Old Major (Animal Farm) facts for kids

Old Major is a character in the book Animal Farm. He is an award winning elderly Middle White boar. He is twelve years of age, and had 400 piglets. Old Major has a wise and benevolent look but his tushes are never cut. He had given inspiration to the other pigs about the fair rules on the farm once the farmers were gone, before Old Major died. Old Major is based on Marx and Lenin of the Russian Revolution, whose ideas changed into Communism.

Role in the Story

One evening, Old Major said that he had a dream the night before. Because of the dream, a meeting was to be held in the big barn at night. At the meeting, he talked with the other animals about the cause of their suffering, Man. He gave them the way to end their problem, rebellion. Later, he told the farm animals about his dream. In the dream he saw the Earth after Man was no longer on it. He also remembered a song sung by the animals of old, "Beasts of England", which the animals learned very fast.

While the animals were singing "Beasts of England", the sound woke their owner Mr. Jones. He fired his gun six times. This ended the meeting immediately. Old Major died peacefully in his sleep 3 days later.

Images for kids

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  Squealer sprawls at the foot of the end wall of the big barn where the Seven Commandments were written (ch. viii) – preliminary artwork for a 1950 strip cartoon by Norman Pett and Donald Freeman

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  Front row (left to right): Rykov, Skrypnyk, and Stalin – 'When Snowball comes to the crucial points in his speeches he is drowned out by the sheep (Ch. V), just as in the party Congress in 1927 [above], at Stalin's instigation 'pleas for the opposition were drowned in the continual, hysterically intolerant uproar from the floor'. (Isaac Deutscher)

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  Foreign Office copy of the first instalment of Norman Pett's Animal Farm comic strip. This example was commissioned by the Information Research Department, a secret wing of the Foreign Office which delt with disinformation, pro-colonial, and anti-communist propaganda during the Cold War