The children's friendship with Moon-Face

The children's friendship with Moon-Face is one of the Faraway Tree's most dependable bonds: an initially wondrous meeting becomes a working partnership in which hospitality, protection, rescue, and trust circulate between the children and their round-faced friend. Its importance lies not only in affection but in action. Moon-Face opens his home and risks himself for the children; the children, in turn, remain loyal when magical lands separate, enlarge, exhaust, or imprison their companions.

Identity and First Meeting

The children introduce Moon-Face to Dick as a beloved inhabitant of The Faraway Tree, emphasizing his striking appearance—a large, round face like the moon—and calling him a darling. The description establishes both his individuality and the warmth with which the older children speak of him. He is not presented as a remote marvel in the tree but as a friend whom they intend to bring into Dick's life.

When Jo knocks at Moon-Face's door, Moon-Face recognizes the visitors and greets them with beaming smiles, inviting them inside. His welcome turns the ascent through the tree into an arrival at a trusted household. The room itself is extraordinary: a large opening in the floor begins The Slippery-Slip, and the furniture is curved to fit the tree trunk, including the bed, chairs, sofa, and stove. Yet the strangeness of the setting is balanced by the familiarity of the reception. Moon-Face's home is both a passageway into danger and a place where the children are received as guests.

Hospitality and Mutual Trust

Moon-Face's friendship becomes especially clear when the Land of Topsy-Turvy leaves Jo upside down. Silky identifies the next likely land as the Land of Spells, and Moon-Face immediately proposes waiting there for a remedy. He asks Jo to stay the night with him while the others return home to explain what has happened. The proposal is practical, but its emotional force comes from the shelter it offers: Jo cannot safely climb down while inverted, so Moon-Face makes room for him rather than treating his condition as an inconvenience.

Moon-Face's home also contains routines that make the children part of its ordinary life. After they use his cushions, a red squirrel in a jersey appears to collect them. The squirrel ties the three cushions to a rope, gives three gentle tugs, and sends them swinging upward to Moon-Face. This small exchange shows the friendship's domestic texture. The children's presence is accommodated within Moon-Face's established household arrangements, and the tree's nonhuman inhabitants help maintain the connection between guest and host.

The relationship is not confined to private conversation. The children navigate the tree together, listening to the leaves whisper “Wisha, wisha, wisha, wisha” and accepting the idea that trees may communicate secrets through their trunks. Their friendship with Moon-Face therefore belongs to a wider network of shared attention, in which human children, tree, squirrel, and other inhabitants participate in a living environment rather than occupying separate worlds.

Shared Danger and Rescue

Moon-Face repeatedly becomes a companion in peril, not merely a host who remains behind. When the children and their friends grow enormous in the Land of Spells, the opening through the cloud suddenly appears too small for their enlarged bodies. Moon-Face turns pale and tries to descend, only to become stuck. The once-useful route home has become a trap, and the children's shared adventure shifts into a problem of physical survival and escape.

The same pattern of danger and cooperation recurs in the enchanter's tower. The enchanter pretends to release the group but sends them up hundreds of stairs into a round room with only a small window, then announces that Wizard Wily will decide how to deal with them. When the possibility of escape by broomstick arises, Moon-Face volunteers to run down the hundreds of steps to search for one. The others call him a good old friend as they watch him hurry away. His willingness to undertake the exhausting and dangerous task gives tangible form to his loyalty: he does not merely encourage escape; he attempts the necessary work himself.

Moon-Face also shares the group's ordeal in the Land of Dreams. While he, the children, and Saucepan Man lie helplessly asleep, Silky seeks help from Dame Washalot, Mister Watzisname, and the Angry Pixie. The rescue depends on coordinated action. When the Sandman prepares to throw sleep-producing sand, Dame Washalot wets the sack with a whole wash-tub of water, the Angry Pixie empties a kettle over the Sandman, and Mister Watzisname cuts the sack and throws dry sand into the Sandman's eyes. Moon-Face is one of the endangered sleepers, but the scene confirms that his friendship with the children is embedded in a reciprocal community willing to fight for him when he cannot act for himself.

The escape remains precarious even after the Sandman is defeated. The big white bed carries the sleepers through the air, rushes to the edge of the Land of Dreams, and returns toward The Faraway Tree. It catches on a branch and slides sideways, throwing everyone off until Silky wakes the children, Moon-Face, and Saucepan Man. The friendship is thus tested by repeated spatial reversals: the bed is transport and danger at once, and return to the tree is not immediately the same as safety.

Loyalty Across the Tree's Changing Spaces

When the group later reaches Moon-Face's house and finds it empty, a note directs them to the Land of Do-As-You-Please. The children do not treat his absence as abandonment. They continue after him, following the movement of friendship through the tree's shifting lands. Their willingness to pursue Moon-Face reflects the relationship's stability beneath the Faraway Tree's instability: places change, routes close, and companions are separated, but the children continue to orient themselves toward one another.

The most severe test comes when Silky and the others are trapped inside a blocked section of the tree. Jo recognizes that the two people from the Land of Tempers have stuffed the passage with objects, leaving the prisoners unable to move up or down. The children try to pull out a great ball of moss and other obstructions, but nothing moves. Moon-Face's vulnerability here is defined by confinement rather than magical transformation: a familiar route has become a sealed space, and physical strength alone cannot restore the relationship's access.

Jo then proposes asking a woodpecker for help. He understands that the bird's strong beak can peck through the wood into The Slippery-Slip, creating a new route by which the trapped friends can be pulled out. The plan treats the woodpecker as an active collaborator, not a decorative creature. When the bird returns with five others, six woodpeckers stand in a row and drum through the wall with powerful, rapid pecks. Their labor opens the possibility of reunion, while the children's persistence translates concern for Moon-Face and the other prisoners into a concrete rescue method.

Meaning of the Friendship

The children's friendship with Moon-Face is marked by an exchange between emotional recognition and practical care. The children see him first as a remarkable, lovable figure; Moon-Face answers that affection with open doors, shelter, companionship, and personal risk. Later rescues reverse the direction of care, as the children and their wider circle work to recover him from sleep, spatial danger, and entrapment.

The relationship also gives The Faraway Tree a social structure. Its rooms are curved, its passages vertical and circular, and its cloud opening may become impossibly narrow, but friendship makes these unstable spaces navigable. A home can serve as shelter, a slide can become a prison or a route, and a stuffed passage can be transformed by woodpeckers into an opening. Moon-Face and the children repeatedly convert strange architecture into shared experience, so that loyalty—not physical stability—becomes the most reliable way of finding a path through the tree.