Baddies in books: The Gruffalo’s double-edged menace

He’s great to have around when you want to terrify anyone coming after you, but watch out when he gets hungry

In one episode of much-loved sitcom Father Ted, the young priest Dougal confesses that the spider-baby he saw on TV was actually something he’d dreamed. Ted shows him a diagram of a man’s head. Inside it is the word Dreams. Outside, is the word Reality. “Have you been studying this like I told you?” Ted asks.

For the mouse protagonist of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s bestselling picture book The Gruffalo, no such convenient distinction exists between the outer and inner worlds. To fend off a series of murderous, though beguiling, invitations to dinner from ravenous predators during his stroll through the dark forest, the trickster mouse invents a previous invitation with an imaginary friend.

“His eyes are orange, his tongue is black;
He has purple prickles all over his back.” [...]
“He has terrible tusk, and terrible claws
And terrible teeth in his terrible jaws.”

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