Overthinking The Gruffalo – Or What Happens When You Read The Same Children's Book 100 Times

There are children’s books and then there are children’s books. Some you resent more with every exhausted read; others leave you genuinely gutted when your kid falls asleep before the story has ended.

Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s oeuvre – from The Gruffalo (which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year) to the tear-inducing adventures of The Snail and the Whale – is solidly in the latter camp.

Beautiful artwork, charming stories, perfect rhymes and loads of amazing background details make them firm favourites in millions of households around the UK – and the world. The Gruffalo has been translated into more than 40 languages. However, reading these books for the hundredth time to your kids, you do start to wonder about the universe they occupy. Maybe it’s just me.

A Gruffalo bauble hangs on a Christmas tree in Stick Man. The tractor in The Scarecrow’s Wedding is made by a brand called Gruff-tor, which has a very familiar-looking logo. There’s a Gruffalo doll in a landfill in Superworm, a Gruffalo biscuit in The Highway Rat, a Gruffalo carving in Zog and the Flying Doctors.

And hang on a minute, is the mermaid in Zog the same one that’s in Tiddler? They certainly look very similar, but the latter features in a tall tale that Tiddler – a small fish with a big imagination – is telling. Does this mean the dragon-filled fantasy world of Zog exists on the same plane of reality as a fictional story from a less fantastical world – one with fishing boats and a littered seabed?

I cannot tell you for sure. But I can spend a lot of time thinking about it.

Supposedly, the work of film director Quentin Tarantino is split into two parts, too – with half his movies existing as films within the universe of the others. That’s to say the surviving characters from Pulp Fiction could go and see Kill Bill at the flicks. Is the Gruffalo an established fictional franchise in the Donaldson / Scheffler’s univers – an entertainment juggernaut like The Gruffalo is in real life?

If I’m right, the Gruffalo and the Gruffalo’s Child exist on one plane of reality – and Gruffalo merch on another. The Gruffalo’s child has a Stick Man toy (while Stick Man spots a Gruffalo Christmas ornament). Even in the beautiful animated version of The Snail and the Whale, coming to BBC One this Christmas, a child is seen drawing a Gruffalo in the sand, while the classroom wall is covered in pictures that suggest the kids know their Donaldson and Scheffler classics.

It’s enough to make the Marvel Cinematic Universe seem straightforward.

Hear me out here. There’s a fish in Tiddler that looks like the Gruffalo. Given that author Julia Donaldson makes a cameo at the end of the same book (a bit like Tarantino has a habit of doing in his films), are we to interpret this as a fish inspiring Donaldson to create her masterpiece? And if we’re really overthinking it (we’ve come this far), the Gruffalo cameo in Superworm nods to another famous intratextual moment – the Futurama episode with the Bart Simpson doll.

Like I said, you end up reading these books a LOT. I haven’t even touched on Room on the Broom or the world-out-of-time, Dr Moreau genius of The Smartest Giant In Town, with its medieval ladies-in-waiting and humanoid frogs.

When I asked Julia Donaldson about my theory at a BBC press event for The Snail and the Whale, she told me this: “There are different worlds. There are some worlds in which the animals wear clothes, and some in which they don’t. There are some worlds which are like the ‘real’ world.”

Donaldson’s not so sure they could cross over. “Children often write to me asking if I can write a book with all the characters in, and no, I can’t,” she said. Well, of course not. They exist on different levels of metatextual reality!

Honestly, these books are wasted on children!