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Jungle Tales of Tarzan (Found in the Attic Series, 20)

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"Jungle Tales of Tarzan" is the sixth volume in the Tarzan series by Edgar Rice Burroughs and pretty much goes back to the beginning for a collection of short stories set in the time when Tarzan still lived among the great apes. Tarzan has learned how to read from the books he has found and it is opening his young mind to new questions, like where do dreams come from and where he can confront Goro, the supreme being that is the moon. There is also the love triangle between Tarzan, his first love Teeka, and their rival Taug, as well as his adventures tormenting the people of the local Mbonga tribe.

"Jungle Tales of Tarzan" is actually a nice companion volume to the original "Tarzan of the Apes," provide more depth and detail to the early years of the Lord of the Jungle. It also marks a coda to what we would now consider the original story arc of the Tarzan novels. Burroughs would write another 21 Tarzan novels but they would become increasingly formulaic. In many ways this is the last time we would see the original Tarzan; you can think of "Jungle Tales of Tarzan" as sort of being the "deleted scenes" from the original "Tarzan of the Apes" novel. This particular edition also features ilustrations by J. St. John Allen, always considered the best of ERB's original artists.

The structure of this book--a series of inter-related short stories-- is different from the other novels in the Tarzan series. Jungle Tales of Tarzan expands upon a period of time first covered in the early chapters of Tarzan of the Apes when the young apeman was entering adolescence and becoming more cognizant of how different he was from the others of his tribe. Many of the stories involve Tarzan's first love, the she-ape Teeka, and Taug, who eventually wins out over Tarzan for her affections. Tarzan's relations with the black tribe living near the apes of Kerchak also figures prominantly in these stories. (A warning to the politically correct: there are strong current of racial prejudice in them.) There are also meditations on theology, where Burroughs' disdain for organized religion is quite evident--and political bureaucracy also takes its lumps. There are humorous stories, too, particularly "Nightmare" and "Tarzan Rescues the Moon." When I first read this book 45 years ago, I don't remember being particularly impressed by it. However, after reading Erling Holtsmark's critical study, Tarzan and Tradition, I saw that it is a prime example of his thesis that Burroughs' early Tarzan stories--along with being first-rate adventure yarns--had strong existential undercurrents. Tarzan (like Burroughs other heroes) is an archetype of the "alienated man"--strangers in very strange lands, whose differences from his peers are manifest and thus can not easily fit in with society around him. He is like neither the apes who have raised him, nor the black tribes who are his first humans contacts. This emphasis on alienation may in no small part explain the appeal of Burroughs' stories to their primary audience, adolescent males who are suddenly becoming painfully aware of how different they are from their fellows--especially members of the opposite sex.

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