The Minpins was Roald Dahl’s “valedictory children’s story”, as his biographer Donald Sturrock calls it.1 It recounts the tale of a boy, significantly named Little Billy, who defies his mother’s rules, enters “The Forest of Sin”, and discovers a secret community of tiny people, the eponymous Minpins. Not only that, but Billy finds out that the forest is terrorized by a huge, scary monster, the Red-Hot Gruncher (who is never visible, though, due to the smoke that surrounds him, caused by the fire in his belly), threatening both humans and Minpins, and embarks on a risky plan to eliminate him. There’s an interesting point about scale in this main plotline: both the tiny Minpins and the human-child-sized Billy are very small when compared to the enormous monster. It’s small and clever vs. big and stupid, a David and Goliath narrative once more.2
What interests me the most in this story, though, are the miniature people themselves, and the way the interact with their environment. Let me begin with the forest.
Forest as (other)world of scale extremes
Billy’s strange, otherwordly experience in this story begins before he even encounters the Minpins, already at the moment he enters the forest itself. He experiences the forest as a rather eerie space:
Very very slowly, he walked forward into the great forest. Giant trees were soon surrounding him on all sides and their branches made an almost solid roof high above his head, blotting out the sky. Here and there little shafts of sunlight shone through gaps in the roof. There was not a sound anywhere. It was like being among the dead men in an enormous empty green cathedral.
As the monster approaches, Billy goes the only way he can to avoid it: up. He starts climbing one of the trees, and there his sense of having suddenly entered an other world is enhanced, especially as he sees the first signs that the tree itself may be housing strange, unfamiliar creatures:
He looked up, but even now he couldn’t see the top of the giant tree. It seemed to go on for ever. He looked down. He couldn’t see the ground either. He was in a world of green leaves and thick, smooth branches with no earth or sky in sight. […]
And all at once, a strange uncomfortable feeling came over him. It felt as though the tree he was sitting in and the green leaves all around him belonged to another world altogether and that he was a trespasser who had no right to be where he was.
There are several things to notice in these brief passages. First, the contrast of the (relatively) small Billy in a forest of “giant” trees is interesting in itself, opening up a question of scale before he has encountered the Minpins. There is also a hint that the forest is a place of extremes: giant trees can share a space with tiny beings, not just small birds, animals, insects, etc., but, in this case, also hidden tiny people. The vastness of the forest seems to justify the existence of other extremes of scale.
These particular extracts I quote above, actually reminded me of another, much earlier book about little people that live in a forest of giant trees: Upton Sinclair’s neglected (and only!) children’s novel The Gnomobile: A Gnice Gnew Gnarrative with Gnonsense, but Gnothing Gnaughty (1936). I wrote a journal article on this book a couple of years ago, focusing not just on the little people it presents, but also on the ways the text engages with energy humanities and environmental studies.3 Sinclair’s novel follows the adventures of 12-year-old Elizabeth and her uncle Rodney, and their encounter with the last two Gnomes (Bobo, and his grandfather Glogo) of the Californian redwoods. As young Elizabeth enters the redwood forest for the first time, and before she even encounters the Gnomes, her experience (like Billy’s) has something of the numinous:
Suddenly the sunlight was gone, there was twilight and a solemn hush, and a forest made of the largest of living things […] Over it all lay a hush as of twilight, of Sunday, the inside of a cathedral—every kind of solemn thing of which you could think.
As I wrote in my article:
Elizabeth’s reaction evokes beauty and wonder. She walks into the forest “softly, reverently” as if she is immersed into a “new world” that is primordial and almost lost to modern sensibilities.
Re-reading The Minpins, I was struck again by the similarities between the two sets of extracts above. In both instances, sudden immersion in the forest environment makes the two children think that they have perhaps walked through a portal and have found themselves in a different world. Both Elizabeth and Billy are particularly affected by the sunlight being blocked, restrained, controlled by the trees forming a “roof”, creating an experience that evokes solemnity and a sense of the numinous - both texts use the imagery of a cathedral very specifically.4 For Elizabeth, the transition to this otherworld is accomplished by just walking into the forest. For Billy, it is enhanced by climbing on to a tree, and realising that the tree itself is yet another world within the strange world of the forest, a liminal space, somewhere between earth and sky, and he finds himself suspended there.
Worlds within worlds. Questions of scale emerge again: big and small, what fits inside what. As I noted above, the forest seems to be an appropriate space to explore such questions. In both stories, forests and giant trees are the homes, the natural environment, of tiny human-like creatures, much smaller than the children in these stories, and that seems particularly fitting. Again, as I wrote in my article on The Gnomobile:
When the gnomes first appear, and in spite of their comical names, the narrator’s voice explains their existence as outgrowths of natural energies. Just as the giant redwoods are “the biggest of all living things” why shouldn’t this forest be also home to the smallest, with both ends of the size scale being the result of “forces of nature free from restraint”?
Roald Dahl’s The Minpins doesn’t make this point explicitly through the narrator’s voice, but I think the idea is there, implicitly, as the tale opens. That the world of the forest can sustain extremes of scale, including a version of humanity that defies scientific knowledge.
Scale, sound, materialities, and practicalities
When Billy climbs the tree, and has this unsettling feeling that he has trespassed on another world, he notices that “something very peculiar happened”:
There was a huge smooth branch very close to where Little Billy was sitting and he suddenly noticed that a small square patch of bark on this branch was beginning to move. It was a very small patch, about the size of a postage stamp, and the two sides of it seemed to be splitting down the middle and opening slowly outwards, like a pair of shutters on some tiny window.
Of course, it materialises that this is indeed a window, and Billy sees a “tiny face” peering out, of “an extremely old man with white hair”. We are not given any specific measurements of the tiny man, but we are told that “the whole of the tiny man’s head was no larger than a pea”. Later on, when we meet Minpin children, we find out that “the heads of these children were no larger than the heads of matchsticks”.
I am probably taking all of this too seriously as representations of exact measurements, but let me give it a go: if an average pea is 0.33 inches in diameter, and an average human head is approximately 1/7th to 1/8th of a person’s total height, then the Minpin with the “ancient miniature face” (Don Mini, as we find out later his name is) must be around 2.31 to 2.64 inches. Let’s say 2 1/2 inches as a happy medium, which is just over 6 cm. Much smaller than, indeed less than half the size, of, say, the gnomes of The Little Grey Men, or the Lilliputians in Mistress Masham’s Repose, who are around six inches tall. As you will see from the gallery below, illustrators have read the sense of scale in Dahl’s story as rather vague (see Figure 2). Quentin Blake’s first image below seems to show Don Mini as much smaller than in the second image (though in the former he is further away from Billy’s face). Patrick Benson’s illustrations only include one in which Billy and Don Mini are in the same picture, and the latter seems to be closer to the 6cm mark.
Children’s fantasies that deal with miniature worlds and tiny people don’t always consider the scale of sound, but The Minpins does. When Billy sees other Minpins coming out to stare at him, he notices that their faces were “silent, unmoving, almost ghost-like”. This is, of course, a result of their different scales. Billy soon realises that Don Mini seems to be talking to him, “but his voice was so soft and whispery, Little Billy had to lean right up close to catch his words”. When Billy tries to answer, Don Mini exclaims: “Don’t shout”, and when Billy protests that he doesn’t, he adds: “Talk softer […]. If you talk too loud your voice will blow me away.”
Don Mini eventually tells Billy his name, and that his people are the Minpins, who “own this wood” and live inside the trees. He explains that the forest is a microcosm of, perhaps, an entire country, in Billy’s understanding, saying that:
“All the trees in this forest are hollow. Not just this one, but all of them. And inside them thousands and thousands of Minpins are living. These great trees are filled with rooms and staircases, not just in the big main trunk but in most of the other branches as well. This is a Minpin forest. And it’s not the only one in England.”
Don Mini happens to be the “Ruler” of the tree Billy has climbed, and explains where trees stand in a complex network of many Minpin communities:
“The population of each tree looks after itself. Our large trees are like your cities and towns, and the small trees are like your villages.”
The sense of a secret world hidden inside this particular forest, therefore, is suddenly extended: there are thousands, even millions of other Minpins in other forests, and by the end of the story, young readers are invited to keep their eyes peeled when walking in woods, in case they spot a Minpin (more about this below).
Billy continues to receive an education about Minpin society by getting a flavour of their materialities, and the ways they live their lives vertically. First of all, he is intrigued by the idea of tiny Minpin households in the trunks and branches of hollow trees and asks for a peep inside. What he sees is beautifully captured by Patrick Benson’s illustration below (Figure 3):
Little Billy shifted his position and placed one eye right up against the square hole that was no bigger than a postage stamp.
What he now saw was quite marvellous. He saw a room that was lit by a pale yellow light of some sort and it was furnished with beautifully made miniature chairs and a table. To one side was a four-poster bed. It was like one of the rooms Little Billy had once seen in the Queen’s Dolls’ House at Windsor Castle.
“It’s beautiful,” Little Billy said. “Are they all as lovely as this one?”
“Most are smaller,” the old Minpin said. “This one is very grand because I am the Ruler of this tree. […]
The pleasure of seeing miniature rooms compares quite naturally with the delight of looking at doll’s houses here. The text quite effortlessly likens the first Minpin room Billy sees with perhaps the most famous doll’s house in the world: Queen Mary's Dolls' House at Windsor Castle, built in the early 1920s (1921-1924). Indeed, this room is Don Mini’s own, so particularly “grand”, worthy of such a comparison. Queen Mary's Dolls' House is renowned for its (illusion of)5 completeness, its attention to detail, its unparalleled show of craftsmanship, and its strict adherence to a one twelfth scale. Still, there’s one thing it lacks: dolls to populate its opulent rooms.6 Portraying the Minpins rooms (in words and images) is a way of imagining perfect little people inhabiting such a tiny, perfectly-formed space.
What Billy also observes are the kind of clothes and footwear the Minpins wear. The former are old-fashioned, but the latter are very practical indeed:
It was amazing to see him [Don Mini] walking up and down these almost vertical branches without the slightest trouble. It was like seeing someone walking up and down a wall.
“How on earth do you do that?” Little Billy asked.
“Suction-boots,” the Minpin said. “We all wear them. You can’t live in trees without suction-boots.” On his feet he was wearing tiny green boots rather like miniature wellies.
His clothes were curiously old-fashioned, mostly brown and black, the sort of thing people wore two or three hundred years ago .
Suddenly, all the other Minpins, men, women and children, were climbing out of their windows and making their way towards Little Billy. Their suction-boots seemed to allow them to walk up and down the steepest branches with the greatest ease, and some were even walking upside-down underneath the branches. All of them were wearing these old-fashioned clothes from hundreds of years ago, and several had on very peculiar hats and bonnets. They stood or sat in groups on all the branches around Little Billy, staring at him as though he were someone from outer space.
The Minpins, therefore, seem to be dressed in “old-fashioned” clothes, placing their dress sense somewhere in-between early modern and Victorian times, with “peculiar hats and bonnets”. As Figures 4 and 5 show, Patrick Benson’s interpretation is closer to what the text describes, using an assortment of clothing and headgear items from the last few centuries, while Quentin Blake’s is rather more anarchic (but still inspired by an older sense of fashion).
Still, the idea of little people dressed in old-fashioned garments is interesting, and seems to be chiming with fairy traditions. The Minpins are not called fairies, neither do they have any other name from folklore (unlike, for example, the gnomes of The Little Grey Men and The Gnomobile). And they don’t have any supernatural powers either, other than being able to converse with birds, something Billy can’t do.7 But fairies in the folklore tradition are often dressed in ways that marks them as “other”, including sometimes wearing archaic clothes.8 Or is it that we have here a secluded, isolated society of beings who are “evolving” (socially/culturally) at a slower speed than us, normal-sized humans? I am still thinking about this.9
Archaic or old-fashioned clothes aside, the Minpins seem to have access to really useful technology too to navigate their environment: suction boots! And they are not the only little people with this particular kit: as I’ve written in the past, Chilly Billy, the little man who lives in the fridge,10 has them too, so that he can walk around the fridge, “up walls, over lemonade bottles […] even […] upside down, hanging from the ceiling”. I think the use of suction boots links little people like the Minpins and Chilly Billy with the natural suction cups/mechanisms used by many small organisms in nature: frogs, bats, geckos, insects, arachnids, etc. Does that make the Minpins more animalistic? Well, yes and no: yes, the suction boots make them similar to animals such as geckos, but these are add-ons, footwear that the Minpins (presumably?) manufacture and wear as a technological/artificial adaptation to their environment.
Flying on birds and the power of close observation
The Minpins can not only communicate with birds, but they use birds as their main means of transportation. Billy suddenly sees a swallow landing close to him and a Minpin mother and children climbing on its back and flying away. Don Mini explains:
“We can summon them any time we want if we have to go somewhere. How else would we get our supplies of food up here? The Red-Hot Gruncher makes it impossible for us to walk anywhere in the wood.”
“Do the birds like doing this for you?” Little Billy asked.
“They’ll do anything for us,” Don Mini said. “They love us and we love them. We store food for them inside the trees so they don’t starve when the icy-cold winter comes along.” […]
It was an astonishing sight. […] There were blackbirds and thrushes and skylarks and ravens and starlings and jays and magpies and many kinds of small finches. […]
“The birds are our cars,” Don Mini said to Little Billy. “They are much nicer and they never crash.” […]
Then the robins came in and the children began climbing onto their backs and going for short flights.
Don Mini said to Little Billy, “The children all practise learning to fly on robins. Robins are sensible and careful birds and they love the little ones.”
So the birds and the Minpins seem to live in a symbiotic relationship, the birds ferrying the Minpins around, enabling them to collect food and visit their relatives, while the Minpins store food for the birds, especially during the colder period of the year. At the same time, the texts takes this opportunity to enumerate a number of British “garden” birds that most children would be familiar with, including, of course, robins, perhaps the least timid of such birds, which have earned their reputation as especially friendly in earlier children’s literature too (most notably, in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden). Of course, flying on a bird will end up being part of the solution to the Red-Hot Gruncher too: Billy will end up flying on a swan and tempting the terrible monster to chase him, therefore plunging into the lake and to its destruction.
I am not going to elaborate too much on the desire to fly and the mechanics of flight, which seem to come up again and again in miniature fantasies (I will return to this topic in separate pieces), but I should note that Dahl’s biographer remarks:
This idea of flying on birds had featured in the Norwegian fairy tales of Theodor Kittelsen that Roald had been read as a child, and had stayed with him ever since. Ophelia remembered her father telling her a tale he had invented when she was very young about a tiny pink pill that miniaturized the swallower to such an extent that he or she was able to fly on the back of a budgerigar.11
I am wondering about the Norwegian fairy-tale link indicated here. As far as I know Theodor Kittelsen was an acclaimed artist and illustrator, rather than a writer/folklore collector, and the only fairy-tale illustration of his that I could find featuring flight on the back of a bird is for the tale “Bonde Værskjegg”, usually translated into English as “Farmer Weatherbeard”. In this story, the father of young Hans flies on an eagle in an effort to free his son from the evil Farmer Weatherbeard, as shown in one of Kittelsen’s illustrations12. Still, I cannot help but think that, though Swedish, the story of Nils Holgersson’s shrinking and his wonderful journey with the geese13 is perhaps a closer analogue to Dahl’s story, especially given the tiny size of the Minpins, as well as the story Dahl’s daughter recalled, of the pill that could miniaturize a human being, allowing them to fly on a budgerigar.
Billy’s own flight on the back of a swan doesn’t only give the plotline its resolution, but also provides a kind of “coda” to the story, in which Billy continues to benefit from his friendship with the swan, who flies him to other wonderful places, including high up in the sky, and underground, towards the centre of the earth. These places are figured in the text as different “otherworlds”,14 thus adding to the initial image of the forest as an otherworld, as discussed above. Indeed, the tale expands the idea of multiple “other” worlds, of which the world of the tiny Minpins is only one.
At the very end of the story, the young reader is encouraged to watch the birds around them:
Watch the birds as they fly above your heads and, who knows, you might well spy a tiny creature riding high on the back of a swallow or a raven. Watch the robin especially because it always flies low, and you might see a nervous young Minpin perched on the feathers having its first flying lesson. And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.
These last few words, which definitely warrant Donald Sturrock’s characterisation of The Minpins as Dahl’s “valedictory children’s story”, also brought to my mind the epigraph to B.B.’s The Little Grey Men (also found at the opening of other of his books):
The wonder of the world, the beauty and the power, the shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades; these I saw. Look ye also while life lasts.
Both writers are urging their readers to look, to watch, to observe, lest they miss the magic and beauty of the world: their own “little people” are figured as part of this wonder of the natural world, perhaps a metaphor or cipher for the act of looking closely, of paying attention to the details that are often missed, but without which the world around us would be much poorer.
Donald Sturrock, Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl (HarperCollins, 2010).
See my piece on B.B.’s The Little Grey Men for a similar situation.
Dimitra Fimi, “Gnomes, Gnature, and the ‘Gnifty Gnomobile’: Elemental Spirits, Deforestation and Energy Systems in Transition in Upton Sinclair’s The Gnomobile”, Children's Literature in Education, 55 (2024), pp. 329–342. Originally published online, open access, on 12 August 2022. Available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10583-022-09507-7.
I am not implying direct borrowing here (though it’s not impossible): the architecture of a Gothic cathedral, with its high pillars and arches, its control of sunlight via strategically placed windows/shafts, and its play with scale (making the faithful feel awed and small in the presence of the divine) compares really well with the image of a dense wood of very tall trees, the canopy of which “blots” the sunlight and skews one’s sense of scale.
See my previous piece on Miniature books in Children’s Fantasy for an example of how this dolls’ house’s completion is indeed an illusion.
The reasons for that are related to the aims that led to its creation. As Simon Garfield notes: “It was never intended as a plaything, for it was always too precious to handle. Instead, it was the embodiment, in one single space viewable (almost) all at once, of all that was finest about Britain as it limped away from war” (Simon Garfield, In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate The World, Canongate Books, 2018, Chapter 5). However, I think there’s another reason too, also pointed out by Garfield when he writes about another exquisite set of miniature rooms, the Thorne rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago: “dolls do not really look like miniature people. We are sinuous and overanimate; a doll is too easy to read… To have placed dolls within the exquisite objects at Windsor or Chicago would have made those big glass eyes and chiffon dresses and horsehair hair seem even more artificial; the only things some dolls may be miniatures of are larger dolls” (Ibid.) I think this is a crucial point - one only has to look at the highly detailed and beautifully crafted doll’s houses of the 18th and 19th centuries to realise that the only thing that makes them look a bit crude are the dolls they house. I think that children’s fantasies that portray miniature worlds and little people are (partially) a wish fulfilment of having the perfect little beings to match the perfect miniature craftsmanship of some of these amazing artefacts.
For a discussion of how other children’s fantasy texts treat these matters see my previous pieces on The Little Grey Men and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.
See Katharine Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures (Pantheon Books, 1976), p. 111.
See also my earlier piece on T.H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose for one more example of little people having the (military) material culture of an earlier time than the novel’s setting.
A character who first appeared in The Amazing Adventures of Chilly Billy (1980), written by Peter Mayle and illustrated by Arthur Robins, and then in its sequel, Footprints in the Butter: The Further Adventures of Chilly Billy (1988).
Donald Sturrock, Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl (HarperCollins, 2010).
Interestingly, Billy never manages to communicate with the Swan in the “twittering” language the Minpins so easily used, so when he experiences these other worlds whilst flying on the Swann’s back, he cannot ask for explanations nor discuss his experience. This, I think, adds to the idea of the mysteries of the natural world that we may not be able to understand fully in our anthropocentric worldview.