Fictional, humorous tales on how things came about. Kipling told these stories to his children & made the original images from his woodcut designs. Kipling explained: "In the evening there were stories meant to put Effie [his daughter, "Best Beloved"] to sleep, and you were not allowed to alter those by one single little word. They had to be told just so; or Effie would wake up and put back the missing sentence. So at last they came to be like charms, all three of them [whale, camel & rhino]."
Each story is accompanied by a poem, in a somewhat ballad style. Many of the stories are addressed to “Best Beloved” (they were first written for Kipling’s eldest daughter, Josephine (Effie), who had died during an outbreak of influenza in 1899), and throughout they use a comically elevated style inspired by the formal speech of India, full of long and improbable-sounding words, some of them made up. As a result, it is a delight to read them aloud, and easy to memorize passages from them. they have been recorded several times before but I wanted to enjoy rolling those wonderful words around myself. What fun! (Summary from Wikipedia)