Okay, book two in meaningless human years, the prequel that will later be drowned in other prequels to the prequel, the one where it all began--
I actually remember very little of the plot of this book. I find this is fairly common as I think through the titles. Some of them are pretty sharp in my mind and some are just a blur of greenery and scones and horrible, sucking wounds. There’s little rhyme or reason I can see now, but as this series progresses I may develop a thesis.
Martin the warrior is sort of the pre-incarnation of Matthias from the last one, but that was a really inconsistently developed thread. A lot of the protagonists in the earlier books had vague… Martin infusions? And the theology of this world is delightful nonsense. The only thing I can compare it to is the folk-Catholicism-but-no-central-church vibes of T Kingfisher’s World of the White Rat. And even that’s a stretch. Sometimes there is a warrior spirit, and dude mice sometimes have it, but not girl mice, and not other species I don’t think. Sometimes you’re just born a really cool warrior with vibes. And Martin is the OG.
Martin begins this book like the protagonist of an Elder Scrolls game, imprisoned for no particular reason. He was going about armed in the kingdom of The Bad Guys, but, you know, he’s in prison now. There he meets Gonff, a textbook rogue sidekick and not a city in Canada. They escape, I forget how, and Martin rallies the repressed residents of Mossflower Wood to rise against tyranny. They go to Salamandastron, I’m almost sure, but I don’t really remember why, so I’m not gonna talk about it much. Salamandastron is by far the coolest recurring setting in this universe and deserves to be recounted in a book I can recall even basic details about. It’s a cool mountain of cool sword guys. I think maybe they come help out.
Look, this one is very generic, even for a Redwall book. That’s kinda mean, since it’s only the second one. It’s more that it’s laying the groundwork for The Formula, even more than its predecessor. There is a designated protagonist and he is good and boring. He has a couple of wackier associates.
In this book he does not have a girl mouse love interest (Gonff does instead). Later we’ll learn that this is because his girl mouse love interest died tragically and he never mentioned that to anybody, and definitely not because Mr. Jacques hadn’t thought of it yet. Because he was too sad.
They go on some quests and probably solve a riddle, though I couldn’t swear to it. There are a few big battles and the bad guy dies. A few named characters die so you know it’s serious. Then Redwall is founded.
No, what’s interesting about Mossflower isn’t the main plot at all. The actual villains are a family of Scottish wildcats. (Who are extremely endangered, and adorable field mice aren’t, so really, whose side am I on?) There’s an evil but kind of honorably evil dying king, a motif he will return to. His evil daughter who takes the throne with a style Narnia’s White Witch could only aspire to is deliciously evil. Her name is Tsarmina! It just means queen but it’s sorta Slavic and therefore scary! She’s Disney villain levels of camp, but Redwall villain levels of brutal. Cluny the Scourge who?
And then there’s her mild mannered, good-hearted brother. I have forgotten his name, but he has a distant descendant who shows up in Redwall, but I didn’t mention last summary because he’s a very minor character. (His name I do remember. It’s Ginger.) Tsarmina’s brother is the first example of a phenomenon that absolutely fascinated me as a child. I hereby name this Redwall element The Virtuous Vermin.
See, Redwall is kinda racist, but, uh, against mustelids? It’s racist the regular way, too, in accents and tropes an unexamined British solipsism kinda way. Species is destiny in Redwall. Mice, squirrels, shrews, moles, hedgehogs, hares, otters, badgers, and most birds are good. (Birds of prey are a tossup, some are noble, some are merciless forces of nature, some are kinda evil, which is a weird choice.) A few creatures got to be neutral. Rabbits were useless, bats were just sorta detached, fish lacked sapience for some reason. Anything weasly, rats, cats, and foxes are evil, but in petty or greedy ways. Reptiles are literal demons with psychic powers. (Brian had some phobias going to dwarf Tolkien’s little spider thing.) Occasionally a new species would turn up, like that later book where there are wolverines visiting from fantasy Canada. But the rules were mostly consistent. If you were predatory or not conventionally cute, you were evil. I saw an interview with him once where that was basically his whole explanation. A simple soul, our Mr. Jacques. Cute=good.
It was extremely rare for any representative of a good species to turn evil. Occasional acts of greed or cowardice resulted in treachery. There were a few evil shrews, possibly due to their pointy insectivory. There’s a whole book about how trying to raise a ferret as a good guy is doomed because evil is fate (oh, we’ll get to that one). There’s a backwards version of that one where trying to raise an otter as bad is doomed because goodness is fate (he did a lot of… remixes in the last decade or so).
But occasionally, a designated bad guy would be moved to goodness for apparently no reason other than the power of conscience. And I (I and a lot of other nerdy children trying to learn the shapes of stories) was absolutely transfixed by this phenomenon. Do not look to Redwall for a moral universe or you will become both perplexed and annoyed, but I still have a soft spot for The Virtuous Vermin. And not-Tsarmina was the first. He was gentle and unmotivated to do patricide or tyranny and when rescued he just wandered away to be a farmer like a wise peasant in a Kurosawa film. And I still kinda love him for it.
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