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happytapirstudio · 3 months

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Redwall Reread #2: Martin the Warrior

2nd in chronological order, 6th in publication order (1993)

(major spoilers under the cut)

Summary: A young mouse warrior named Martin escapes from slavery at the evil fortress Marshank and journeys to the hidden valley of Noonvale to raise an army, destroy Marshank, free the slaves, and seek vengeance against the stoat tyrant, Badrang.

Framing Device: Two travelers stop by Redwall Abbey one winter night and tell this story to the creatures there.

The Goodies: Martin’s our main boy, obviously. Felldoh the squirrel, a fellow slave-turned-warrior, is also a key player. Then we have the critters from Noonvale: Rose (full name Laterose) and her little brother Brome, both mice, plus her friend Grumm the mole. While Martin, Rose, and Grumm travel to Noonvale, they recruit the hedgehog Pallum. They also encounter a variety of beasties: a tribe of savage pygmy shrews, the lovely mole wife Polleekeen, a family of stuffy rabbits, and a rowdy horde of squirrels, plus of course the denizens of Noonvale, including Rose’s mom and dad. Back at Marshank, we’ve got a whole host of slaves, who later team up with a group of traveling performers, the Rambling Rosehip Players, whose most notable members are Ballaw the hare and Rowanoak the badger.

The Baddies: Two stoats ((two of them))! Badrang the Tyrant, former corsair, now the cruel and calculating ruler of Marshank, and Captain Tramun Clogg, his old sea-going partner. Each of them have their own little vermin swarm, among which the only individual really worth mentioning is Hisk the weasel, Badrang's head slavedriver and personal enemy of Felldoh.

The Freakies: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, it is time for...REDWALL HERPETOFAUNA. This demands an entire essay but for now I will just say we’ve got a whole mess of reptiles and amphibians crawling around these here Marshwood Hills.

The Birdies: The Warden of Marshwood Hill, a grey heron. AND. Boldred, the map-making short-eared owl, and her husband Hortwingle (a stay-at-home dad) and daughter Emalet. AND. A cute little dipper who Rose befriends in Marshwood Hill. Special shoutout to the various unnamed seabirds, particularly the one who steals that piece-of-shit baby shrew and tries feeding him to its hatchling.

Noteworthy Locations: All of this takes place in the northwestern region of the Known Redwall Universe, away from Mossflower Wood and the Western Sea. Most of the time, we’re at or around Badrang’s Fortress, which backs up to a stretch of coastal marshes that includes Marshwood Hill up to the north. Inland is a rich stretch of forest, including the idyllic Noonvale (which I high-key wish we’d revisit in later books), and a small mountain range/highland area.

Noteworthy Weapons: Martin the Warrior’s sword for sure. Or, I guess, his dad’s sword. For most of the book Martin’s using a pygmy shrew sword, which probably looks even more pathetic than I’ve been imagining.

Riddles: Just a little one...when Martin and friends ask Polleekeen for directions to Noonvale, she provides them with a short riddle.

Continuity Notes: This is a key story in the arc of Martin the Warrior (go figure, huh), and we also get some significant insight into Luke very early on. Apart from that, the only other scraps come from the pro- and epilogue: the storytelling takes place after Mariel of Redwall, with characters from that story. The travelers are descendants of Brome and Pallum. One of them brings Rose’s namesake from Noonvale: the seedling of a variety of late-blooming rose, which, once planted in spring, will become a characteristic component of Redwall’s appearance.

Other Notes: I believe this is the only book where rabbits make an appearance? I mean I straight-up forgot they ever made an appearance at all, that’s how rare they are. Additionally, the previous book I read (Brocktree), which takes place in a coastal terrain like this one, also features a grey heron and short-eared owl on its bird roster. The birds’ personalities are very different, though.

Tapir Takes:

(1) The B in Badger stands for Butch.

(2) I wrote down “Martin acting like the protag of an 80’s film” and I stand by it. If these were humans, he’d be the tanned youth with blue eyes and sandy-blond hair tousled by the sea wind. This vision came to me when he was rescuing that pygmy shrew nuisance from the seabirds. It also re-contextualized that earlier period of time when he first meets Rose, and he’s freaking head-over-heels, stuttering over his words, goo-goo-eyed and ga-ga-faced. Insufferable. Disney Channel Original Movie-type shit. Thank god it goes away after a couple chapters.

(3) Similarly, Rose acts like a damsel-in-distress more often than I'd expect? Ultimately yes I'd characterize her as a warrior first and a princess second, but there are still moments where she reacts to things in a distinctly feminine way (screams, passes out, paralyzed with terror), while her male companions do not.

(4) And then Martin will jump to her defense so fast!!! He is her freaking white knight. They'll all be laughing at a joke, but the moment it turns sour against Rose, Martin will intervene. And as a whole they are sooo codependent. Like when Martin was just hurling himself at the gates of Marshank and Rose was the only one able to pull him away (which I think she knew...the calmness she approached him with suggests a confidence in her own ability to get him to see reason.) She's always talking reason to him, but she herself will also do reckless things because of him, and ultimately gets herself killed running into battle alongside him. In many ways this is a really well-crafted tragedy. To me. It's also, in other ways, really freaking obnoxious (see point 2). To me.

(5) Returning to Gender for a moment. Overall, the girls in this book are a lot more finicky and shallow than they were in Brocktree. (These volumes were written nearly a decade apart, so perhaps that explains it.) I'm thinking primarily of Celandine the squirrel, secondarily of that whiny old mouse lady. For sure, there are just as many, if not more, grizzly girl warriors than there are damsels in distress, but Celandine's character still surprised me. And, like a lot of other things about this book, something about it feels a little corny, a little melodramatic, and pointedly one-dimensional in a jarring way.

(6) I can't wait to write about warriors in Redwall. This book is chock-full of characters, scenes, and quotes that illuminate the various facets of Redwall Warrior Culture. Stuff about the nature of a warrior's spirit, the inherent grief and tragedy of the warrior's destiny, the importance of nonviolence roles (while also emphasizing that such roles must coexist and cannot be substituted for one another.) Essay forthcoming, indeed.

(7) Martin definitely has some of the blandest Redwall villains. I remember Cloggs, and the double-assassination scene is always fresh in my mind, but I think that’s mostly from watching the TV show between my initial and present read of this book. It’s particularly upsetting to me because everyone in the book insists Badrang is pure evil, but there’s very little to demonstrate that evilness. He’s just a slave-owner, something most Redwall villains already are. I think the evilest thing we see him do is leave Martin out for the seabirds, but after that all he does is yell at his underlings and dish out insults. And besides that, he has no personality, especially compared to Cloggs.

(8) The frenemy angle between Badrang and Cloggs could’ve been so much more interesting than it was!!!! The crossed-wires assassination was cool and I wish we’d had more stuff like that!!!

(9) Druwp is a really interesting character. Really, really interesting. Tucking him away for later.

(10) I don’t like what Jacques does with his herpetofauna, and I don’t like how he does it two more times in this book, first with the pygmy shrews and then with the Gawtrybe. You know what I’m talking about. Essay forthcoming.

(11) The Marshwood Hill arc (?) did prove something important to me, though! Something I mentioned in my Brocktree post! Is it cannibalism to eat another talking animal, even if they're a different species? YES!!!!!! The denizens of Marshwood are called cannibals several times because they eat any travelers that come near their marsh. However, when the Warden eats them, it's treated differently. It's gross and perhaps excessively strict, but he is not called a cannibal, or considered to be stooping down to the frogs/lizards/snakes' level. Perhaps the definition of cannibalism excludes birds? When life closes an answer God opens a question. Wait that's not how that goes

(12) The end of this book always felt very sudden to me. I think that's equal parts an intentional choice on Jacques' part and an inevitable consequence of the tragedy genre. Still, I feel there should've somehow been more padding around Rose's death and the last few chapters.

(13) I mentioned the show earlier. So I’ll drop my Redwall TV Show Story here: I watched the show before I found the books. Loved the show. They adapted three Redwall books: the original, the direct sequel (Mattimeo), and this prequel. I actually own the original on DVD, somehow. At any rate, I watched religiously as they aired in chronological order on PBS, but then during a playdate with my neighbor, whose mom did not let her watch this show because it was “too violent” (pffffft baby) ((we were four)), I missed an episode early on in the third season and totally fell off the wagon! It haunts me to this day. I tried rewatching it when it was on Netflix, but I just couldn’t get into it. I might do so now, though. Just found out via the Redwall Wiki that they transed Pallum’s gender. A huge win for feminism.

OVERALL: I think I remember being not a huge fan of this book when I first read it. Well I hate to say it but I’m definitely not a huge fan now! It seems it had the makings of a good story, but the delivery fell somewhat short. Still, it had its moments <3

#redwall #martin the warrior #tapir literacy #tapir's redwall reread #long post

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