Carollers and Wind in the Willows

"Badger by C. E. Swan
(Meles taxus syn. Meles meles)"
From: The wild beasts of the world (1909)
by Frank Finn
via Wikimedia Commons

The Wind in the Willows first appeared in print in 1908. It's a beloved children's classic since then — I suspect that a plot summary isn't needed! Even aside from the books with Ernest H. Shephard's (or Arthur Rackham's, or...) illustrations, its legacy lives on in other ways.

My family watched the 1980s British stop motion animated series on Canadian television in the 1990s, and still sometimes hum the theme song from memory.

Mouse knitting
From: Appley Dapply's Nursery Rhymes (1917)
by Beatrix Potter
via Wikimedia Commons

The Wind in the Willows's Christmas passages, atmospheric and pleasingly English, have also inspired composer Audrey Snyder to arrange a musical setting of the Carol. It is sung by choirs at Christmas under the title "Joy on Christmas Morning." (For example: [YouTube].)

***

It was a pretty sight, and a seasonable one, that met their eyes when they flung the door open. In the fore-court, lit by the dim rays of a horn lantern, some eight or ten little fieldmice stood in a semicircle, red worsted comforters round their throats, their fore-paws thrust deep into their pockets, their feet jigging for warmth. With bright beady eyes they glanced shyly at each other, sniggering a little, sniffing and applying coat-sleeves a good deal. As the door opened, one of the elder ones that carried the lantern was just saying, 'Now then, one, two, three!' and forthwith their shrill little voices uprose on the air, singing one of the old-time carols that their forefathers composed in fields that were fallow and held by frost, or when snow-bound in chimney corners, and handed down to be sung in the miry street to lamp-lit windows at Yule-time.

    CAROL

Villagers all, this frosty tide,

Let your doors swing open wide,

Though wind may follow, and snow beside,

Yet draw us in by your fire to bide;

Joy shall be yours in the morning! 

 

Here we stand in the cold and the sleet,

Blowing fingers and stamping feet,

Come from far away you to greet

—You by the fire and we in the street—

Bidding you joy in the morning! 

 

For ere one half of the night was gone,

Sudden a star has led us on,

Raining bliss and benison

—Bliss to-morrow and more anon,

Joy for every morning! 

 

Goodman Joseph toiled through the snow—

Saw the star o'er a stable low;

Mary she might not further go—

Welcome thatch, and litter below!

Joy was hers in the morning! 

 

And then they heard the angels tell

'Who were the first to cry NOWELL?

Animals all, as it befell,

In the stable where they did dwell!

Joy shall be theirs in the morning!'

"Belgian winter landscape" (19th century)
by Louis-Pierre Verwee
via Wikimedia Commons

 

The voices ceased, the singers, bashful but smiling, exchanged sidelong glances, and silence succeeded—but for a moment only. Then, from up above and far away, down the tunnel they had so lately travelled was borne to their ears in a faint musical hum the sound of distant bells ringing a joyful and clangorous peal.  

Source: The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame [Project Gutenberg Australia]

December 2021 in Books: What I'm Reading

THIS MORNING I read "Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes" (1922) from The Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter. Published reluctantly when the author-and-illustrator was losing her eyesight, she gently rewrites famous rhymes like "This Little Piggy."

"We have a little garden"
Illustration of Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes
by Beatrix Potter

She also illustrates a poem from her friend Louie Choyce:

We love our little garden
And tend it with such care,
You will not find a faded leaf
Or blighted blossom there.

[Tip: You can find the entire book on Wikisource. ]

***

Turning to adult literature of the 21st century:

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett felt like a page-turner after a while. Set in the 1950s through 1990s, if I remember correctly, it follows two twin women who were born in the segregation-era United States.

I enjoyed the back and forth between the different generations of Vignes women.

My only gripe? At times I wished I were reading James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, or another 20th century author instead; sometimes a 21st century perspective blurs the experiences of the 20th too much.

*

In a predictable coincidence, the Jimmy Carter biography His Very Best sheds another light on racism in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

His campaign to become Governor of Georgia profited greatly by what a few people ca. 2016 have called 'racial anxiety.'

But Carter upended expectations when, in his inaugural speech, he declared his support of racial integration.

*

In between I have been reading more of Assia Djebar's Les femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement.

Then I have begun reading Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue. Set during the recession of 2008-2009,  its main characters are a family of Cameroonian immigrants to the United States.

In an audiobook recording, I'm also listening to Cherie Dimaline's Empire of Wild. Published in 2020, it is a novel about a Métis community in Canada, in which a wife looks for her lost husband.

***

This past week, Barack Obama has posted his end-of-year lists of his favourite songs, books and films of 2021. A few authors are old-timers, like Jonathan Franzen, Colson Whitehead, and Kazuo Ishiguro; others are relative newcomers like Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Dawnie Walton. The lyrics of a few of the songs are also worth looking at, in their own literary right.

April 2021 in Books: What I've Been Reading (Children's and Youth Literature)

In the course of a deep dive into the Edwardian Age, I launched back into Beatrix Potter in April.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), of course, is a classic and led to the breakout success of the author, when publisher Frederick Warne — wiser than other publishers who had rejected her — asked for the manuscript to be illustrated in colour and accepted it on those terms:

Source: PenguinRandomHouse

The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin: A young squirrel, bristling with energy, goes on short boat trips together with other squirrels to an island in the English countryside. The others, who respect the chief inhabitant of the territory, bring tribute to the elderly owl who inhabits the island, before they roam around it. But Squirrel Nutkin badgers the owl, taunting him with flippant rhymes, as the threat that the owl will finally take his revenge intensifies. I have to confess I didn't particularly like this book.

It is a cannibalistic book, in a way. In the Narnia books the conundrum of humanizing animals, but still making them attack or eat each other, also arises; but I think C.S. Lewis took more steps to address the paradox. One assumes that in the Edwardian Age, children were not thought to be particularly sensitive.

Source: PenguinRandomHouse

And The Tailor of Gloucester shows off Potter's range of illustrator skill with watercolour paintings: they teem with 18th century formality, panache and detail. It was, apparently, the author's own favourite work and is based on a local legend not unlike the Heinzelmännchen of German fairy tales.

Source: PenguinRandomHouse

***

King and the Dragonflies is a middle grade or young adult book that was published in 2020 and landed in National Public Radio's best books of the year list. Kacen Callender also wrote Felix Ever After, which follows a transgender teen and, getting a lot of attention when it came out, feels like a pioneering book in the broadening social awareness of transgenderism, non-binary ideas of gender, etc.

via Publishers Weekly

The narrator protagonist of King and the Dragonflies is a teenager who lives in rural Florida, in walking distance of the wilderness of the bayou. Hurricane Katrina's legacy still looms large, and based on the ages and birthdates it is clear that the plot is supposed to be set in the here and now. The bayou itself mostly suggests, to the protagonist, his brother Khalid — an older, only sibling who died unexpectedly as a school athlete, and whose spirit King likes to think is reincarnated in the dragonflies that fly over its surface.

His parents are torn up about the sudden loss of their son, also uneasy and angry in a social environment where the sheriff is a racist and they feel unsafe.

King and the Dragonflies has old-fashioned elements: the benign and not-so-benign rednecks who appear in the periphery of King's life are not too far off from the 1930s Alabama of To Kill a Mockingbird.  This (possible) literary continuity says more about how engrained racist thought processes become in the mass psyche once they enter it, however, than about the author's intentions, I imagine. [A line of thought suggested also by Ibram X. Kendi's historical book Stamped from the Beginning, which shows in hundreds of ways how racist tropes and practices that we consider as part of the social landscape now, and don't always question and fix as much as we should, were introduced over the course of colonialist history, were certainly 'not always there,' and have unfortunately been very difficult to de-introduce.] 

Racism and homophobia are shown as parallel ills, the battle against them both necessary for equality and individual freedom in the present day. Callender (the author prefers the pronouns they/them) also specifically stress intersectionality. People who champion the one cause might reject the other cause — in the book, King's father is homophobic, and King's friend Sandy, who is White and gay, is struggling to recognize his own family's racist legacy even if he does not share their prejudice. We can't fix one problem and believe that everything is fixed; the problems are interconnected and, to very crudely paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., we can only enjoy justice for the one once we have ensured that it exists for all.

*

For the target audience: I think this book is a friendly companion to gay (or bisexual) children/teenagers, and an encouragement to come out of their shell, trusting in their own individual truth and worth. And to straight classmates it is a great encouragement to be a braver and more reliable ally.

***

Kacen Callender [Wikipedia]

A Toast to Winter, Part V: Oscar Wilde's Selfish Giant

When I was a child in Canada, I read The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde. The tales that stayed with me were "The Happy Prince" itself — the tale of a golden statue that beggars itself to mend the inequality of rich and poor in late Victorian London — and "The Nightingale and the Rose," and "The Selfish Giant."

What is "The Nightingale and the Rose" really about? — is it about people pouring out their heart's blood for the sake of love only to find out that it is lost, or if it is about people sacrificing themselves for art? I haven't figured it out yet and it isn't wintry.

"The Selfish Giant" is very wintry, however. It has been turned into a film and, despite its simplicity, appears to hit a fundamental chord with readers still.

"[P]late illustrating a story 'The Selfish Giant' in Wilde's
The Happy Prince and Other Tales. London: Nutt. 1st ed." (1888)
Picture by Walter Crane (1845-1915)
via Wikisource

***

The villain-turned-hero of the tale is a giant who keeps neighbouring children out of his yard. That is why he is selfish.

(Given how ogres behave in many fairy tales, presumably the infants can count themselves lucky that they didn't feature on the giant's dinner menu that evening. But Wilde doesn't see gianthood that way.)

Then the Spring came, and all over the country there were little blossoms and little birds. Only in the garden of the Selfish Giant it was still winter. The birds did not care to sing in it as there were no children, and the trees forgot to blossom. Once a beautiful flower put its head out from the grass, but when it saw the notice-board it was so sorry for the children that it slipped back into the ground again, and went off to sleep. The only people who were pleased were the Snow and the Frost. "Spring has forgotten this garden," they cried, "so we will live here all the year round." The Snow covered up the grass with her great white cloak, and the Frost painted all the trees silver. Then they invited the North Wind to stay with them, and he came. He was wrapped in furs, and he roared all day about the garden, and blew the chimney-pots down. "This is a delightful spot," he said, "we must ask the Hail on a visit." So the Hail came. Every day for three hours he rattled on the roof of the castle till he broke most of the slates, and then he ran round and round the garden as fast as he could go. He was dressed in grey, and his breath was like ice.

ONE DAY the children break in through the wall and visit the garden sneakily. Spring creeps in after them and the trees begin to flower again.

The Giant's heart is softened at the sight. He sees that one of his little visitors hasn't been able to perch in a tree like the others, so he lifts the disconsolate boy into the branches.

At that gesture, the neighbourhood children see their formerly grumpy neighbour in a different light. His garden is teeming with frolicking youth for the rest of the giant's life.

He saw a most wonderful sight. Through a little hole in the wall the children had crept in, and they were sitting in the branches of the trees. In every tree that he could see there was a little child. And the trees were so glad to have the children back again that they had covered themselves with blossoms, and were waving their arms gently above the children's heads. The. birds were flying about and twittering with delight, and the flowers were looking up through the green grass and laughing.

***

The Christian subtext (the echoes of "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" when the giant helps the boy, the stigmata later in the story, etc.)  and Victorian worship of childhood innocence here, might be a little too saccharine for modern tastes.

Grimm Fairy Tales: The Star Talers

"Illustration of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale 'The Star Money'" (1862)
by Ludwig Richter (1803-1884)
via Wikimedia Commons

GROWING UP amongst the dark firs and bristling blackberry bushes, fragrant lilacs and apple trees, and the distant rushing of the wind in the hill where my family lived in Canada, I became immersed in the world of Grimm fairy tales. I would sit in the attic, where my siblings and I slept like contented nestlings as the nightlight shone from underneath the window, and imagine a fairy tale in old Europe with the help of Ludwig Richter's illustrations (frogs, ancient leafy trees, wells and courts and birds whose species were unfamiliar beyond the Atlantic) from the early 1860s. We had an expurgated edition that did not have all of the tales and was in modern High German, no regional German dialects as far as I recall.

I read, for example, The Star Money, "Die Sterntaler." It is as brief and as simply-cut as its heroine's shirt, because the Grimm brother who wrote it down was sketching a mere memory of the tale's plot.

It presents a main character and nameless wayfarers: a parentless figure who wanders through the world, who sees the woes of fellow-travellers and has the means to 'fix' them — so she does.

***

Es war einmal ein armes, kleines Mädchen, dem war Vater und Mutter gestorben, es hatte kein Haus mehr in dem es wohnen, und kein Bett mehr, in dem es schlafen konnte, und nichts mehr auf der Welt, als die Kleider, die es auf dem Leib trug, und ein Stückchen Brod in der Hand, das ihm ein Mitleidiger geschenkt hatte; es war aber gar fromm und gut. Da ging es hinaus, und unterwegs begegnete ihm ein armer Mann, der bat es so sehr um etwas zu essen, da gab es ihm das Stück Brod; dann ging es weiter, da kam ein Kind, und sagte: „es friert mich so an meinem Kopf, schenk mir doch etwas, das ich darum binde,“ da thät es seine Mütze ab und gab sie dem Kind. Und als es noch ein bischen gegangen war, da kam wieder ein Kind, und hatte kein Leibchen an, da gab es ihm seins; und noch weiter, da bat eins um ein Röcklein, das gab es auch von sich hin, endlich kam es in Wald, und es war schon dunkel geworden, da kam noch eins und bat um ein Hemdlein, und das fromme Mädchen dachte: es ist dunkele Nacht, da kannst du wohl dein Hemd weggeben, und gab es hin. Da fielen auf einmal die Sterne vom Himmel und waren lauter harte, blanke Thaler, und ob es gleich sein Hemdlein weggegeben, hatte es doch eins an, aber vom allerfeinsten Linnen, da sammelte es sich die Thaler hinein und ward reich für sein Lebtag.

THE FAIRY TALE is read as an allegory about the Christian's notion of charitable deeds.*

* See "Allegorie" in the Wikipedia article here.

It is a tale that, to my leftist mind, epitomizes the absurdity of the world before modern social security, where a girl could be abandoned by society and yet be forced by her conscience to rectify the world's inequality out of her slender means.

To the proto-feminist part of my mind, it is impressive that the tale's reward for kindness is financial independence at nobody else's expense rather than, let's say, a husband.

But I have to add: from a non-cynical, religious standpoint, the insistence that a kind gesture to meet the needs of others is never in vain and never unappreciated by God is touching, although it is implausible and difficult to realize.

*

There was once a poor, little girl. Her father and mother had died, she had no house left to live in, no bed to sleep in, and nothing in the world other than the clothes she wore on her body and a piece of bread in her hand, which a pitying person had given her. But she was pious and good. She went away then, and along the way she met a poor man who begged so much for something to eat that she gave him the piece of bread. Then she went further, and a child came, and it said, "I am so cold where my head is, please give me something that I can bind around it." So she took off her cap and gave it to the child. And when she had gone a little further, a child came again and had no jacket, so she gave it hers; and still further, a child begged for a frock and she also gave it hers. Finally she reached a forest, and it had already become dark. Another child came and begged her for a shirt, and the pious girl thought: 'It is dark night, so you may as well give your shirt,' and so she gave it. All at once the stars fell from the sky and were many hard, shining coins. And although she had given away her shirt, she had one on after all but this time it was made of the finest linen. So she gathered all of her coins into it and was wealthy for the rest of her life.
(Free translation, based in part on Margaret Hunt's version.)

"Das arme Mädchen (1812)" [Wikisource - in German]
"Grimm's Household Tales, Volume 2/The Star Money" [Wikisource]
"Die Sterntaler" [Wikipedia - in German]
"Star Money" [Wikipedia]

February 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

"2019 in books: what you'll be reading this year"
The Guardian,
Saturday, January 5, 2019

John Ruskin, the Victorian art theorist, entered the world on February 8, 1819, but I confess I likely will not be reading any of his essays.

"John Ruskin" (1853/4)
by John Everett Millais
Oil on canvas, in the Ashmolean Museum
via Wikimedia Commons

TO CROSS into the American realm of letters, I've been pleased that James Baldwin has had a posthumous renaissance these past few years, or that perhaps he's never faded from view. A New Yorker originally, a public figure, black, gay — his writings, and his perspective on racism and his debates with people like the conservative William F. Buckley, are much-quoted even now. He lived and wrote at the height of the American civil rights movement, born in Harlem in 1924 and dying at the age of 63 in southern France — the country he had moved to after the Second World War.

He was, perhaps, not a raging optimist. Here's a Friday quotation, taken from Another Country (quoted in Goodreads here):

"People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy."

Baldwin's book If Beale Street Could Talk has just been adapted into a film, which was released in the US last year by Barry Jenkins. (It appears in the Guardian's article because in Britain the film is coming out later, on February 8.)

"James Baldwin" [Wikipedia]

From the first edition, via Wikimedia Commons

On February 5th, I'm looking forward to Angie Thomas's — she is an American, too, but Mississippian and born in 1988 — book On the Come Up. It's apparently the story of a teenager who wants to become a rapper. Thomas's last book The Hate U Give — the winner of many prizes and the basis of a Hollywood film — has a tense and immediate prose that can appeal to an adult reader just as much as to a younger millennial, which is why I think I might like On the Come Up.

“On the Come Up by Angie Thomas review – another YA hit”
Patrice Lawrence (January 30, 2019) [Guardian, online]

via Penguin.co.uk

On February 21st, Penguin UK is coming out with a collection of Toni Morrison's essays and speeches, including her eulogy of James Baldwin, and it's called Mouth Full of Blood. (Demosthenes' stones seem more comfortable to me, where filling mouths is concerned.)

***

RETURNING to children's literature, Penguin UK is publishing an illustrated digest of Charles Darwin's important work On the Origin of Species, on February 19th. Designed in serene, bright saffron-yellow, greens, pale turquoise and senna by Sabina Radeva, the flora and fauna are presented in familiar and soothing forms.

via C.H. Beck

LASTLY, the German publisher C.H. Beck is printing Alexander von Humboldt's accounts of his expedition to Russia in the year 1829 — fifteen years after the Napoleonic Wars.

Von Humboldt's accounts of travelling along the Amazon in the early 19th century were a pleasant read. So I am looking forward to Die Russland-Expedition: Von der Newa bis zum Altai.
[Note: C.H. Beck released it last week, so it does not count as a February book, properly speaking.]

***

Easter in Swedish: Noisy Village of Astrid Lindgren

"Bullerbü (Bullerbyn), eigentlich Sevedstorp"
Photograph by Manuela Hoffmann
August 9th, 2009. On Flickr.
License: (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Listening in on a television programme about her World War II diaries,* I was surprised to realize that Swedish children's author Astrid Lindgren wrote her books against the background, as it were, of the Second World War.

Lindgren experienced the war on Sweden's 'home front' — and war indirectly, through her work and naturally through her relations. She was married then and at that time her husband was, of course, in the military. Trained as a secretary, she spent her time reading, i.e. censoring, German-language letters for Sweden's special intelligence service.

I guess that she was eager for 'pastures new' after the war. Because then she spent her time planting and tending — like a garden — literary worlds for children. These worlds were, by and large, freed from the cruelty and indeed any great influence of elders. Pippi Longstocking is doubtless her famous protagonist, now. But I have liked reading Ronia, the Robber's Daughter (Ronja rövardotter), Mio My Son (Mio, min Mio)** and Alla vi barn i Bullerbyn — The Children of Noisy Village — too.

***

AFTERWARD we were going to hunt for the Easter eggs filled with candy which Mommy had hidden. Every Easter Karl and Bill and I each get a large egg filled with lots and lots of candy. But this year Mommy said that if we would be satisfied with eggs that were a little smaller, she would buy some for Britta and Anna and Olaf too. Then we could give them as a surprise at our party. Of course we wanted to do this. It was hard to find the eggs, Mommy had hidden them so cleverly. Mine was in the cupboard where we keep the pots and pans. It was made of silver with little flowers. Inside there was a little chicken made of almond paste, and lots of candy.

***

The Children of Noisy Village
By Astrid Lindgren
Illustrations by Ilon Wiklund.
Translation by Florence Lamborn.
New York: Penguin, 1988 (124 pp.)
For children five years and up, I think. Puffin: "8-12."

* "Kriegstagebücher von Astrid Lindgren" [Radio Berlin Brandenburg: Stilbruch]
K. Wenzel et al. (October 15th, 2015)
[Note: The video is online — presumably just in Germany — until October 15th, 2016.]

** In this book the background of World War II was material, I imagine. It is sombre.

*

More information:
"Astrid Lindgren's second world war diaries published in Sweden" [Guardian], by Alison Flood (May 13, 2015)

I also consulted "Wir Kinder aus Bullerbü", "The Six Bullerby Children," and "Astrid Lindgren" on Wikipedia.

Poppies, in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Study of Poppies, by John Constable
via V + A Museum website

They walked along listening to the singing of the bright-colored birds and looking at the lovely flowers which now became so thick that the ground was carpeted with them. There were big yellow and white and blue and purple blossoms, besides great clusters of scarlet poppies, which were so brilliant in color they almost dazzled Dorothy's eyes.

"Aren't they beautiful?" the girl asked, as she breathed in the spicy scent of the flowers.

- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum (1900)

The Wizard of Oz is familiar enough through the 1939 film with Judy Garland that an introduction to it is likely unneeded. Instead, then, I have taken this excerpt. In the Hollywood version, the flowers have been enchanted by the Wicked Witch of the West; in this version, the fragrance of the poppies in themselves is a sedative. When reading this chapter, I wondered, if in 1900, laudanum was still used as a medicine even for children. (Wikipedia: American patent medicine manufacturers were first required to list opium content in 1906; preparations of coca leaf and preparations of opium were roundly restricted by the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act in 1914, and Britain and France formulated their own similar restrictions a few years later.)

Illustration: Made in Great Britain, ca. 1832.
Maker: John Constable, born 1776 - died 1837. Oil on paper with a brown ground. Given to the Victoria and Albert museum by Isabel Constable. Museum number: 329-1888.

In honour of the exhibition: Constable: The Making of a Master, in the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK), from September 20th, 2014 to January 11th, 2014. More information here.

Laudanum and Harrison Narcotics Tax Act [Wikipedia]
Text quoted from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (New York: Alfred A. Knopf — Everyman's Library, 1992), p. 68

Little Bear's Visit

One of the staples of early childhood literature in the English tongue, which perseveres into the current generation and across country borders as my experience in a Berliner bookshop proves, is the Little Bear series by the American, Else Holmelund Minarik.

"Top of Zürich on Uetliberg Uto Kulm (Switzerland)",
January 10, 2010
By Roland zh
A random yet atmospheric picture of bears which is meant to invoke topical beariness whilst not clashing with our mental recollection  of Sendakian beariness. The cover of Little Bear's Visit, with Sendak's bear, can be found at Google Books.
Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Accompanied by the illustrations of Maurice Sendak, it has a gentility, a warmth and serenity which are heartening. In the sparing use of colour in the illustrations and of verbiage in the text, it is an endorsing example of the modernist tendency to pare away fuss and feathers. In this case it achieves, in the end, a truthful-feeling simplicity.

***

Pierre: a cautionary tale

In the 1960s Maurice Sendak came out with a series of books for children which we have at home, in tiny hardback editions no larger than a school pupil's hand, as the Nutshell Library. A year later, Harper and Row published Where the Wild Things Are, whereupon metaphorically speaking the American illustrator and author's ship set sail.

***

One of these Nutshell Library bookins is Pierre: A Cautionary Tale. It describes the travails of a naughty boy who is fond of telling his caring parents 'I don't care.' His apathy is greatly tested, however, when a lion visits in the absence of his parents and (after a polite string of warnings) swallows him entire.

Thanks to the author's humanity Pierre is none the worse for being swallowed; and the lion is not a particularly vicious lion. Pierre's parents are, however, perturbed:

Arriving home
at six o'clock,
his parents had
a dreadful shock!
They found the lion
sick in bed

and fear that he is suffering from indigestion caused by their offspring. After a little battery,

His mother asked,
"Where is Pierre?"
The lion answered,
"I don't care!"

His father deduces, "Pierre's in there!"

Then they must figure out how to get him out again, which (*spoiler alert*) they manage to do. Out pops a  renewed Pierre who declares that he does care, and the humans once again live in harmonious relations with the noble beast.
[To see the hidden text above, use your cursor and drag past it.]

*

The lion took them

home to rest

and stayed on

as a weekend guest.

***

Illustration: Front cover of Pierre, from the Harper Collins website (edition: HarperTrophy, 1991)

St. Nicholas's Trouble

by Felix Timmermans (1886-1947), Flemish author

"De nood van Sinter-Klaas" (1924, in Het keerseken in den lanteern) is a tale of St. Nicholas and his comrade Knecht Ruprecht, set in modern, 20th-century times:

***

Es fielen noch ein paar mollige Flocken aus der wegziehenden Schneewolke, und da stand auf einmal auch schon der runde Mond leuchtend über dem weißen Turm.