And Now For Something Completely Different: The Borrowers, by Mary Norton
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The Borrowers and The Borrowers Afield, by Mary Norton
(Odyssey/Harcourt, January 1998). Covers by Marla Frazee
I’ve done four posts in a row on Edgar Rice Burroughs, with more to come. But right now it’s time for a change of pace.
It’s going to be a big change for this particular post. It’s about The Borrowers. In my late teens, after I learned Andre Norton was a woman, someone told me she’d written books under her own name of Mary Norton, and that one was called The Borrowers. Turns out this wasn’t true; her original name was Alice Mary Norton, although she changed it legally to Andre Alice Norton in 1934. This was in the late 1970s, pre-internet, and I believed Andre Norton wrote The Borrowers for several years. It added to her charm for a while because I’d read The Borrowers when I was 11 or 12 and adored it.
The Borrowers may seem pretty far afield from Sword & Planet fiction, but the story of little people living in human houses and borrowing things from them, which would explain why things got “lost,” inspired my imagination and I invented many stories of myself shrunk down to that size and adventuring. After I wrote Swords of Talera, my first S&P novel, I toyed with the idea of writing an S&P story with borrower size characters but never did. Many many years later I discovered a graphic novel from DC called Sword of the Atom, which somewhat scratched that itch for me. (More on that later.)
[Click the images for non-Borrower-sized versions.]
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The Borrowers Afloat, The Borrowers Aloft, and The Borrowers Avenged
(Odyssey/Harcourt, January 1998). Covers by Marla Frazee
I got The Borrowers from our local library and only found out as an adult in my thirties that there were three later books in the series. These are: The Borrowers Afield, Afloat, and Aloft. I still remember being irritated at our library for not having those too. I would have devoured them.
This happened to me with other series I would have read more of at the time, including The Three Investigators (I thought there were just 2), The Hardy Boys (I only saw 3), and Doc Savage (I thought there was only a couple).
I picked up my own copy of The Borrowers many years ago, and later got The Borrowers Afloat, but after thinking about this post I went and ordered Afield and Aloft, and then discovered that Mary Norton wrote a fifth sequel 20 years after Aloft called The Borrowers Avenged. I ordered that one too. I just finished reading Afield and Aloft and they had all the charm and fun of the original.
I’m reading Avenged now. The first two I have are ex-library copies but I bought the other three are new. The older ex-library editions have wonderful covers and interior illustrations by Beth and Joe Krush. I particularly love The Borrowers Afield cover, by Marla Frazee. Totally ignites my imagination.
Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for Black Gate was The Fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Part IV: The Hollow Earth and Pellucidar.
I love Mary Norton’s fantasy. She wrote Bed-Knob and Broomstick, which Disney turned into the delightful film Bedknobs and Broomsticks in 1971. And she also wrote Are All the Giants Dead?, which I think Black Gate readers ought to know about.
I saw that movie but never read the book. I need to get it, along with are all the giants dead. I hadn’t even heard of that one.
“Are All the Giants Dead” looks vaguely Nordic. Curiosity piqued! Thank you for recommending.
I definitely have to check that one out. It’s got a kind of sword & sorcery vibe on the cover
I never got around to these but I do remember them being quite popular by my late childhood. I also recall the first book being adapted as a prime time Hallmark special for NBC starring Eddie Albert of “Green Acres” fame in the early seventies during the heyday of videotape and chroma key. It’s out there on the internet.
Byron, I’m pretty sure I saw that when I was quite young. Or maybe I just imagined the images so well when I was reading it that I can still see them,
I vividly remember the promos running for a few weeks before it aired. I thought I was just a couple of years too old to read the books at the time (I was very much into adult books by that point) but I’ve since circled around to where this now seems right up my alley. I’ll have to look for a few vintage paperbacks…
I read the last couple only a few years back and really enjoyed them at age 60 plus
I know I read at least some of the Borrowers books back in the day — like you, I would’ve been limited to whatever was on the shelf at the school library or the public library. I also remember reading some books in another, relatively similar series — The Littles by John Peterson (which I only know the author’s name because I just this very second looked it up), which at the time I think I might have preferred.
I didn’t know about the “Littles” until my son came along but I ended up buying that series for him and reading them myself with some enjoyment.
My library had those issues too. We had two Oz books, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz and Glinda of Oz, on the shelves at home, and later I was given The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but I couldn’t read the rest of the series, because libraries didn’t shelve Oz books back then; my understanding is that they were considered subliterary trash, like a lot of other book series. I only read the rest of the series as an adult, and I’m sorry to say that some of Baum’s writing doesn’t hold up as well through my adult eyes.
I had a similar reaction to the Oz books. I’ve since read that many of the latter titles were in fact ghost written and Baum merely put his name on them.
I only got the Wizard of Oz when I was young and I liked it, but then also tried to read another one when I was an adult and it was not great.
Similar — at home, we had an older copy of The Wizard of Oz, and I got a copy of Ozma through the Scholastic Book Club, but that was the full extent of my access to the Oz books until I got a set of used paperbacks sometime around grad school.
Ditto Doctor Doolittle — the school and/or public libraries had some random assortment, but not all, most notably including Doctor Doolittle on the Moon, which I could tell simply by the title alone would have been the greatest book ever.
I don’t remember seeing any of the Doctor Dolittle books as a kid. I read one that was kind of “A Housekeeper on the moon” called Miss Pickerel on the moon, or something like that
Yes, I also remember reading some Miss Pickerell books, including Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars. And looking things up, it looks like it was preceded by Miss Pickerell on the Moon.
that was the only one in our library. I think I did eventually get the Mars one too at a book sale but it’s packed away in my closets
Bit of trivia about the illustrators, Beth and Joe Krush; their son, Jay Paul Krush, a composer of some renown, also tried his hand at illustration as a young man. As far as I know he illustrated just one book, Catherine Crook de Camp’s Creatures of the Cosmos, an SF anthology for younger readers. (And if her name sounds familiar, it’s because she was the wife of L. Sprague de Camp.)
I didn’t know that about Krush. I actually met both Catherine and Sprague de Camp. I was in REHupa for many years and Sprague was an honorary member. I met them both at a conference one time.
Nice to see the Gate with a posting on classic children’s fiction.
It might have been the British author A. C. Harwood in The Recovery of Man in Childhood who described a scene in which parents have brought their child to some spectacular landscape — say the Grand Canyon — and the child sits down happily with his back to it, playing with toys and small objects.
Norton seems to have understood this aspect of the imagination of many children. The English artist-author Denys Watkins-Pitchford did too, in The Little Grey Men — which may have been the subject of a column here some time ago.
I see that kind of childlike focus in my grandsons, who are 5 and 3
Great post, but don’t forget Hayao Miyazaki’s adaptation of The Borrowers, The Secret World of Arreitty. It doesn’t get the love of his other movies, but it’s definitely worth seeing if only for Carol Burnett’s performance.
I’ve never seen that one but it sounds cool. I don’t watch many movies so I’m seldom all that aware of what’s going on in that field.