Odysseus in the Willows

Kenneth Grahame’s (1859-1932) The Wind in the Willows (WW)* is a subtle book, beautifully written, steeped in intertext and nuance, one that invites readers to find their own connections (despite Grahame’s assessment of literary criticism as “learned effusiveness:” “Cheap Knowledge,” Pagan Papers). Grahame was drawn to literature: Vergil, Horace, Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare, Macaulay, Tennyson, and others. He was formally trained in the standard subjects for a boy of his class and era: Latin, Greek, scripture, “and a smattering of other subjects” (Prince 1994: 29). Grahame had won a prize for Latin Prose in 1874, and even beyond his school years, he was able to quote Sophocles in Greek (“A Harvesting,” Golden Age: Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν [“love undefeated in battle:” Antigone 781]), and dash off a quick rhymed triplet paraphrase of Horace (Odes 1.4.1–2; cf., Chalmers 1933: 36-9, 274; Green 1959: 70). Before WW, Grahame had explored characters and stories from Classical antiquity: Ulysses, the Argonauts, Pan, Orion. Grahame’s life-long fascination with the culture of antiquity suffuses WW.

Many readers have long suspected “that Grahame intended The Wind in the Willows to mirror the plot of the Odyssey” (Gauger 2009: 284). Green, moreover, has observed that “most of Toad’s adventures bear a certain ludicrous resemblance to Ulysses’ exploits in the Odyssey” (2008: xvii), and the final chapter, tellingly entitled “The return of Ulysses,” features an arming scene (“an irreverent take-off of the stock Homeric arming ceremony”: Green 1959: 260) and the aristeiai (battle-field successes) of the book’s four heroes in Iliadic fashion (Mole, River Rat, Badger, and Toad). But there is more that links WW to Greco-Roman epic in both its structure and thematic arcs. Like Vergil’s Aeneid, WW is organized into twelve books (half the number of books in the Iliad and Odyssey). The novel’s overarching themes are drawn from ancient epic: xenia (hospitality), anabases and katabases (journeys to and from the underworld), arming scenes and aristeiai, epic catalogues, lying tales, Toad’s “cleverness,” and subtle, perhaps unintended, intertexts.

Toad, clearly, is a parody of the Odyssey’s eponymous hero, a wealthy but fool-hardy animal who prides himself on his cleverness (he is designated as clever/cleverly [or not] 26 times), thus praising in himself what Homer and Athena recognized in Odysseus, often called πολύτροπος (polytropos: “many turned”) and πολύμητις (polymetis: “of many counsels"). Athena smiles at Odysseus’ guile: “it would be a sharp one and a stealthy one who would ever get past you in any contriving” (Od. 16.290). The hero from Ithaca is much turned, shifty, versatile, and “unflinching from deceits” (Od. 13.293). Toad is likewise shifty and “unflinching from deceits.” Upon being sentenced for stealing a motor car, he is described as “a criminal of deepest guilt and matchless artfulness and resource” (WW 6.70), a reputation in which he revels:

Toad was delighted with the suggestion [of escaping from jail disguised as a washer-woman]. It would enable him to leave the prison in some style, and with his reputation for being a desperate and dangerous fellow untarnished. (WW 8.85)

Toad, in fact, is literally “many turned”. After eluding the watchful surveillance of his well-meaning friends by escaping through his bedroom window, Toad aims to avoid being followed:

At first he had taken by-paths, and crossed many fields, and changed his course several times, in case of pursuit.(WW 6.67)

Like Odysseus πολύτροπος, Toad switches his course along the paths to ensure his freedom (Irby 2022: 54). Toad, moreover, is proud of his skullduggery:

“Smart piece of work that!” he remarked to himself chuckling. “Brain against brute force—and brain came out on the top—as it’s bound to do.” (WW 6.67)

Contriving many plans, Odysseus is tossed along the many paths of the sea before he can return home. Toad also contrives many plans as he changes his course to evade capture.

Toad’s behavior and adventures also elicit Odysseus’. Like Odysseus, Toad employs a disguise: Odysseus assumes the camouflage of a beggar; Toad is dressed as a washer-woman. Just as the suitors treat Odysseus like a beggar (and he acts the role), so, playing the part, Toad is treated like a poor washer woman; with a persuasive and pathetic lying tale, he elicits the sympathy of a train engineer who agrees to protect the pitiful creature in exchange for having his shirts washed (Toad escapes the engineer before washing the shirts). Still in his washer-woman disguise, Toad emerges and finds himself on the wrong side of a canal. But, securing the sympathy of a barge operator with his lying washer-woman tale—his daughter has summoned him to Toad Hall—he manages transportation across the canal. Odysseus is not recognized in Ithaca when he finally returns after a 20-year absence (incidentally the length of Toad’s sentence for stealing the handsome motor car), and Toad, trying to return from jail to Toad Hall, is not recognized in the train station. Lacking his purse, the disguised Toad had been unable to purchase a ticket home: “it was hard, he thought, to be within sight of safety and almost of home, and to be baulked by the want of a few wretched shillings and by the pettifogging mistrustfulness of paid officials” (WW 8.88). Likewise, sailing homeward with the aid of Aeolus’ bag of winds, Odysseus is within sight of Ithaca (“we could see people tending fires”: Od. 10.30) when his greedy companions open the bag, hoping to find silver and gold, but instead releasing a windstorm that blows the ship off course. Odysseus contemplates suicide by drowning (Od. 1.59). Toad, likewise, despairs in jail: “This is the end of everything” (WW 8.81). For weeks he refuses meals. When Toad finally does return from his first set of misadventures, he arrives “dark and late,” like Odysseus who returns to Ithaca “late” after losing all his ships and his companions. Nor does Toad dare leave the shelter of the trees on the riverbank, as Odysseus remains hidden in Athena’s mist.

Odysseus and Toad also elevate the lying-tale to high art. Like Odysseus’ lying tales, Toad’s straddles a fine line between truth and fabrication. In his tale to the barge-woman, Toad really is trying to get to Toad Hall, just as Odysseus-the-Cretan had, in fact, fought at Troy. Coming across the same motor car that had landed him in jail in the first place and still in his washer-woman disguise, Toad persuades the car’s owner to allow him to drive it. The reluctant owner agrees, but as Toad drives faster and faster, the driver tries to stop him: “Be careful, washer-woman!” Accelerating to full speed, Toad retorts

Washer-woman indeed! Ho, ho! I am Toad, the motor-car snatcher, the prison-breaker, the Toad who always escapes!” (WW 10.120).

Odysseus’ retort to Polyphemus immediately comes to mind:

Cyclops, if any one of mortal men asks about the shameful blinding of your eye, tell them that it was Odysseus, sacker of cities, son of Laërtes, having his home in Ithaca. (Od. 9.504).

Both Odysseus and Toad must take credit by name, both Odysseus and Toad brag about their accomplishments. There is no virtue in performing anonymous acts of heroism. The epic hero places a high premium on his reputation. Like Odysseus, Toad’s weapons of choice are “cleverness,” persuasion, and deceit.

WW and the Odyssey also explore the motif of temptation: the lotus-fruit, which causes those who eat it to forget their homes; the Sirens’ song, which brings death to those who hear it; and motor cars, Mr. Toad’s particular drug of choice. Like Odysseus’ crew who cannot resist the lotus-fruit, like Odysseus who must listen to the song of the Sirens, Toad succumbs to the lure of motor cars, collecting them, crashing them, stealing them. Toad’s carriage house is “piled up—literally piled up to the roof—with fragments of motor cars, none of them bigger than your hat” (WW 4.37), the detritus of six smashes. Toad “seems as enamored of the crash as he is of the ride” (Deforest 1989: 83). Toad’s carriage house, cluttered with motor car shards, elicits the Sirens’ beach which is littered with the bones of sailors who had been enticed by their deadly music (Od. 12.45-6). Were their ships wrecked? Did the men swim to shore? Homer does not tell us. Odysseus, however, can listen in relative safety because he is tied to the mast. Toad, moreover, is constrained by his friends. Like Odysseus, Toad struggles. Unlike Odysseus, Toad escapes restraint to glut himself on his lotus-fruit and Sirens’ songs.

The caricature evident in WW may have been influenced by the late Hellenistic Batrachomyomachia, “The Battle between the Frogs and Mice,” which uses Homeric diction and style to satirize the Iliad. Throughout Batrachomyomachia the tension between the mice and weasels, a natural predator of biological mice, is sustained, as, in WW, is the tension between the Riverbankers and Wild Wooders (ferrets, stoats, and weasels). During the exchange of personal histories when the mouse prince meets the frog king, the mouse prince (Crumb-snatcher) acknowledges the long-standing animosity between mice and weasels (one of the Mouse king’s three sons was killed by a weasel: Batr. 113-4). Even if Grahame had not read the Batrachomyomachia in Greek, he would have had access to William Cowper’s 1809 English translation. The coincidence is indeed scintillating.

Parody aside, the highly textured, subtle allusions run deep, and Grahame’s approach is more reverential than parodical, as Poss observes (1975: 85). In WW, Grahame has constructed a utopic Arcadia on the cusp between Romanticism (where the Classics are idealized), Victorianism (where the Classics are internalized), and Modernism (where the Classics are adapted to innovation and stylistic experimentation). The Arcadia that is the foundation of WW is a both a model of Greek epic style in diminuendo (in accord with Victorian engagement with the Iliad) and a celebration of domesticity (as in Victorian responses to the Odyssey). Rejecting the present and the future, Grahame’s vision, Grahame’s world recedes into the literary past where the Classics maintained pride of place.

*References are by chapter and page number in the 2008 reissue of The Oxford World Classic edition, edited by Peter Green.

WORKS CITED

Chalmers, P (1933), Kenneth Grahame: Life, Letters, and unpublished Work (London).

Deforest, M (1989), “The Wind in the Willows: A Tale for Two Readers,” Classical and Modern Literature 10: 303-23.

Gauger, A (2009), The Annotated Wind in the Willows (New York and London).

Green, P (1959), Kenneth Grahame 1859–1932. A Study of His Life, Work and Times (London).

Green, P (2008), ed. and introduction, The Wind in the Willows (Oxford).

Irby, G (2022), Epic Echoes in The Wind and the Willows (Routledge).

Poss, GD (1975), “An Epic in Arcadia: The Pastoral World of Wind in the Willows,” Children’s Literature 4: 80-90.

Prince, A (1994), Kenneth Graham: An Innocent in the Wildwood (London).

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Georgia L Irby is a Professor of Classics at William and Mary. Her research interests include the history of Greco-Roman science, mythology, literature, and religion. In her forthcoming Epic Echoes in The Wind and the Willows, she explores Grahame’s engagement with epic themes, imagery, and story arcs. She has always been friendly to Bears and spends as much time as possible in the Hundred Acre Wood or messing about in boats on the Riverbank.