The Gruffalo is a British children's picture book by author Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler. It tells the story of a mouse taking a walk in the woods and deceiving different predators, including the Gruffalo. The Gruffalo was first published in 1999 in the United Kingdom by Macmillan Children's Books. It is about 700 words long and is written in rhyming couplets featuring repetitive verse. It is an example of a trickster story and was inspired by a Chinese folk tale called "The Fox that Borrows the Terror of a Tiger". The Gruffalo has sold over 13.5 million copies and has won several prizes for children's literature including the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize.
It has been adapted into plays and an Oscar-nominated animated film. The book has inspired a range of merchandise, a commemorative coin, a theme park ride in Chessington World of Adventures, and a series of woodland trails. In 2004, The Gruffalo was followed by a sequel—The Gruffalo's Child—also written by Donaldson and illustrated by Scheffler.
Context
Author and illustrator
Julia Donaldson is an author of children's books, the most famous of which being The Gruffalo. Before writing The Gruffalo, Donaldson had a background in drama and performance. She studied drama at the University of Bristol and then busked in Europe and the United States. She began her career as a writer by writing children's songs for television programmes. In 1993, one of her songs that she sang and performed with her husband—"A Squash and Squeeze", about an elderly lady with a small house—was turned into a book, published by Methuen and illustrated by Axel Scheffler. Scheffler was born and grew up in Germany before moving to the UK to study art. He first worked with Donaldson on A Squash and Squeeze, published in 1993.
Creating the book
In an interview in the book The Way We Write (2006), Donaldson writes that although "It can take months or years for the germination of a book ... writing The Gruffalo probably took two weeks, with all the rewriting". She said that writing the second half of the book was difficult and almost forced her to stop altogether. Donaldson said that she had admired Scheffler's illustrations for A Squash and Squeeze, and when her publisher did not suggest he would also be illustrating The Gruffalo, she sent him the text of the book herself. Scheffler showed the text to Macmillan, who were his publisher at the time and subsequently published the book.
Plot
A mouse walks through a wood and encounters three predators—first a fox, then an owl, and finally a snake. Each of these animals invites the mouse into their home for a meal, the implication being that they intend to eat the mouse. The mouse declines each offer, telling the predators that it plans to dine with a "gruffalo". The mouse then describes the gruffalo's frightening features, such as "terrible tusks, terrible claws, and terrible teeth in his terrible jaws". The mouse tells each predator that they are the gruffalo's favourite food. Frightened that the gruffalo might eat them, each animal flees. Convinced the Gruffalo is fictional, the mouse says:
Silly old fox/owl/snake, doesn't he know? There's no such thing as a Gruffalo! After getting rid of the last animal, the mouse is shocked to encounter a real Gruffalo, which has all the features the mouse thought that it was inventing. The Gruffalo threatens to eat the mouse. Instead, the mouse insists that they themselves are the scariest animal in the wood. Laughing, the Gruffalo agrees to follow the mouse. The two walk through the wood, encountering each of the three predators again. Each predator is terrified by the sight of the Gruffalo and escapes to their home, but the Gruffalo believes that they are actually scared of the mouse. Exploiting this, the mouse threatens to eat the Gruffalo in a “Gruffalo crumble”. The Gruffalo flees, leaving the mouse to eat a nut in peace.