The Faraway Tree

The Faraway Tree is a series of popular novels for children by British author Enid Blyton. The titles in the series are The Enchanted Wood (1939), The Magic Faraway Tree (1943), The Folk of the Faraway Tree (1946) and Up the Faraway Tree (1951).
The stories take place in an enchanted wood in which a gigantic magical tree grows – the eponymous 'Faraway Tree'. The tree is so tall that its topmost branches reach into the clouds and it is wide enough to contain small houses carved into its trunk. The wood and the tree are discovered by three children who move into a house nearby. They befriend many of the residents and have adventures in magical lands that visit the top of the tree.
The first title of the main trilogy, The Enchanted Wood, was published in 1939, although the Faraway Tree and Moon-Face had already made a brief appearance in 1936 in The Yellow Fairy Book. A picture-strip book, Up the Faraway Tree, was published in 1951. Over the years, the Faraway Tree stories have been illustrated by various artists including Dorothy M. Wheeler (first editions), Rene Cloke, Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone, and Georgina Hargreaves.
In the first novel in the series, Jo, Bessie and Fanny (edited to Joe, Beth and Frannie in revised editions) move to live near a large forest, which the locals call "The Enchanted Wood". One day they go for a walk in the wood and discover it really is enchanted. They encounter a group of elves who have been robbed of important papers by a gnome. They chase the gnome and recover the papers, but the gnome himself escapes up a huge tree whose branches seem to reach into the clouds. This is the Faraway Tree.
Against the elves' advice, the children climb the Faraway Tree. They discover that it is inhabited by magical people, including Moon-Face, Silky, The Saucepan Man, Dame Washalot, Mr. Watzisname, and the Angry Pixie, whose houses are carved into the trunk. They befriend some of these people, in particular Moon-Face and Silky. At the very top of the tree they discover a ladder which leads them to a magical land which is different on each visit, because each place moves on from the top of the tree to make way for a new land. The children are free to come and go, but they must leave before the land moves on, or they will be stuck there until that same land returns to the Faraway Tree. In various chapters, one of the children gets stuck in the land.
The lands at the top are sometimes extremely unpleasant – for example, the Land of Dame Slap (altered to Dame Snap in revised editions), an aggressive school teacher; and sometimes fantastically enjoyable – notably the Land of Birthdays, the Land of Goodies, the Land of Take-What-You-Want, and the Land of Do-As-You-Please.
The first land the three children visit is the Roundabout Land, in which everything turns constantly. They encounter a pair of rabbits, who dig a hole for the children to help them escape the land when they discover that the hole back to the tree had closed up after the ground turned above it. After several more adventures, the people of the Faraway Tree need the children's help when they are invaded by an army of Red Goblins. The last land they visit in this book is the Land of Birthdays, where the brownies and the inhabitants of the Faraway Tree celebrate Bessie's birthday.
Dick (later Rick), the cousin of Jo, Bessie and Fanny, comes to stay and he joins the secret adventures in the lands of the Faraway Tree. Dick is not interested at first, but later on he becomes interested and gets into mischief. Together they venture into many new lands and have a lot of fun. For example, in the Land of Goodies, some houses are made of chocolate.
Connie, a spoilt and stuck-up girl, comes to stay for the summer with the three children while her mother is sick. At first, Connie refuses to believe in the Faraway Tree or the magical folk who live in it, even when the Angry Pixie throws ink at her and when Dame Washalot soaks her. When the children visit the lands at the top of the tree, Connie gets a few surprises. The Saucepan Man's mother decides to live in the tree, leaving her job as a baker in Dame Slap's land. She sets up a surprising cake shop in the tree.
Unlike the first three books in the series, this work is not a novel, but a series of illustrations with short text underneath. The plot follows two new children, Robin and Joy, who have read The Enchanted Wood and want to join in the adventures. They go to the wood to meet Jo, Bessie and Fanny and meet some of the wood's residents, including Silky and Moon Face.
The main characters are Jo, Bessie and Fanny (updated in recent revisions to Joe, Beth and Frannie), who are three siblings. Fanny is the youngest, Bessie is next in age and Jo is their big brother. They live near the Enchanted Wood and are friends of the residents of the Faraway Tree. Other characters include:
In modern reprints, the names of some of the characters have been changed. Jo has been changed to Joe, the more common spelling for males, and Bessie is now Beth, the former name having fallen out of use as a nickname for Elizabeth. Fanny and Dick have been renamed Frannie and Rick because in the United Kingdom and some countries in the Commonwealth of Nations they are now more widely used as slang terms for genitalia.
The supporting character Dame Slap has also become Dame Snap, and no longer practises corporal punishment but instead reprimands her students by shouting at them.
Entire passages of the original have been rewritten to remove references to fighting. For instance, when the tree is taken over by Goblins in The Enchanted Wood, the Goblins were originally fought off, with descriptions of Mr. Watzisname 'pummelling them as if he were beating carpets' and the Saucepan Man throwing his saucepans at them. These have been replaced with cursory references to 'chasing'.
Some of the changes were criticised in a review by Alison Flood.
Silky's Story by Jeanne Willis, 2020.
Moonface's Story by Emily Lamm, 2021 (picture book).
The Magic Faraway Tree: A New Adventure by Jacqueline Wilson was published in May 2022.
The Magic Faraway Tree: A Christmas Adventure by Jacqueline Wilson published in October 2023, continues the story of Milo, Mia and Birdy from Wilson's earlier book.
In October 2014, it was announced that the books will be adapted for the cinema for the first time and are being developed for a live action film version by Sam Mendes' production company, Neal Street Productions. As of 2021, the film was still listed as being "in development".
In May 2024, it was announced that the film adaptation, under the script of Simon Farnaby and direction by Ben Gregor, will be starred by Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy.
In 1997, stories from the novels were adapted into animated ten-minute episodes for the TV series Enid Blyton's Enchanted Lands which aired on Children's BBC and CBBC on Choice. The series, entitled Enchanted Lands: The Magic of the Faraway Tree had 13 episodes:
Voices: Roy Hudd, Richard Pearce, Kate Harbour, John Baddeley, Jimmy Hibbert, Janet James and David Holt.