Evolution of a character

Someone (sorry, I forget who) suggested a while back that a woozle was part weasel and part elephant, and that a heffalump was part elephant and part weasel. So I fetched The World of Pooh from my shelf (a nice trade paperback omnibus of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, with all the Shepard illustrations (the original B&W ones and the later-added color ones)), and I've been reading Pooh stories now and then, mostly just before going to sleep and just after waking up, because they take Very Little Brain to read and that's what I've got at the moment.

I suspect that I had never before read (or had read to me) some of the stories in House at Pooh Corner. Interesting. It's possible that I just don't remember them—but I remember others of them quite clearly.

Anyway, I ended up reading the second book before the first, so now I've gone back to re-read the first, and it's interesting from a writing/editing perspective to see how much the characters, and their voices, change over the course of the stories. In the first couple stories, Milne hasn't quite settled on how the characters talk; Pooh uses more big words in the first story than in all the others put together. And then there's the whole "under the name of Sanders" bit for Pooh, and the "Trespassers William" bit for (as he's initially introduced) "the Piglet," and the interjections where Christopher Robin is startled to find himself in the story, and so on. Because the later stories show what I've come to think of as the way the characters "really" are and "really" interact with each other, it feels like it took a while for them to grow into themselves. But from another point of view, I suppose one might feel that they started out one way and then Milne went and unfairly changed them. Of course, the same could be said (in either direction) for real-life people, too. Do we grow into being more ourselves, or do we depart from our promising beginnings to settle into ruts? Don't answer that.

Oh, and as for woozles? I see no evidence to suggest that they're connected to heffalumps in the manner described. It's possible that the Disney movie says otherwise, but in these parts we don't set much store in Disney adaptations of beloved children's books. They are not considered canon.

(Okay, now that I've brought up the movie I have to make the connection to my comments the other day about Frost: I've met a fair number of people who were referred to as Tigger (either as a name or a nickname or a description), and who have noted that "the wonderful thing about Tiggers is that I'm the only one!" I don't actually mean that to be as mean as it probably sounds; I think it's fascinating to see many members of a large culture each adopting the same highly individual role. Probably inevitable in a culture where we glorify individualism (and I don't mean "glorify" to have the negative connotations it probably has here). Back in the old days, I wonder if thousands of kids played Eric the Red or Hengest or Genghis Khan. And now my commentary has wandered so far from the point that I must close.)

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