Oh, Those Windy Willows! ... Gathered from the Niche

I suppose my first encounter with some form of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows was in 1970, when I was six. There was a Rankin/Bass (then called Videocraft International) TV show called The Reluctant Dragon and Mr. Toad Show. It was not too successful. “The show was a flop and canceled midway through its first season, airing from September 12 until December 26, 1970. A year later, ABC aired reruns of the show on Sunday mornings on September 12, 1971. The show is partially lost, as only 8 of the 17 episodes have been recovered as of February 17, 2024.” – Wikipedia. I liked it okay.

My next encounter was in 3^rd Grade with the 1949 book The Adventures of Mr. Toad (illustrations by John Hench), released in connection with the Disney feature The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (about these two ‘fabbaluss figgahs’). I think I saw an abridged version of it before in the big Walt Disney’s Story Land book. It was the illustration that really drew me in, though I didn’t see the actual animation until years later.

It wasn’t until middle school that I finally read the actual book of The Wind in the Willows, and it was in a similar edition with these illustrations, though hardback whereas mine is softcover. I came to love it very much. It was a part of the same imaginative matrix, along with The Hobbit, The Sword in the Stone, The Dark is Rising, and so on, that was brewing inside me at the time.

It was in high school that I finally read an edition with the classic Ernest H. Shepard illustrations. They were enchanting. Shepard had gone to visit the aging Grahame before he started drawing. Grahame showed him around the actual landscape that he had set the story in. Since then, Shepard’s drawings have become as connected with the book as Tenniel is with the Alice books.

In 1980 I got the beautiful Michael Hague edition. Over the years I got an Airmont Classics copy

and a paperback of A. A. Milne’s play adaptation, Toad of Toad Hall (since shadow libraried) from secondhand shops.

This is the play that Tolkien mentions in his essay On Fairy Stories: “Naturally only the simpler ingredients, the pantomime, and the satiric beast-fable elements, are capable of presentation in this form. The play is, on the lower level of drama, tolerably good fun, especially for those who have not read the book; but some children that I took to see Toad of Toad Hall brought away as their chief memory nausea at the opening. For the rest they preferred their recollections of the book.” This beginning has a child dialing a daffodil as a telephone.

I finally got what must be the crowning edition of all editions, The Annotated ‘The Wind in the Willows’. Full of pictures by a plethora of illustrators, dripping with notes (of course), and filled with details about Kenneth Grahame and his life, it tells you anything you might wonder about the book and more. 

In time, I did get a copy of Disney’s The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (one of my few Blu-rays)

and lastly and most recently the 1987 Rankin/Bass special, which, in a manner o’ speaking, rather neatly brings me back to where I started.

Side Note: I recently learned that it was originally going to be titled The Wind in the Reeds (no doubt after that passage in the chapter ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’) but had to be changed at the last moment because of the immanent publication of a book by Yeats titled The Wind Among the Reeds. I think that the change was fortuitous (if a little puzzling to some readers) because of the more euphoniously memorable alliteration of The Wind in the Willows.