"...Winnie-the-Pooh lived in a forest all by himself under the name of Sanders.BibliOdyssey assembled the original Winnie-the-Pooh drawings.
"What does 'under the name' mean?" asked Christopher Robin.
"It means he had the name over the door in gold letters, and lived under it..."
I just noticed that drawing in my kid's Winnie the Pooh book the other day! I was all, "Sanders?"
ReplyDeleteActually, given the text, his name wasn't necessarily Sanders, he just lived literally under that name. I can paint "Jones" over my door. That doesn't make it my name
ReplyDeleteWinnie the Pooh's last name was not Sanders.
ReplyDeleteMilne makes that quite clear, by stating that "under the name" means that you have the name over the door and live under it. He nowhere says Sanders was Pooh's name.
Usually, when we say "lived under the name of", we're referring to someone who had perhaps adopted another name, for possibly nefarious reasons.
I comment under the name "Soubriquet".
Nonetheless it's hilarious.
ReplyDeleteDoes it mean he has a bogus last name to hide his true identity? This is a complicated thing that Milne has done. In the days of slavery the slaves "lived under the name" of the slave owner and did not have their own last name. To this day it makes it extremely hard to trace ancestry.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing is that the history of the name SANDERS literally means from the house of Alexander, as in Alexander the Great. (which included all of the household even those not genetically connected to Alexander.
My last name is Sanders. The line was explained to me by my father when I was a child.
Personally I think Milne knew someone named Sanders that he wanted to include in the story in a honoring way.
I see it as ambiguous - before Christopher Robin asks, one would expect the narrator to be saying that Pooh lived under an assumed name. After that jokey answer, it's not clear whether the narrator changed his mind or meant the joke all along.
ReplyDeleteI see this as a more low-key version of some of the linguistic games that Lewis Carroll played and that so fascinated me as a child.
The House of Alexander comment reminds me of a terrible joke - Q: What do Winnie the Pooh and Alexander the Great have in common?
A: Same middle name
The name Sanders is there because it was left there by the one that lived there before him and he never bothered to change it. Remember he likes to say "Oh Bother."
ReplyDelete