first published in 1999 in Britain by Macmillan Children's Books. It is about 700 words long and is written in rhyming couplets featuring repetitive verse. It is an example of a trickster story and was inspired by a Chinese folk tale called "The Fox that Borrows the Terror of a Tiger". The book has sold over 13.5 million copies and has won several prizes for children's literature, including the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize.
It has been adapted into plays and an Academy Award-nominated animated film. The book has inspired a range of merchandise, a commemorative coin, a theme park ride in Chessington World of Adventures in England, and a series of woodland trails. In 2004, The Gruffalo was followed by a sequel, The Gruffalo's Child, also written by Donaldson and illustrated by Scheffler.
Context
Author and illustrator
Julia Donaldson is an author of children's books, the most famous of which being The Gruffalo. Before writing The Gruffalo, Donaldson had a background in drama and performance. She studied drama at the University of Bristol and then busked in Europe and the United States. She began her career as a writer by writing children's songs for television programmes. In 1993, one of her songs that she sang and performed with her husband—"A Squash and Squeeze", about an elderly lady with a small house—was turned into a book, published by Methuen and illustrated by Axel Scheffler. Scheffler was born and grew up in Germany before moving to Britain to study art. He first worked with Donaldson on A Squash and Squeeze, published in 1993.Creating the book
In an interview in the book The Way We Write, Donaldson writes that although "It can take months or years for the germination of a book... writing The Gruffalo probably took two weeks, with all the rewriting". She said that writing the second half of the book was difficult and almost forced her to stop altogether. Donaldson said that she had admired Scheffler's illustrations for A Squash and Squeeze, and when her publisher did not suggest he would also be illustrating The Gruffalo, she sent him the text of the book herself. Scheffler showed the text to Macmillan, who were his publisher at the time and subsequently published the book.Plot
A small, clever mouse takes a walk through a deep, dark wood in search of food. Along the way, he encounters three hungry animals—a fox, an owl, and finally a snake—each of whom invites him to their home for a meal. However, the mouse realizes that each invitation is a trick to eat him. To outsmart them, he invents a mysterious creature called a Gruffalo, describing his sharp teeth, claws, and other fearsome features. He tells each predator that he is on his way to meet the dangerous beast, scaring them into letting him go.However, after getting rid of the snake, the mouse suddenly comes face-to-face with the real Gruffalo, a beast who looks exactly as what the mouse had described. The Gruffalo, much to the mouse’s horror, declares that a small mouse like him would make a tasty meal. Coming up with another clever trick, the mouse confidently tells the Gruffalo that he is actually the scariest creature in the entire forest. To prove it, he suggests that they take a walk together. As they stroll through the woods, they pass the fox, the owl, and the snake, who all see the Gruffalo and flee in terror. The Gruffalo, now convinced that the mouse must be truly fearsome, becomes frightened himself. When the mouse boldly declares that his favorite food is "Gruffalo crumble", the terrified monster runs away, leaving the mouse victorious. Alone once more, the mouse finally sits down to enjoy his well-earned snack—a nut—and smiles to himself, knowing that he has outwitted everyone in the forest.
Themes
Humour
In an article titled "Humour and the locus of control in 'The Gruffalo'", Betsie van der Westhuizen identifies the following types of humour used in The Gruffalo: "humour with regard to the narrative aspects, humour with regard to the poetic aspects, visual humour and humour and the performing arts". She writes that the most common use of humour in the story is incongruity, arising from the sense that "everything is not as it should be". Some examples include the mouse averting the predators and the unusual descriptions of food, such as "owl ice cream" and "scrambled snake". She writes that there are different experiences of humour among different ages of children who read The Gruffalo: three to five year olds will appreciate the elements of surprise and repetition in the story; six to eight year olds will enjoy the rhyme and rhythm of the text and the story's hyperbole. As for visual representations of humour, van der Westhuizen writes that an example occurs when the mouse scares away the snake, accompanied by fragmented images of the imaginary gruffalo's features, then immediately afterwards comes across the real Gruffalo.Mice often feature as the main character in stories for children, and one key characteristic of the animal in this context is humour. Both Ghassan Fadhil Radhi and van der Westhuizen write that children relate to the character of the mouse who triumphs in difficult situations, along with the humour that is a key element of many mouse stories.
Chinese folk tale
Donaldson has said that the story of The Gruffalo was inspired by a Chinese folk tale known as "The Fox that Borrows the Terror of a Tiger". The folk tale is about a hungry tiger who tries to catch a fox. The fox is clever and tells the tiger that God has made the fox king of all animals. Whilst accompanying the fox, the tiger notices that other animals run away in fear. Not realising that they are actually running away from the tiger, the tiger believes that fox is indeed a feared king. Donaldson was originally going to have the beast in her book be a tiger, but was unable to think of rhymes for "tiger" so instead invented a new word—"gruffalo".The Taiwanese translator of The Gruffalo recommended the book for publication in Taiwanese because he noticed the story bore resemblance to the traditional tale. Teachers have used this translated book to demonstrate a modern retelling of the Chinese folk tale. In an article on the traditional Chinese translation of The Gruffalo in Taiwan, Chen-Wei Yu writes that the "resourcefulness" of the mouse in Donaldson's story represents a Western association with "individual autonomy" and "self-achievement", whereas the fox in the original fable is to be looked down upon because it does not accept its correct place in society nor an individual's obligation to others. This latter interpretation of the story has led the phrase "The Fox that Borrows the Terror of a Tiger" to mean someone who makes use of another person's power for their own gain.
Writing style
The Gruffalo is a short children's story around 700 words long. It is intended to be read aloud as it is written for a target audience of children who do not know or are learning how to read. It is written in rhyming couplets in primarily dactylic tetrameter. This is a relatively uncommon metre, consisting of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, for instance:| Come | and | have | lunch | in | my | un- | der- | ground | house |
| ◡ | – | – | ◡ | – | – | ◡ | – | – | ◡ |
The rhythm of the text is broken at key points in the story. For example, when the mouse announces that he is going to meet the gruffalo "here, by the rocks", the pause on the word "here" lets the reader know the importance of the location and makes them more likely to remember it when the mouse and Gruffalo return there later in the story. The rhythm is broken again after the mouse fools the predators and sees the Gruffalo for the first time, saying "Oh, help! Oh, no! It's a gruffalo".
To create a satisfying rhyming scheme for the story, Donaldson tried a few different names for the creature that would eventually become the Gruffalo.
In Burke's view, the name is "fittingly crafted by the author". The use of the Gr sound at the start of the name evokes negativity, harshness and discomfort, as it is a common consonant cluster in words with that connotation. The first syllable in the name—gruff—is shared with the other children's literary characters of the Three Billy Goats Gruff. The sound of the word "Gruffalo" is used to emphasise the first time the Gruffalo is seen in the story: the mouse begins saying the sentence "Silly old snake, doesn't he know, there's no such thing as a Gruffal...", then the reader turns the page to see the picture of the Gruffalo and the mouse finishes its sentence with the exclamation "Oh!". Burke writes that this exclamation works particularly well when the text is read out loud. Van der Westhuizen writes that there is some "very subtle wordplay/manipulation of spelling" when the real Gruffalo is first introduced to make him "more specific, more substantial": from that point on in the text, "Gruffalo" is spelled with a capital 'G'; up until in the story, it was spelled with a lower case 'g'. There is typographic variation in the text, in that the Gruffalo's and predator's dialogue is written in italic font whereas the mouse's dialogue is not.
The text contains a mixture of predictable rhymes and unpredictable rhymes. It utilises alliteration from the very start, which gives more emphasis to the descriptions and helps children remember them more easily. The word "terrible" is repeated as an adjective to describe the Gruffalo's features, which Burke writes may remind readers of Where the Wild Things Are—another children's book to use the word. The Gruffalo mainly uses concrete nouns rather than abstract nouns.