Our Gates Are Always Open

The kestrel spoke around a beakful of chestnut: “I am Skarlath; I was alone, but you saved my life; now I am with you. Where come you from, friend?”

Scratching his golden stripe, the badger chewed thoughtfully. “I’m not sure. I think I had a mother, Bella or Bellen or something, it’s hard to remember. I must have been very young. Boar the Fighter, that’s a name I recall, maybe he was my father, or my grandsire, I’m not certain. Sometimes I dream about home, or maybe it’s my imagination, but it feels nice. Then there’s the mountain, was that my home? It is all very mixed up.”

Sunflash speaks about himself, excerpt from Chapter 2 of Outcast of Redwall

one of the reasons outcast differs from every other novel of redwall is in the fact veil, the titular character, does not even exist until the eighteenth chapter of the book. the previous seventeen chapters are spent building the rivalry between swartt sixclaw, the primary antagonist, and sunflash the mace, ascendant badger lord. though he may not have done so intentionally, mister jacques’ inclusion of the experience of sunflash allows us to draw comparable narrative lines with veil’s story. sunflash is fortunate to bear memories of his early childhood that become the lynchpin for his growth into a just, kind, and wise badger lord and friend. this foundational aspect of backstory, echoed more explicitly in the narrative of deyna in taggerung and rooted in current theories of psychology and human development, postulates that positive experiences with a parental guardian in early life are necessary for healthy growth and formation of the self. in future posts, we will weigh the differences between sunflash’s early childhood and veil’s early childhood; here, we will extrapolate what sunflash’s early memories imply about his childhood environment.

though his memories are certainly sparse, the tone and descriptive words sunflash uses to talk about his early childhood betray more about it than he is consciously aware of. he begins his reminisce with his mother: she is the largest figure in his memory as a baby. her name comes to his lips immediately, though when he presses against the fog of memories, he falters in his confidence. so much of the secure base of his babyhood has been eroded by the cruelty he experienced at the hands of swartt. bella likely spoke to sunflash of boar the fighter even before he could understand speech, sharing the legacy of their bloodline and imparting some of the sense of the destiny of badger lords to her son--whom she knew, even as he was a babe, he would one day take on that heavy mantle. perhaps boar even visited little sunflash in his early dreams, as is the mysterious power of some badger lords, which could explain sunflash’s vague sense of the existence of salamandastron. it is one of the latter lines of sunflash’s dialogue that gives us the most information about his formative environment. he dreams of his home and the emotions those dreams conjure for him are inherently positive. these dreams bring him comfort and they are totally unlike his reality at the mercy of swartt. “... it [thematic elements of home] feels nice.” what does “nice” mean for a baby? we can easily guess. there was safety. there was security. there was warmth. baby sunflash’s basic needs were met: he did not go hungry, somebeast tended to him when he cried, and he was groomed and cared for.

swartt tried his absolute damndest to beat any sense of personhood out of sunflash. swartt gave sunflash a degrading name, forced the young badger to commit acts lower than a slave, deprived sunflash of food and drink, and left him exposed to suffer the full effects of the weather. swartt did not succeed in breaking him because sunflash carried his verifiable sense of self borne out of the scant memories of his childhood. sunflash knew he had a benevolent mother figure. he knew he had a family history, the promise of having come from somewhere and something of any measure of meaning. he knows he had a home: a place where he was wanted, where he belonged. it was a place where he was safe, where his needs were met, and where his worth as a living creature was imparted. sunflash subconsciously knew that swartt could not truly define him.

i think i may have mentioned in tags or briefly in other posts that outcast of redwall is very special to me. i am unceasingly grateful to mister jacques for writing this book, not only because it is a vital fictional case study in family dynamics, child behavior, and the influence of environment on human development, but because of mister jacques’ fundamentally honest approach to narrative.

if there is anything you can be convinced of in regards to all of redwall, it is that you can always trust that mister jacques will never attempt to sell you a “falsehood” in order to bring his story in the direction he intends. what do i mean by “falsehood”? for the sake of avoiding spoilers from a show i in full transparency have actually never seen (game of thrones), i would instead like to use an example from a similar recent adaptation of the works of one of mister jacques’ contemporaries: amazon’s rings of power.

again, to be fully transparent, i abhor rings of power, and not for its misguided multi-ethnic pandering that at times borders on insensitivity. in robust confidence and unfailing ego a pair of men undertook the writing of this show, and the shallowness of the narrative they have birthed betrays their lack of experience and their emotional immaturity. rings of power alone is the biggest reason i am low-key relieved that netflix’s planned redwall movie and tv show have effectively been shelved for the time being. i cannot quantify the amount of grief that would fall over me if we were given a version of mister jacques’ world that had been mindlessly adapted in such a way as to make it a brutal mockery of mossflower. far more eloquent critics and devout middle earth scholars have broken down the aspects of amazon’s rings of power that have fallen far short of tolkien’s vision, and i encourage you to peruse their think pieces, but i will simplify my point by picking out the treatment of the character of galadriel. the narrative rings of power attempts to sell you is based entirely on an interpretation of galadriel that has nothing to do with the infinitely wise, long-suffering figure of galadriel that tolkien wrote. tolkien’s galadriel is soft and powerful, containing the narrative depth of living through thousands upon thousands of years of the cultural height and decline of middle earth, and every word she speaks is laden with conscious discernment and meaning. true, galadriel at the time of rings of power is much younger than the galadriel tolkien presents in the lord of the rings, but it is canon that she had already been married and had had a daughter by the time rings of power is meant to take place. in comparison, the galadriel of rings of power is a petulant, rude, self-serving, overbearing child, carrying none of the life experience of the equivalent canon galadriel of this time. i believe the choice of the show’s writers to remove completely galadriel’s life partner celeborn and her daughter celebrían speaks volumes about their true intentions in regards to galadriel’s character within the narrative of rings of power.