The Three Mulla-mulgars 

(1919) by Walter de la Mare is a forgotten classic of fantastic

adventure. Perhaps one reason for its neglect these days is that although it has many features of a
book for children--a child protagonist, talking animals, magical artifacts, supernatural events,
exciting adventures, and exquisite pictures by Dorothy P. Lathrop--it also features a richly poetic
and idiosyncratic writing style, a complicated religious and philosophical foundation, and an
times confusing and unsettling ambiguity and irony.

Thirteen years before the story begins Seelem, a Mulla-mulgar (royal monkey) from the Valleys of
Tishnar, left there on a journey of discovery and ended up in the forest of Munza-mulgar, where
he met a common fruit-monkey named Mutt-matutta and sired by her three sons, Thumb
(Thumma), the eldest and broadest, Thimble (Thinbulla), the second and tallest, and Nod
(Ummanodda), the youngest and most magical. He taught his sons important things like never to
eat meat, grow a tail, run on all fours, or climb trees, and always to sing songs in praise of
Tishnar. Tishnar is an interesting conception, representing "all the wonderful, secret, and quiet
world beyond the Mulgars' lives… wind and stars, too, the seas and the endless unknown," a
divine beauty so compelling "that a Mulgar who dreams even of one of her Maidens, and wakes
still in the presence of his dream, can no longer be happy in the company of his kind."

Thirteen years later, Seelem, who had begun to "listen as if out of the immeasurable and
solitudinous forests he heard voices calling him from far away," left for his beloved Valleys of
Tishnar, whence he said he would soon send for his family in royal style. But months have passed
without any communication from him, and Mutt-matutta pines away, telling her sons as she dies
that they must go in search of their father and giving Seelem's fabulous Wonderstone to Nod.
When rubbed correctly and needfully, the Wonderstone may bring magical aid. One of the
fascinating elements of the novel is Nod's caretaking of "the strange pale glowing milk-white
Wonderstone, carved all over with labyrinthine beast and bird and unintelligible characters… as
if in itself it were all Munza-mulgar, its swamps and forests and mountains lying tinied… and as
full of changing light as the bellies of dead fishes in the dark."

The story, then, depicts the double quest of the three Mulla-mulgar brothers to find both their
father and the earthly paradise of Tishnar. Rather than dealing with good and evil, the brothers'
quest is a romantic journey towards the ineffable, unattainable, and ideal. Pursuing this quest
during an unprecedented snowy winter leads the Mulla-mulgars to dense forests, thorny
wastelands, wide rivers, and massive mountains, introduces them to strange cultures like those of
Minimuls (subterranean monkeys), Oomgars (humans), Babbaboomas (baboons), and Moona-
mulgars (mountain monkeys), exposes them to supernatural beings like the ancient witch-hare
Mishka, the black panther agent of death Immanala, and the indelibly beautiful and sad Water-
midden, and pushes them to the limits of their wits, courage, strength, love, and faith. Will spring
never come? Will they ever find the Valleys of Tishnar? Do the valleys even exist in this world or
are they only accessible through death? Is their father living there or has he died and become a
Meermut (spirit)?

As with the best fantastic quest stories, the characters represent human potential: "And they
combed themselves, and stood up to their trouble, and thought stubbornly, as far as their
monkey-wits would let them, only of the future (which is easier to manage than the past)." The
relationships among the three brothers is moving. And Nod is a great main character: young and
small, brave and clever, sensitive and loving, proud and humble, and magically gifted. He is
prone to egregious mistakes that cause great trouble and earn him names like Prince of Bonfires,
but is also capable of great achievements that win him names like Eengenares (Eyes-of-an-eagle).

The rich language of the novel is one of its great challenges and pleasures, as de la Mare wrote
words archaic (e.g., megrims), difficult (e.g., margent), transformed (e.g., Ephelantoes), or made
up (e.g., Noomanosi [death]), and uses familiar words in unusual ways (e.g., "that terrific steep of
air"). He even created a Mulla-mulgar language that the narrator translates into English, though
often in moments of intensity he leaves it in its original form: "Sibbetha eena manga Moh!"
Nonetheless, the basic story is understandable, and there are many humorous, exciting, moving,
or sublime scenes that readers of any age could enjoy. And passages like the following evoke a
magical atmosphere:
"Over the swamp stood a shaving of moon, clear as a bow of silver. And all about, on every twig,
on every thorn, and leaf, and pebble; all along the nine-foot grasses, on every cushion and touch
of bark, even on the walls of their hut, lay this spangling fiery meal of Tishnar--frost. He called
his brothers. Their breath stood round them like smoke. They stared and snuffed, they coughed
in the cold air. Never, since birds wore feathers--never had hoar-frost glittered on Munza-mulgar
before."

And descriptions like the following have a beautiful power:

"He was shrunk very meagre with travel, and his little breathing bosom was nothing but a slender
cage of bones above his heart."

My only criticism of The Three Mulla-mulgars is that it ends abruptly, hinting at a sequel that I
believe de La Mare never published. But perhaps the point is that the journey and what it does to
the main characters may be at least as important as its goal. And there is more world building
and heroic and comical adventuring and poetic and original writing packed into the short novel
than in the majority of other fantasy for children (or adults). (less)

Revisiting a forgotten children’s

book by one of the 20th century’s
most distinctive writers
Walter de la Mare bears one of the loveliest names in English literature, but we don’t
hear much about his books these days. That’s one reason the University of
Cambridge is hosting an international conference Thursday and Friday called
“Reading Walter de la Mare, 1873-1956.” It is boldly and accurately subtitled “A voice
which has no fellow.”
Once upon a happier time, de la Mare’s most ambitious work of fiction, “Memoirs of
a Midget” (1921), earned acclaim as one of the finest novels of the 20th century —
which, incidentally, it is (see my 2004 Washington Post essay on the book) — while
admirers of his exceptional animal fantasy “The Three Mulla-Mulgars” (1910) tended
to agree with Richard Adams, who, when asked about its possible influence on
“Watership Down,” declared: “To try to copy ‘The Three Mulla-Mulgars’ would be
like trying to copy ‘King Lear.’ ”
Nothing if not versatile, de la Mare was also an equally gifted poet and anthologist.
“Behold, This Dreamer!,” for instance, assembles passages about “Reverie, Night,
Sleep, Dream, Love-Dreams, Nightmare, Death, the Unconscious, the Imagination,
Divination, the Artist, and Kindred Subjects.” In fact, de la Mare’s work repeatedly
conjures an otherworldly mysteriousness. Consider his most famous poem, “The
Listeners”:
AD
“ ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,/Knocking on the moonlit door.”
No one answers, though phantom listeners “stood thronging the faint moonbeams on
the dark stair,/ That goes down to the empty hall.” After pounding harder without
response, the Traveller eventually gives up, saying, “Tell them I came, and no one
answered,/ That I kept my word.” He then rides away, and silence quickly returns.
The listeners would seem to be ghosts — unless the Traveller is himself a fearsome
revenant, come back from the dead to fulfill some ancient promise.
Along with “The Listeners” and the wonderful children’s verse of “Peacock Pie”
(1913), de la Mare is probably best known for his eerie stories, the most frequently
reprinted being “Seaton’s Aunt,” about a psychic vampire. Written around 1909, it
was followed by a full-length novel of spiritual possession, “The Return” (1910), in
which the protagonist discovers that his face has been reshaped into that of a dead
18th-century pirate. The consequences are initially unsettling, then hallucinatory and
finally transformative.
AD
Oddly enough, de la Mare alternated work on “The Return,” which is psychologically
intense and claustrophobic, with work on the zestful and visionary “Three Mulla-
Mulgars” (also called “The Three Royal Monkeys”). Thumb, Thimble and Nod are the
sons of Seelem, the far-wandering brother of Assasimmon, the Mulgar, or monkey,
prince of the Valleys of Tishnar. After their father’s disappearance, the three brothers
trek across jungles and wastelands and over mountains in search of those celestial
valleys. Allegorically, theirs becomes a journey into the nature of things, much
simpler in character but similar to George MacDonald’s phantasmagoric “Lilith” and
David Lindsay’s mind-boggling “A Voyage to Arcturus.”
As in so many fairy tales, the third and youngest brother soon emerges as the main
character, in part because good-hearted Nod has “magic in him.” He has also been
left the Wonderstone by his dying mother. “If in your long journey,” she explains,
“you are in danger of the Third Sleep” — the Mulgar name for death — “or lost, or in
great fear, spit with your spittle on the stone, and rub softly three times with your left
thumb. . . Tishnar will hear you; help will come.”
Note that the Mulgars can talk, walk upright and regularly wear coats to keep warm,
but they aren’t human beings in fur (as are Badger and Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s
contemporary “The Wind in the Willows”). Thumb, Thimble and Nod eat fruits and
nuts, fear Oomgars (men) and generally interact only with other jungle simians.
During their adventures, they are captured by cannibalistic monkeys (the terrifying
Minimuls), trick a Cyclops-like gorilla out of his boat and, ultimately, join forces with
mountain Mulgars, who are as comfortable on narrow ledges as they are valiant in
fighting eagles: “And with sticks and staves and flaring torches they turned on the
fierce birds that came sweeping and swirling out of the dark upon them on bristling
feathers, with ravening beaks and talons.” Still, Nod makes friends with a
shipwrecked sailor (who teaches him rudimentary English) and falls in love, sort of,
with a sorrowful and lonely water-maiden.
AD
Throughout, de la Mare keeps his prose musical — “Calm and still the mist lay, and
softer than wool” — while intensifying his story’s otherness by occasionally using
words from the monkey-language, most of them echoing their English equivalents. A
zevvera is a zebra, a bobberie a boat. Similarly, the panther-like Immanala,
sometimes called the Queen of Shadows, closely resembles the sinister tiger Shere
Khan from Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle Book,” while a troupe of the hardy mountain
monkeys might almost be mistaken for the 13 dwarves of “The Hobbit.” Unlike J.R.R.
Tolkien, though, de la Mare eschews massive bloodshed, let alone an epic
confrontation between good and evil. Still, Nod’s connection to the Wonderstone
grows as intimate as Bilbo and Frodo’s with the Ring. Not only does it open doors
into another realm of being, it can also feed and succor — at least until Nod falls
asleep and the amulet drops from his small brown fingers:
“It fell to the bottom of his sheep-skin pocket, and then, like a dream, vanished, gone,
were fountain, feast, and music. And deep in snow, encircled by poison-thorns,
slumbered the nineteen travelers in their rags and solitude, come out of magic,
though they knew it not.”
While such prose now sounds old-fashioned or even too delicately textured for the
age of Twitter, truly adventurous readers will always seek out “The Three Mulla-
Mulgars” and de la Mare’s other books. They stand high among the most original and
idiosyncratic works of 20th-century literature.