The Butterfly Lion

Structurally, Morpurgo’s novel is a frame tale, a device wherein one story introduces and surrounds another. In fact, here there are two levels of framing: First, the adult Morpurgo recalls his childhood encounter with the butterfly lion, and second, an elderly woman named Millie explains the origin of the lion.

The framing plot—which describes a young Michael Morpurgo’s attempt to run away from his boarding school—takes place in Wiltshire, England, after WWII and involves a distinctly British cast of characters, including an old woman with a very quaint appearance and manner, a uniformed boarding school boy who dislikes pudding, and a lion—the symbol of the English monarchy. The old woman’s home is stereotypical of an aged English estate, overgrown with ivy and constructed from Edwardian brick: “It looked as if it had grown out of the ground. There was hardly a brick or a stone or a tile to be seen. The entire building was smothered in red creeper, and there were a dozen ivy-clad chimneys sprouting skywards from the roof” (15).

The embedded narrative is a story that offers hope and inspiration for the troubled boy. It is nestled within the framing plot, though both stories carry similar themes. The embedded narrative begins in South Africa during the Second Boer War, though the characters in this storyline also hail from England. The British were, at the time of the embedded narrative’s early chapters, engaged in a costly and deadly campaign that would ultimately sway British public opinion against the war (see Background). Bertie’s mother, an unhappy British woman trapped on a South African farm, is representative of Britain’s doomed and unhappy colonial endeavors in South Africa.

The majority of the novel is didactic—a mode that is often adopted in children’s literature, meant to entertain and offer moral instruction to young Morpurgo and the reader. The embedded narrative in The Butterfly Lion contains the novel’s moral lessons, which connect to the frame tale, uniting the stories. Typically, in stories intended to convey a specific idea to children, the message is clearly defined early, reinforced through the plot, and solidified in the characterization. The message at the heart of The Butterfly Lion is the distinctly British virtue of keeping a stiff upper lip when facing adversity. Morpurgo would have been familiar with the Rudyard Kipling poem “If,” which famously valorizes such stoicism and which Kipling was inspired to write after learning of a British defeat during the First Boer War (see Background). Of war poets, Morpurgo says, “I read them as a young man, when I was a soldier. The poems were part of the reason I left the army and became a teacher and then a writer” (Morpurgo, Michael. “The War Poets Were the Reason I Left the Army and Became a Writer.” The Guardian, 18 Nov 2022).

Several lions appear to the as-yet-unnamed Michael in the early chapters of the frame tale, highlighting the symbolic importance of this animal in the novel. Each lion is more unlikely in appearance than the last, giving the progression a fairy-tale feeling of displacement from the boy’s real world. First, there is a concrete statue of a menacing lion on the gate to Millie Andrews’s compound: “A great stone lion bestrode the gateway. As I came closer I could see he was roaring in the rain, his lip curled, his teeth bared” (10). This is a fairly typical way to encounter an image of a lion in England. Soon after, while sitting in Millie’s kitchen, Michael looks out the window and sees a much more unusual lion: “Somehow the clouds were casting a strange shadow over the hillside, a shadow the shape of a lion, roaring like the one over the archway” (15). There is still a sense of realistic possibility here—clouds often resemble other objects—but the text introduces doubt through words like “somehow” and “strange” that highlight the increasing sense of magic. Finally, the lion is transformed into a fully otherworldly vision: “The lion on the hillside was still there, but now he was blue and shimmering in the sunlight. It was as if he were breathing, as if he were alive” (16). The blue lion defies any real experience Michael or the reader has had: Its color is impossible, it interacts with the sun in a mystical way, and it appears supernaturally “alive.”

The progression of lion imagery mirrors the characterization of The White Prince in the embedded narrative. First, the lion is simply a cub, clearly understood as a small and vulnerable animal. In time, the lion’s deep friendship with Bertie makes it a symbol of Bertie’s childhood and his desire for companionship. Eventually, the lion will represent Bertie’s promise to preserve the lion’s memory, breathing eternal life and legacy into their complicated relationship via the butterfly-attracting chalk monument on the hillside—a complex evolution of the relationship that speaks to The Enduring and Transformative Power of Friendship.