Mossflower
core novel 1988 Redwall
Record
| First published | 1988 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.13 (73,414 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780091721602 |
Synopsis
Set generations before the first Redwall novel, Mossflower follows the young warrior mouse Martin as he arrives from the north in Mossflower Wood, where the local creatures live under the oppressive rule of the wildcat Verdauga Greeneyes. When Verdauga dies, his daughter Tsarmina seizes power through treachery, poisoning her father and framing her own brother for the crime, and continues her father's tyranny over the wood's inhabitants. Martin, captured and imprisoned soon after his arrival, has his sword broken by Tsarmina, but escapes with the help of a fellow prisoner, Gonff the Mousethief. Together they set out to rally the woodland creatures against Tsarmina's rule and to find Boar the Fighter, a legendary badger lord believed to be the only one capable of standing against her.
Where it sits
- Universe: Redwall
- Series: Redwall core; position 2 of 22 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Brian Jacques
Notes
- From the series record (Redwall): Brian Jacques's 22-novel high-fantasy sequence of anthropomorphic animals centered on Redwall Abbey, one continuous author-written saga (1986-2011; Jacques died shortly after The Rogue Crew's publication, completing the series). Listed here in original publication order; internal chronology deliberately left unpopulated -- the series' own well-documented publication-vs-internal-chronology divergence (e.g. Mossflower and Martin the Warrior are set generations before Redwall itself) is stated in prose per the same convention already applied to Valdemar's Last Herald-Mage set. Registered per the genre-boundary-transparency convention (talking-animal fantasy, same treatment already extended to Pern's dragons) -- this canon's marketing/critical consensus treats Redwall unambiguously as fantasy, not an animal fable in the Watership Down sense. No independently confirmable award history found.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series Redwall: position 2 of 22: previous Redwall (1986) · next Mattimeo (1989)
Sources
- Wikipedia: Redwall
- FantasticFiction: Brian Jacques's Redwall books in order
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossflower
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Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.