Moon in Fiction - Literary

Literary

• The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, a 10th century Japanese folktale, tells of a mysterious Moon Princess growing up on Earth as the adopted daughter of a bamboo cutter and his wife, dazzling human Princes and the Emperor himself with her beauty, and finally going back to her people at "The Capital of the Moon" (Tsuki-no-Miyako 月の都), leaving many broken hearts on Earth. It is among the first - possibly the very first - text of any culture assuming the Moon to be an inhabited world and describing travel between it and the Earth.
• John Heywood's Proverbes (1546) commented that "The moon is made of a greene cheese", "greene" meaning "not aged", but was probably being sarcastic.
• One of the earliest fictional flights to the Moon took place on the pages of Ludovico Ariosto's well-known Italian romantic epic "Orlando furioso" (1516). The protagonist Orlando, having been thwarted in love, goes mad with despair and rampages through Europe and Africa, destroying everything in his path. The English knight Astolfo, seeking to find a cure for Orlando's madness, flies up to the Moon in Elijah's flaming chariot. In this depiction, the Moon is where everything lost on earth is to be found, including Orlando's wits, and Astolfo brings them back in a bottle and makes Orlando sniff them, thus restoring him to sanity.
• In the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, a newspaper reporter concocted a series of stories purporting to describe the discovery of life on the Moon, talking of such creatures as winged humanoids and goats.
• Roverandom by J.R.R. Tolkien was written in 1925 to console his son Michael, then four years old, for the loss of a beloved toy dog. In the story, the dog has flown to the Moon and had a whole series of amusing adventures there. The story was only published posthumously. In addition, Isil and the guidesman Tilion in J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional Middle-earth cosmology are based in Tolkien's familiarity with Norse and Gaelic myths of the moon.
• Doctor Dolittle in the Moon (1928) was intended to be the last of Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle books. The Doctor, with his unique ability to communicate with animals, arrived in the Moon on the back of a giant moth and finds a considerably different kind of fauna (for example, Moon insects are far bigger than the local birds), and more startlingly, intelligent plants whose language he learns (as he never did with earthly plants). He also meets the Moon's single human inhabitant, a prehistoric man who has grown into an enormous giant due to lunar foods and conditions (which soon happens to the doctor himself). But it is doubtful whether he would ever be allowed to return to Earth.
• Goodnight Moon (1947) by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd.
• Winter Moon, a poem by Langston Hughes.
• Moon Palace (1989) by Paul Auster, one of his best-known and most complicated novels.