The Legend of Luke
core novel 1999 Redwall
Record
| First published | 1999 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.04 (17,814 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780091768621 |
Synopsis
Set generations before the present-day events of Redwall Abbey, during the time of its construction, the twelfth book opens when a hedgehog named Trimp arrives singing of a hero called Luke the Warrior. Her song stirs the curiosity of Martin the Warrior, who knows little of his own father, and he sets out with his friend Gonff the Mousethief, the mole Dinny, Trimp, and other companions gathered along the way to learn Luke's story. Their search leads them to Vurg and the elderly hare Beau, old friends of Luke who carry a record of his life. That record reveals how, years earlier, the pirate captain Vilu Daskar attacked the peaceful mouse settlement where Luke and his family lived, killing several of its people, including Martin's mother, and driving Luke to hunt Daskar down by commandeering a pirate ship of his own.
Where it sits
- Universe: Redwall
- Series: Redwall core; position 12 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 12 of 22: previous Marlfox (1998) · next Lord Brocktree (2000)
Sources
- Wikipedia: Redwall
- FantasticFiction: Brian Jacques's Redwall books in order
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Luke
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