Collection: Rewards and Fairies

Overview
"Rewards and Fairies" (1910) returns to the Sussex meadows of Dan and Una, the children first met in Puck of Pook’s Hill. Puck, “the oldest Old Thing in England,” again slips them through the seams of time, but the episodes here are richer, darker, and more inward-looking. Each tale is paired with a lyric that distills its mood and lesson, among them the celebrated "If, ". Across prehistory, the Middle Ages, the Tudor court, the smuggling coast, and the Atlantic world of the 18th century, Kipling threads an intimate chronicle of English craft, conscience, and continuity.

Frame and Structure
The book keeps the earlier volume’s device: Puck conjures a visitor, the visitor tells a story rooted in a particular moment and place, and a poem follows like an aftertaste. The enchantment is gentle and domestic rather than spectacular; hayfields, forges, chalk pits, and kitchen hearths are the gateways. The “fairies” of the title are as much the unseen laws of skill, duty, and memory as literal sprites, while “rewards” are what good work and right conduct quietly earn across generations.

Notable Episodes
"Cold Iron" sets the tone with a village smith’s pride and a lord’s changeling child, showing how iron, “cold iron”, binds and protects but also costs. "Young Men at the Manor" looks at post-Conquest England through youths learning to govern more by stewardship than sword, suggesting that the making of a country lies in management of land and people as much as in battle. "Gloriana" brings a quicksilver Queen Elizabeth I into close quarters; stripped of pageant, she is sharp, lonely, and absolutely responsible, her conversation with the children a study in the burden of rule.

Kipling goes deeper into the island’s prehistory in "The Knife and the Naked Chalk", where a flint-knapper from the chalk downs crosses into forest tribes and discovers how a tool remakes the maker. Later centuries enter through the byways: "A Priest in Spite of Himself" walks the smuggling paths and tangled loyalties of the Sussex shore, where a refugee Huguenot finds his ministry amid contraband and kinship. "Marklake Witches", set in the Napoleonic era, places reason and rumor in collision as a sick girl and a French prisoner are ensnared by village fear. The transatlantic world arrives in "Brother Square-Toes", following a plain man among revolutionaries and statesmen; its companion poem, "If, ", compresses the book’s ethic of balance, courage, and self-command into crystalline counsel.

Themes and Tone
Running through the stories is reverence for exact knowledge, of iron, herbs, ships, weather, law, and for the craftsman’s humility before his material. Magic opens doors, but character carries the traveler through. Authority is treated as service; whether queen, saint, blacksmith, or smuggler, those who hold power rightly do so by mastering themselves first. The land itself is a character, its chalk and clay, woods and marshes, shaping habits and fates; the poems echo this with haunting natural imagery, as in "The Way Through the Woods", where lost roads and living trees braid time together.

Place in Kipling’s Imagination
"Rewards and Fairies" deepens the earlier book’s playful antiquarianism into a meditation on how a nation remembers: not through chronicles alone, but through speech, craft, and example. By letting Dan and Una listen rather than lecture, Kipling keeps wonder close to the ground. The result is a mosaic of voices that makes the past intimate, and the virtues it esteems, steadiness, responsibility, love of one’s work, feel less like museum exhibits than living tools.