How the Rhinoceros    got his Skin    

from 

  Rudyard Kipling’s    

JUST SO STORIES


How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin

unabridged 

author information and adaptations by 

  Kathryn A. Paxton-Hill 


A Bright Water Studio Original

2011


dedication page

Author- Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling ( December 30, 1865 -January 18, 1936)

 

About the Author  

Rudyard Kipling 


 Kipling was an English writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is best known for his poems and stories set in India during the period of British imperial rule.


 Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay,(Mumbai) India, 1865. His parents were from England and before he was born had moved to India to teach.  In 1870, Kipling was sent back to England to be schooled in Devon. In 1882, he returned to India and worked as a newspaper reporter. He also wrote poetry and fiction in his spare time.

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     His unusual first name comes from Lake Rudyard. John Lockwood Kipling and Alice Macdonald, parents of Rudyard Kipling, met here on a trip from Burslem and where they spent many happy hours together.

     He was also a Freemason. And of his own Masonic experiences, he was later to write, "In 1885, I was made a Freemason by dispensation (being under age) in The Lodge of Hope and Perseverance 782 E.C. because the Lodge hoped for a good Secretary. They did not get him, but I helped, and got Father (John Lockwood Kipling, was from Yorkshire and studied art and sculpture in London.) to advise me in decorating the bare walls of the Masonic Hall with hangings after the prescription of King Solomon's Temple. Here I met Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, members of the Araya and Brahmo Samaj, and a Jewish Tyler , who was a priest and butcher to his little community in the city. So yet another world was opened to me which I needed." (MWBro. Robert A. Gordon PGM, Kipling and Freemasonry)

online dcitionary

painting of the author and photo of young Kipling

   Among his most famous books are The Jungle Books, which are set in India and involves a boy, “Mowgli” who is brought up under the law of the jungle.

"The Jungle Book (1894) was a collection of fictional stories about the wilds of India, many of them about Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves."
Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/rudyard-kipling#ixzz1IqizSp00

    Kipling didn’t spend all his time in India writing.  At one point, after returning to England, he married an American, Caroline Balestier. They had dreams of traveling but financial reasons delayed this and they moved to Vermont. This is where many of his most successful and best loved children’s books were written.

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�Kipling's India-map
this is a map of what India looked like when he was living there.

snake charmers

Their two daughters were born in Vermont. While living in the  United States Kipling wrote 'The Jungle Book' (1894). In 1896, a quarrel with his wife's family prompted Kipling to move back to England and he settled with his own family in Sussex . His son John was born in 1897. The 'Just So Stories' (1902) were originally written for his daughter Josephine, who died of pneumonia aged six.

(interested in more about snake charmers? Click here!  and to see a video just click here!)

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Rhinos and Indian village 1880's

 

As a child and a young journalist , Kipling was inspired by what he saw and influenced by his experiences while living in India. “How the Rhinoceros got His Skin” is just one of the many of his 'Just So Stories', which was created with India in mind. The stories from this book are a magical blend of truth and fantasy.

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wild animals
Kipling invented tales about how animals, many of them from Africa as well as India, got their special characteristics.

Rudyard Kipling traveled a lot!  As a writer traveling to many countries gave him a lot of different ideas, and veiwpoints to create his stories from.

world map

Besides spending much of his time in India and England, in 1889 Kipling took a long voyage through Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Japan, and the United States.

He spent many winter holidays in South Africa. Kipling also travelled to Rhodesia. (now known as Zimbabwe)

His travels also took him to Canada, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand and Brazil.


Follow this link,

http://www.map-zone.net/

Click on a continent or region in the map  for a list of countries and territories and locate the countries Kipling visited. Look at the map on this page and locate the country you want to visit on the map in the link!


 How the Rhinoceros got his Skin

 

ONCE upon a time, on an uninhabited island on the shores of the Red Sea, there lived a Parsee from whose hat the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than oriental splendor.  And the Parsee lived by the Red Sea with nothing but his hat and his knife and a cooking-stove of the kind that you must particularly never touch.  And one day he took flour and water and currants and plums and sugar and things, and made himself one cake which was two feet across and three feet thick.  It was indeed a Superior Comestible (that’s magic), and he put it on the stove because he was allowed to cook on that stove, and he baked it and he baked it till it was all done brown and smelt most sentimental . But just as he was going to eat it there came down to the beach from the Altogether Uninhabited Interior one Rhinoceros with a horn on his nose, two piggy eyes, and few manners. In those days the Rhinoceros’s skin fitted him quite tight.  There were no wrinkles in it anywhere. He looked exactly like a Noah’s Ark Rhinoceros, but of course much bigger. All the same, he had no manners then, and he has no manners now, and he never will have any manners.

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This is an image of the Parsee

 

 

“How!” and the Parsee left that cake and climbed to the top of a palm tree with nothing on but his hat, from which the rays of the sun were always reflected in more-than-oriental splendor.  And the Rhinoceros upset the oil-stove with his nose, and the cake rolled on the sand, and he ate it, and he went away, waving his tail, to the desolate and Exclusively Uninhabited Interior which abuts on the islands of Mazanderan , Socotra , and the Promontories of the Larger Equinox .

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Then the Parsee came down from his palm-tree and put the stove on its legs and cited the following Sloka , which, as you have not heard, I will now proceed to relate:

Them that takes cakes

Which the Parsee-man bakes

Makes dreadful mistakes.

And there was a great deal more in that than you would think.

     Because, five weeks later, there was a heat-wave in the Red Sea, and everybody took off all the clothes they had.  The Parsee took off his hat; but the Rhinoceros took off his skin and carried it over his shoulder as he came down to the beach to bathe. In those days it buttoned underneath with three buttons and looked like a waterproof .  He said nothing whatever about the Parsee’s cake, because he had eaten it all; and never had any manners, then, since, or henceforward .  He waddled straight in the water and blew bubbles through his nose, leaving his skin on the beach.

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Presently the Parsee came by and found the skin, and he smiled one smile that ran all around his face two times.  Then he danced three times around the skin and rubbed his hands.  Then he went to his camp and filled his hat with cake-crumbs, for the Parsee never ate anything but cake, and never swept out his camp. He took that skin, and he shook that skin, and he scrubbbed that skin, and he rubbed that skin just as full of old, dry, stale, tickly cake-crumbs and some burned currants as ever it could possibly hold. Then he climbed to the top of his palm-tree and waited for the Rhinoceros to come out of the water and put it on.

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The Parsee rubbing crumbs into the Rhinoceros\'s skin

And the Rhinoceros did.  He buttoned it up with the three buttons, and it tickled like cake-crumbs in bed.  Then he wanted to scratch, but that made it worse; and then he lay down on the sands and rolled and rolled and rolled, and every time he rolled the cake crumbs tickled him worse and worse and worse.  Then He ran to the palm-tree and rubbed and rubbed and rubbed himself against it.  He rubbed so much and so hard that he rubbed his skin into a great fold over his shoulders, and another fold underneath, where the buttons used to be (but he rubbed the buttons off), and he rubbed some more folds over his legs.  And it spoiled his temper, but it didn’t make the least difference to the cake-crumbs. They were inside his skin and they tickled.  So he went home, very angry indeed and horribly scratchy; and from that day to this every rhinoceros has great folds in his skin and a very bad temper, all on account of the cake-crumbs inside.

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But the Parsee came down from his palm-tree, wearing his hat, from which the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than-oriental splendour, packed up his cooking-stove, and went away in the direction of Orotavo , Amygdala , the Upland Meadows of Anantarivo, and the Marshes of Sonaput .

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the Rhino and the Parsee

This Uninhabited Island

Is Off Cape Gardafui

By the Beaches of Socotra

And the Pink Arabian Sea :

But it’s hot-too hot from Suez

For the likes of you and me

Ever to go

In a P. & O.

And call on the Cake-Parsee

 

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How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin

Read Aloud and two You Tubes

"Just So Stories" is filled with stories about how different animals from around the world got different body parts. Also the book is filled with different aspects of life and how they came to exist. In the podcast you will hear a story about a Rhino. Rhinoceros are large, thick-skinned, herbivorous mammals of the family Rhinocerotidae, of Asia and Africa. Rhinos are found to grow 8 -14 ft long and 3 - 6.5 feet tall. Also they can weigh up to 5 tons!                 

http://www.pioneer.lib.ok.us/plsp/2396-rhino-story-by-rudyard-kipling

 

This is a visual interpretation of the "Just so" story of Rudyard Kipling, read by Boris Karloff from the Caedmon recordings of the 1950’s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL9ULFqXPvo


One of a series of ten, "Just So Stories" made for World TV. Commissioned by Interama Paris/New York and Stenghold TV

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZUDqiLMHkY 

 

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Rudyard Kipling's daughter, Josephine, would ask him to tell her stories in bed at night.

Rudyard would make up fantastic tales about how the world began and how animals became the way they are. If ever he told the story a different way, Josephine would stop him and say,
"Not like that, Daddy. Tell it Just so!"

http://www.shoorayner.com/AboutBooks/Just%20So/AboutKipling/Index.html

 

A really great project; is to write and illustrate your own ‘Just So’ stories! They don’t have to be about the animals Kipling wrote about.  Instead, you can write about an animal you love or that can be found right here in North America. One little girl wrote a wonderful tale about, “How the Horse got His Hooves.”

   http://bookbuilder.cast.org/

 

If you would like to see all of the Just So stories in their 1902 versions with illustrations that Kipling did himself please visit;

http://www.boop.org/jan/justso/

 

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Kipling and his daughter, drawing of \