My workroom on the Bliss Cottage was seven feet by eight, and from December to April the snow lay level with the window-sill. It chanced that I had written a tale about Indian Forestry work which included a boy who had been brought up by wolves. In the stillness and suspense of the winter of '92 some memories of the Masonic Lions of my childhood's magazine, and a phrase in Haggard's Nada the Lily, combined with the echo of this tale. After blocking out the main idea in my head, the pen took charge, and I watched it begin to write stories about Mowgli and animals, which later grew into the Jungle Books.

... from this tentative beginning Kipling characteristically went on to something that is much greater. Mowgli ceases to be only a fascinating exhibit in the great anthropological museum that (from one point of view) India is. He becomes a myth, like Brer Rabbit or the Centaur or Reynard the Fox. As I have said before, Kipling has the myth-making genius. It is rare in modern literature but it is a sign of greatness whenever it occurs ...

We have his word for it ... that the impulse was derived from a scene in Haggard's Zulu romance, Nada the Lily, where, in a riot of supernatural fantasy, Umslopogaas is presented as running with a pack of wolves (though there are no true wolves in Zululand). This was but the beginning of a train of thought, and much more is necessary to account for the origins of the new, powerful, and lasting myth which Rudyard was to elaborate in the first and second Jungle Books, the best-sellers among his works.

The fable of the man-child who became master of the jungle, but who could not resolve the dilemma of his ambivalent life, the apparatus of Indian animal lore, the strange ethical concept called the Law of the Jungle, are Rudyard's own and have no counterpart in Rider Haggard's work. It would be a shallow criticism of the Jungle Books to call them animal stories for children, though that is the mode in which they first enthral readers. Like their great original, Aesop's Fables, or like the Yataka tales which the Kiplings knew so well, they impress themselves on the mind at more than one level.

The fables illustrate truths which - for such is the nature of successful fable - are not made more explicit by being interpreted at second hand. Every reader may find out for himself who is Mowgli, that strong, beautiful youth belonging neither to the village nor to the jungle; what allegory is expressed by his two kindly mentors, Bagheera the panther and Baloo the bear, by Shere Khan the bully whose great strength and ferocity fail him at every test, by the bandarlog, those gentry of the tree-tops whose only ambition is to be noticed, who suppose a thing has been done if it has been cleverly talked about, and what is the nature of `the Law' which binds the jungle world into an integrated whole while allowing and even enjoining ruthless individual action within admitted bounds - the Law which especially constitutes Mowgli's brothers as the `Free People'.

It is the essence of the Mowgli myth that here concerns us - a hero who has no parents of his own, but loving foster-parents instead, who grows up strong and beautiful, but a stranger among beings of a lower order who cast him out because he is different. His own natural kind too repel him with stones. He has revenged himself on Shere Khan and now he revenges himself on the villagers by destroying their fields and houses; he goes back to the jungle and lives there again - but now he is the Master of the Jungle...

Mowgli, the odd man out among wolves and men alike, who triumphs over his enemies and accomplishes his revenge, sums up a formula which repeats itself with variations in "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" and "The White Seal". It is true that the White Seal did have parents, not fosterparents. But not only was he white, and they were not, which made him different from all other seals, but he asked questions, which no other seal did. He had a mission and could not marry till it was accomplished. He was the genius who is quite different from his parents; he is a more serious version of `The Elephant's Child'.

In the story of that name (in The Just-So Stories) much the same formula was to reappear later. A young person who is different from his family and relations because he is always asking questions - for which they always punish him - finds a fosterparent in another gigantic python and eventually revenges himself on everyone who had punished him. Fantasy need not believe its own tales. Kipling did not think he was Mowgli. But who can doubt that he put into Mowgli much that he longed for, much that he felt deeply, much that he half suspected about himself?

For many people Mowgli, Baloo, Bagheera, Kaa and Co. are the Jungle Books - a kind of Greyfriars. But the merits of the individual Mowgli stories vary very much. Only a few, and perhaps only parts of these, show Kipling at his very top form.

The interest in the Mowgli group as a whole cannot really be a literary one. It is connected with his pervasive idea of the Law which is far from Darwinian; we need note only that no animal will attack another at the pool in time of drought.

Into this world comes the lovable, strong, highly intelligent wolfcub boy, Mowgli, who learns the simple Law which in more complicated form he will have later to follow in human society. And, by his superior human intelligence and compassion, eventually also wins mastery in the animal world. The Law of the Jungle is absolute and can be followed by the animals with comparative ease, for they do not know tears or laughter, the things that make man's life both more glorious and more complex and far more painfully burdensome among human beings than has ever been known in the Eden of Kaa and Baloo, however bloody and terrible many of the deeds that happen in the jungle.

It is to set up some simplified archetypes of humans, made more comprehensible and more - or less - attractive by being typified as animals. The lessons are hammered home: respect the family, the teachers, the overlords, and despise the talkers who never get anything done. It is no surprise that Kipling's friend Robert Baden-Powell based the junior Boy Scouts, the Wolf Cubs, on The Jungle Books, or that Kipling greatly admired the Scout and Guide movements.

'As Mang the Bat flies between the beasts and birds so fly I between the village and the Jungle.' But there is more to this duality. If both village and jungle are subject to a highly codified 'Law', they also incorporate irreducibly lawless energies. It is a lawlessness which Daniel Karlin sees embodied in the 'feckless play' of the Bandar-log: 'inventing or appropriating a series of identities ... They live from day to day, without law, without memory; they embody, if you like, that part of our nature whose floating, irresponsible and self-absorbed energy is at odds with the principle of ordered and controlled design, a threat to the ordered discourse of the jungle' .

The jungle that Kipling creates for Mowgli is a curious amalgam. It is a place to be explored with the relish of childhood, and yet an evocation of a stereotypical 'India' of dark luxuriance and hidden danger ... we can observe, clinging to the lessons that are absorbed, the dark and treacherous side of 'India' that is only finally dispensed with in Kim.

Kim and Mowgli are both divided between their desire to be loved and their need to control and be feared: 'all the jungle was his friend, and just a little afraid of him'. Yet Mowgli will leave the jungle sobbing for the loss of his only family and only home in which he is the acknowledged master. When he leaves the jungle, however, Mowgli enters the service of the British government as a forest-guard. So too will Kim leave his much loved Lahore street life for the British Secret Service.

The pattern of abandonment was repeated no fewer than three times: twice in 'Mowgli's Brothers', which opened with him losing his human parents and closed with him being cast out by the wolf-pack; and again at the end of `Tiger! Tiger!', when he was rejected by the village. Mowgli became, in effect, a super-orphan. But while the abandonment motif was magnified, so too were the emotional compensations. Kipling provided Mowgli at each successive abandonment with a queue of would-be foster-parents, falling over each other to look after him: Father and Mother Wolf, Akela the Lone Wolf, Baloo the Bear, Bagheera the Black Panther and Kaa the Python. Not only were all these wild animals eager to care for Mowgli, but they competed with each other for his affection and acknowledged his power over them, a situation that has appealed to generations of child readers.

Equally gratifying for Kipling was Mowgli's eventual outwitting and destruction of Shere Khan the Lame Tiger, the malevolent would-be foster-parent who, like the giant or witch in the fairy story, wanted to eat the hero. Shere Khan stood for Mrs Holloway, and his sidekick, Tabaqui the jackal, for her son. There were, however, distinct traces of her Evangelical influence, suitably `improved', in the obsession with rules that ran through the stories and was encoded in the `law of the jungle'. While these rules emphasised obedience and knowing your place, they also established ties with others and - one of Kipling's favourite paradoxes - conferred the freedom to move between different worlds.