Just So Stories

Story
Once, crocodiles swam in ‘the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River’, the elephant didn’t have a trunk, the leopard didn’t have spots, and the camel didn’t have a hump. These Just So Stories for Little Children explain how these and other animals got the distinctive features we recognise today.

Why we chose it

These origin stories are among Kipling’s best-known works. They are perennial favourites, still loved by children and adults for their entertaining storytelling and memorable use of language. However, like much of Kipling’s writing, they are also criticised by modern readers for embodying the colonial attitudes of Kipling’s time.

Where it came from
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, short-story writer, novelist and poet. He was born and spent part of his childhood in India where his father was an artist and teacher.

Kipling loved the books of Robert Louis Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard as well as traditional Indian fables such as the Panchatantra.

Kipling developed some of the Just So Stories by telling them to his young daughter Josephine, who demanded they be told ‘just so’, in the exact words he had used before. The first three were published in magazines. In 1899 Josephine died of pneumonia, aged 6, and over the next three years Kipling illustrated the stories and gathered them into a book for small children.

Where it went next

The Just So Stories were immediately popular and have been widely translated and adapted as cartoons and for theatre and television.

Associated stories

Other short stories about animals appear in Kipling’s The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book, both written for older children. How Fear Became, from the second book, is a ‘Just So’ style origin story that tells how the tiger got his stripes.