The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship
by Uri Shulevitz
Summary
Arthur Ransome's retelling, first collected in his 1916 book Old Peter's Russian Tales, follows the youngest of three brothers, dismissed by his own family and neighbors as the fool of the world because he is kind rather than clever, a distinction the story treats as the real point rather than an insult. An old man rewards the fool's simple generosity with a magical flying ship, and the fool collects a crew of oddly gifted companions along the way to the Tsar's court, men who can hear the grass grow, eat mountains of bread, or drink entire lakes dry, each one recruited with the same easy kindness that won the fool the ship in the first place. At court, the Tsar sets the fool a string of impossible tasks meant to disqualify him from marrying the princess, and one by one the fool's strange companions solve each test for him, until the fool, still baffled by his own good fortune, wins the princess anyway and the old man reappears to reclaim the ship that started it all.
Uri Shulevitz illustrates it in a loose, folk inflected style that leans into the tale's own peasant setting, onion domed churches, snowy roads and a cast of exaggerated, almost cartoonish companions rendered with real warmth rather than mockery. It suits children around five to nine who enjoy an accumulating cast of odd helpers, and it reads well aloud in episodes, since each new companion arrives with his own short, self contained scene before the story moves on to the next.
Historical Context & Significance
The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, illustrated for this edition and published in 1968, won Shulevitz the 1969 Caldecott Medal. The committee named a single Honor book, Blair Lent's Why the Sun and the Moon Live in the Sky. He would go on to collect two further Caldecott Honor citations decades later, for Snow in 1999 and How I Learned Geography in 2009, a career spanning forty years between his first medal and his most recent honor.
Shulevitz was born in Warsaw in 1935 and survived a bombing raid on his own apartment building as a small child during the German invasion in 1939. His family eventually reached Israel by 1949, where he served in the army during the 1956 Sinai War before settling in New York in 1959. A Cosgrove Hall animated adaptation directed by Francis Vose aired on British television in 1990 and won the International Emmy for children's programming the following year, carrying Ransome's old Russian tale into a second medium more than seven decades after he first wrote it down.