11 Facts About The BFG

The BFG is a whoopsey-splunkers tale about a young orphan girl and her friend, the Big Friendly Giant. Learn more about Sophie and her adventure in propsposterous Giant Country. 

1. The BFG comes from Roald Dahl’s ‘Ideas Book.’ 

As with many of Dahl’s books, The BFG was born from an Ideas Book. Dahl scribbled down all his thoughts and inspirations in these notebooks to look at later. He eventually turned the scrawled concept into a full book in 1982. 

2. It’s dedicated to Dahl’s daughter. 

In 1962, Roald Dahl lost his first-born, Olivia, to the measles. Vaccines were not yet available and the young girl died at just seven years old. He read to her every day until she passed away, and dedicated The BFG to her memory. Four years after its publication, in 1986, the grieving father wrote an open letter encouraging his fellow Britons to get their children vaccinated. You can read the letter here. 

3. The BFG makes an appearance in another work. 

Before the giant was squibbling through his own story, he made a small cameo in an early Dahl work called Danny, the Champion of the World, as a character in one of the bedtime stories that Danny’s father tells him. The characters are identical in appearance and ability (think big ears and an even bigger heart). Like Sophie, Danny’s father had also witnessed the cloaked giant as he secretly blew dreams into the heads of children. 

4. The main character was almost called “Jody.” 

In an early manuscript kept in The Roald Dahl Archive, the protagonist was actually a boy named Jody. Dahl eventually switched the character to a girl named Sophie, named after his granddaughter.

5. Gobblefunk has over 238 words in its lexicon. 

Gobblefunk, the nonsensical language spoken by the giants, featured a lot of playful words like babblement, whizzpopping, and schnozzles. Roald Dahl wrote out a full list of potential Gobblefunk words to be used in the book, which can be found at the Roald Dahl Museum.  Some of the words on the list are pongswizzler, scumscrewer, bagblurter, troggy, and schweinwein. If you’re looking for a good insult, squeakpip might do the trick. 

6. Roald Dahl liked to pretend to be The BFG. 

Long before he committed the story to paper, Dahl would regale his children with the tale of the Big Friendly Giant, who would blow happy dreams into children’s heads with a pipe. Right before his daughters—Lucy and Ophelia—drifted off, he would stick a bamboo shoot through their window, pretending to be the giant blowing them sweet dreams. Although the girls were never convinced, they didn’t tell their father. “He seemed to me, even then, to have a vulnerable core. So I said nothing,” Ophelia later told The Telegraph.

7. The footwear comes from a real world pair. 

You may remember the BFG sporting a nice pair of brown leather sandals in the book. While these can easily be brushed off as an insignificant illustrative detail, Dahl directly asked for them to be included. The author owned a pair of brown suede sandals with mismatched laces; he mailed one to the illustrator, Quentin Blake, to use as a model for the footwear in the book. 

8. You can watch it as a play. 

The BFG has been adapted for the stage by David Wood and was recently performed in Chicago. “Director Morgan Ashley Madison tells the story with energy and confidence in her staging for Emerald City Theatre, using brisk pacing, cheeky performances, and, best of all, lifelike puppets (designed by Rough House Theatre) in a variety of sizes,” The Chicago Reader noted. 

9. Quentin Blake and Roald Dahl first met while working on The BFG.

It’s hard to imagine a Roald Dahl book without the wacky illustrations of Quentin Blake: the two worked together from 1978 until Dahl’s death in 1990. Although Blake had already illustrated several works for the writer including The Twits and The Enormous Crocodile, the two never met in person until collaborating on The BFG. 

“I think my favourite book of Roald Dahl's to illustrate is The BFG, because I spent a long time talking to Roald Dahl about it and spent a long time thinking about the drawings; so by the time I finished, I knew the book very well,” Blake said on his website. The BFG was Dahl’s favorite book as well. 

10. They were both given awards for the book. 

In 1983, Roald Dahl won the Silver Slate Pencil for writing The BFG. The same year, Quentin Blake won the Silver Slate Paintbrush for the illustrations.   

11. The original depiction of the BFG looks very different. 

Back when the BFG was just a character in Danny, the Champion of the World, he was illustrated by Jill Bennett. Bennett was Dahl’s first illustrator, and also worked on The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Bennett used the description in the book to create the illustration, which Dahl then enthusiastically approved. This illustration—amongst others found in Danny, Champion of the World—went on sale for £85,000 in July at The National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, England.