73 pages • 2 hours read
Roald DahlThe Witches
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1983A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “A Note About Witches”
The unnamed boy narrator explains the difference between witches in fairy tales and witches in real life. In the former, witches regularly wear black capes and hats and travel on a broomstick. In the latter, witches dress normally and look like normal women. They also have normal jobs and homes. They blend into society, so they’re difficult to spot.
What defines real witches is their hatred for kids. They hate them feverishly and think about harming them 24/7. A witch doesn’t hurt children conspicuously—that’s how inept criminals operate. A witch carefully hunts their selected child and surreptitiously crushes them.
There aren’t a lot of real witches in the world, but every country has its share. Witches have a specific gender: They’re women. Men can’t be witches. Men are evil spirits or monstrous dogs. These things are threatening, but they’re nowhere near as menacing as real witches. Nothing is more dangerous than a real witch, and their talent for looking harmless—they could be anybody, even a kind teacher—makes them all the more dangerous.
Chapter 2 Summary: “My Grandmother“
The narrator has had two encounters with witches before the age of eight. In the first encounter, the boy managed to evade harm. The second encounter didn’t turn out so well, but the boy, thanks to his grandma, Grandmamma, survived, which is how he can tell his story to the reader now.
The boy’s family is from Norway, but his dad had a business in England, so the boy was born there, grew up there, and went to school there. For Christmas and the summer, the boy and his family returned to Norway and spent time with Grandmamma—their only other living relative. The boy and Grandmamma have a deep bond.
On an icy Christmas before the boy turns seven, his parents are in a car accident and die. Now, the boy only has Grandmamma. To take his mind off his dead parents, she tells him about witches while sitting in her regal armchair and smoking cigars. The boy questions Grandmamma and wonders if she’s trying to scare him. Grandmamma says she’s telling the truth. She wants him to know about witches—she doesn’t want them to harm him.
Grandmamma knows five kids that have disappeared due to witches. A tall woman in white gloves takes a girl named Ranghild Hansen away. A woman gives Solveg an apple, and she winds up in her family’s painting of ducks and a farmhouse. In the painting, Solveg moves around, grows up, and then vanishes. The third kid, Birgit Svenson, turns into a big chicken. Her parents keep her in a pen. The boy interrupts: This means Birgit didn’t disappear. Grandmamma concedes: Not all the kids vanished. The fourth child, Harald, becomes a stone that his parents keep in a hallway. The fifth kid, Leif, turned into a porpoise during a vacation. He gave his siblings rides before vanishing.
Chapter 3 Summary: “How to Recognize a Witch“
The next night, the boy’s grandma tells him how to recognize a witch. There’s no surefire way to spot one, but with Grandmamma’s intel, the boy has a decent shot at identifying them. A real witch always wears gloves—even during summer—to hide her claws. As real witches are bald, they wear wigs, and the wigs make them scratch their bare scalps.
Witches possess bigger “nose-holes” so that they can easily smell children. It’s difficult for a witch to smell a dirty kid. The cleaner a kid, the smellier they are for a witch. A clean kid smells like dog poop, and an adult doesn’t smell like anything. The boy insists he doesn’t smell like dog poop, but his grandma doesn’t want to debate him.
In addition to blue spit and fire in their eyes, witches squeeze into pretty shoes to conceal their lack of toes. Grandmamma declares that witches aren’t women. They look and behave like women, but they’re demons—they are separate creatures altogether. Grandmamma admits she met a witch one time, and the boy thinks the encounter relates to her missing thumb.
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Grand High Witch
The next day, Grandmamma talks to a man in a black suit about the narrator’s father’s will. The narrator’s father wants Grandmamma and the boy to go back to the house in England. Neither wants to live in England, but Grandmamma honors the wishes of her daughter and her daughter’s husband and moves to England to be with the boy. Besides, there are fewer witches in England than there are in Norway—although the witches in England are arguably the cruelest witches on Earth. They tend to transform children into creatures that adults hate, like slugs or fleas. Grandmamma knew English witches who turned kids into pheasants and placed them in the woods before a pheasant hunt so that they got shot and served for dinner. Some witches turn kids into hot dogs, and the parents inadvertently eat them.
In every country, there’s a Secret Society of Witches. Once a year, the witches in their respective countries come together at a hotel and listen to a speech from the Grand High Witch Of All The World—the most powerful and richest witch of them all. Grandmamma doesn’t know where the Grand High Witch Of All The World lives, but she traveled the world trying to find her. Grandmamma is a retired witchophile (witch hunter). The boy asks how his Grandmamma knows the Grand High Witch exists if she hasn’t seen her. The Grandmamma replies that no one has seen the Devil, yet everyone knows he exists.
Back in England, the boy works on the treehouse he started with his best friend, Timmy. Timmy has the flu, so the boy is alone. A peculiar woman with gloves appears and offers the boy a present: a snake. The boy, detecting a witch, climbs high into the tree until he can’t see the presumed witch. When Grandmamma calls him, the boy climbs down and tells her about the scary interaction—his first encounter with a witch.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Summer Holidays“
The boy and his grandma plan their summer holiday: They’ll be near Arendal, a place in Norway where Grandmamma spent her summers as a kid. She and her brother used to go fishing in a rowboat, and the boy is excited to see the coastal place with its tiny, empty islands. Unfortunately, Grandmamma gets pneumonia. A nurse moves in to care for her, and another woman, Mrs. Spring, moves in to look after the boy. Grandmamma gets better, but the doctor doesn’t want Grandmamma to go to Norway. Instead, she and the boy go to Bournemouth, a seaside town in England, and stay at the Hotel Magnificent.
Before leaving, Grandmamma gives the boy two white mice: William and Mary. The hotel manager, Mr. Stringer, doesn’t want the mice on his property. Grandmamma replies that the hotel is teeming with rats, and threatens to report him to the Public Health Authorities. The manager gives in and allows the mice, but the boy has to keep them in their cage. The boy dreams of operating a White Mouse Circus. He has to train them, so he can’t keep them in a cage.
The hotel is huge. The boy finds an empty ballroom with a sign that says the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (RSPCC) reserved the room, and no one else is allowed in. Assuming the RSPCC meeting is over, the boy goes behind a large screen in the space and trains the mice to walk a tightrope. Soon, he hears voices and sees a lot of women in nice clothes wearing hats.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
The narrator begins his story with imagery. He uses specific language to present a portrait of fairytale witches: “In fairy-tales, witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks, and they ride on broomsticks” (9).
These chapters also establish the narrator’s blunt tone. He speaks directly to the reader about witches and tells them: “Listen very carefully. Never forget what is coming next” (9). The narrator shows off his sense of humor with irony or unexpected and clever twists. The book is supposedly fiction—it’s made up. Yet the narrator establishes a sense of verisimilitude, that the events he is describing are real: The narrator isn’t talking about fictional witches, he claims. He stresses that his story is about “real witches,” inviting the reader to suspend their disbelief that they are reading a work of fiction. He juxtaposes fairytale witches with witches from real life, creating a contrast. It’s as if the narrator is about to tell a true story.
Through the witches, the novel explores Appearances and the Fluidity of Identity. The witches have multiple identities: They’re “ordinary women” (9), workers, and witches. As only women can be witches, Dahl’s witches bring in the motif of gender. Gender determines the type of infernal creature a person can become. Men can’t be witches, but they can be “a ghoul” or “a barghest” (11). These creatures have less power than witches. The novel subverts gender norms, as witches possess the most frightening power. As the narrator says: “A REAL WITCH is easily the most dangerous of all the living creatures on earth” (11). Using repetition, the narrator places emphasis on real witches and children to highlight their centrality.
The witches’ obsession with children brings in the theme of Good Versus Evil. The witches want to destroy kids, and are diabolical. Their knack for passing themselves off as regular women makes them deceitful, adding to their evil characterization. Maintaining his direct and darkly comic tone, the narrator tells the reader that a real witch “might even be your lovely school-teacher who is reading these words to you at this very moment” (12).
The novel continues exploring gender through the introduction of Grandmamma. Not all women are witches, so not all women are infernal. Grandmamma is “wonderful;” she’s why the boy is alive and can tell his story. Thus, separate from witches, women are powerful, and their strength can manifest in ways that are not macabre. The boy’s grandma is powerful not because she can bring harm, but because she can do good. Grandmamma is no stereotypical woman. She smokes cigars like a mob boss. At the hotel, her tough dialogue with the hotel owner explores the motif of gender and the idea that women can dominate men.
Through Grandmamma, Dahl also explores The Importance of Family, Teamwork, and Love. Grandmamma takes care of the unnamed boy after his parents die, and moves to England with him even though she’d rather stay in Norway. She sacrifices for her grandson because she loves him. Love is key to the novel; it’s why Grandmamma tells the narrator about witches and what happened to the five children transformed and disappeared by them. She says: “I am trying to make sure you don’t go the same way. I love you and I want you to stay with me” (17). The stories about the five children link to the theme of Appearances and the Fluidity of Identity, as four of them turn into something else, like a chicken or a stone.
Dahl relates information about the witches through dialogue. It’s as if the grandma is a mentor—a wise philosopher—and her grandson is her student who asks questions and keeps her on her toes. Grandmamma supplies a large quantity of knowledge. By putting her lessons in a conversational format, they become easier to process. Dahl also shows that the grandma is vulnerable to errors. About the five children, the boy says: “You said all of them disappeared.” Grandmamma replies: “I made a mistake. I am getting old. I can’t remember everything” (22). Her fallibility foreshadows how she will make the mistake of taking the narrator to a hotel with witches.
The grandma uses imagery to describe the witches. With detailed language, she depicts their lack of toes and blue spit. (The book also features illustrations by Quentin Blake that help the reader picture the story.) The grandma tells the boy that the witches “have slightly larger nose-holes than ordinary people” (28), and, to them, clean kids smell like “dogs’ droppings.” The irony continues: In the world of witches, the less dirty a child, the filthier they smell.
The novel continues to explore gender and the theme of Appearances and the Fluidity of Identity when Grandmamma tells the boy:
[W]itches are not actually women at all. They look like women. They talk like women. And they are able to act like women. But in actual fact, they are totally different animals. They are demons in human shape (32).
Dahl separates witches from women, giving them a separate identity. Arguably, they’re beyond gender. In a feminist interpretation, the witches might conceal themselves as women to make a point about society. Historically, societies tend to underestimate women, making a woman’s body a convenient disguise. If societies were less dismissive of women, perhaps witches would get caught.
Witches are incredibly sneaky and clever. The narrator says: “A witch never gets caught” (11). In the story, the statement is a red herring—a misleading clue. The boy and the grandma do catch witches.
Through dialogue, Grandmamma tells the boy about the Secret Society of Witches and the Grand High Witch Of All The World. She brings back the theme of Good Versus Evil by comparing the Grand High Witch to the devil—a symbol of wickedness.
The boy and Grandmamma’s return to England reveals a little more about the narrator. He has a best friend, Timmy. Yet mystery still surrounds the boy and his grandma. Neither is named, and it’s unclear what happened to the grandma’s brother, her thumb, and why she’s a witchophile.
The boy’s run-in with the witch while working on the treehouse creates suspense and foreshadows what’s in store for the boy. Grandmamma’s illness adds to her vulnerability and forces them to stay in England and go to the same hotel as the witches. The boy’s pet mice, William and Mary, foreshadow how the boy turns into a mouse.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children introduces the idea of class. The witches market themselves as dignified, philanthropic people. The society name is ironic—the women are not philanthropists, but cruel witches that harm kids.
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