Shocked headlines have reported that a newly discovered letter by Rudyard Kipling"admits plagiarising" parts of "Law of the Jungle", which appears in The Jungle Book. Actually, the letter as quoted admits nothing of the kind. Kipling is evidently responding to a reader, and although we don't know what question was asked, we can infer that Kipling found it somewhat asinine from the dismissive tone of his reply. "A little of it is bodily taken from (Southern) Esquimaux rules for the division of spoils. In fact, it is extremely possible that I have helped myself promiscuously but at present cannot remember from whose stories I have stolen." Given that "Law of the Jungle" offers mock-epic commandments governing wolves' behaviour, we might not think it strange that Kipling declined to produce his anthropological evidence for Wolf Council ordinances.
But even if he had, it would not constitute plagiarism. The fact is that most writers are magpies, borrowing and reworking source material from wherever they find it. Shakespeare's reliance on various older chronicles for his characters and plots is a commonplace, and it would be ludicrous to suggest that in Paradise Lost Milton was "plagiarising" the story of Genesis. When Amy Heckerling updated and reworked Emma into her 1995 film Clueless, she was not plagiarising Jane Austen, she was creating an imaginary conversation with a classic novel. If I'd opened this piece by writing, "To steal or not to steal, that is the question," the only literary misconduct of which I would be guilty is cliche, not "plagiary", to use the word's older form.