Vague Age / Literature

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: Tom Sawyer is an example of this trope oft-cited by literary critics. He's described as "a small boy" and sometimes shows the naiveté of a very young child, yet his romantic interest in Becky Thatcher and bouts of melancholy brooding feel more suited to a twelve- or thirteen-year-old.
• Ascanius, Aeneas's son in the Aeneid, is at varying points in the poem young enough to curl up on Dido's lap at dinner (or at least, no one thinks it's weird when Cupid impersonates him to do so), and old enough to fight in the war. He appears to be somewhere between four and fourteen, never specified.
• Chichi deliberately invokes this in Akata Witch. She refuses to tell anyone how old she is, except when she's teasing an older man. After she gets him excited, she tells him she's twelve (or whatever age she feels like being), laughs at his horror, and runs off.
• Alfie: Annie Rose speaks unintelligibly with the exception of a select few words and sits in a high chair, but she can walk. This makes her seem like she's around eighteen months old, yet "An Evening at Alfie's" says that she "still wore nappies at night", suggesting she can use the bathroom, making her at somewhere between two and three.
• Angela Nicely: Miss Darling is an adult woman old enough to be a first-year teacher, but in “Matchmaker!”, Angela claims that she could be anywhere between 21 and 40.
• Applegate used this trope in Animorphs to make the titular group relatable to as wide a demographic as possible. In-universe, this was justified as part of the characters' many attempts to protect their own identities. In the last book, it was revealed that they were 13 at the time they first met Elfangor and 16 by the time the Yeerks surrendered.
• Vardaman from William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying has no set age, and it is often debated as to whether he is young or just retarded (or both). He's the youngest of his five siblings, and the next-youngest is obviously at least a teenager.
• In A Brother's Price, the ages of the younger princesses are left vague, but they are not "of age" and still play with toy soldiers. Due to them being Royals Who Actually Do Something, this is not as good a hint on their actual age as it could be - they could deliberately continue to play war with their younger sisters in order to learn about strategy and line of command. They’re stated that when their father was still alive (six years prior) they were just learning to walk which would put their current age around 7 to 8. There also are some older noblewomen mentioned in the backstory, who are "ancient", but there's still no word about their actual age, they could simply have aged badly.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Willy Wonka has it claimed that he believes he's getting on in years, hence why the entire plot is about him choosing an heir, but what this actually means is harder to place. He fired his factory workers a decade prior to the story, so he has to have been an active businessman well before that, throughout the book, he displays a very conspicuous level of youth and energy, and he's never described as looking that old, his abilities are all but stated to be supernatural, and the book's sequel outright reveals he has access to age-reducing drugs, albeit only in an early phase. Depending on who you ask, this puts his age anywhere between "early 40s" and "Really 700 Years Old."
• Coraline: The title character's age is hard to pin down. Illustrations make her seem anywhere from 11 to 14 and she's stated several times to be small for her age so she could easily be a teen. Mentally she can be similar to a middle schooler but at other times seems more like an 8 year old. The film pins her age at 11.
• Diana Wynne Jones deliberately kept the ages of her child-characters vague unless there was a plot reason not to, to broaden their appeal to child readers. At a certain stage it can be off-putting to find out that the hero of the book you're reading is younger than you are (if you're eleven, nine seems pretty young). In Hexwood, some characters' Vague Age is a plot point in itself.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Greg and his peers are twelve, Rodrick and his peers are 16, Manny and his peers are three, Peepaw (Greg's great-grandfather) is 93, Gammie (Greg's great-grandmother) is 95 and another family the Snellas have a baby named Seth and a six-year-old named Shawn, but we don't really know the ages of the other characters. We know that Greg's grandparents are elderly, and his parents are probably at least 36, that Greg's uncles Gary and Joe are younger than his dad, his aunt Cakey is older than his mom and his aunt Gretchen is younger than her.
• In Dragon Bones, this is something of a plot point. Axiel's exact age is not known, and he is later revealed to be half dwarf, and much older than he looks. While ages are given for younger characters, this is often not the case with the older generation. Aunt Stala, for example, might be a Cool Old Lady, as her hair is already grey, but she is the half-sister of Ward's mother, who gave birth to him when she was about sixteen, and therefore could be about thirty-six. Though of course Stala could be a lot older than her sister, being illegitimate.
• Ender's Game: Bean is said to be around five when he enters Battle School, but this is just a guess on the authorities' part, as he had previously been living on the streets. Lampshaded in the Shadow series, where it's revealed he was actually the result of an illegal genetic engineering experiment and wasn't even "born" at all, strictly speaking, so nobody has a clue of his exact age, including himself.
• The eponymous girl from Felicity Floo Visits the Zoo looks anywhere between two and nine. She wanders around the zoo seemingly on her own, but seeing as she's sick, maybe she wandered off without her parents noticing.
• Fred has the kids Sophie and Nick. Nick has an Elmer Fudd lisp and seems sort of whiny at times (like when he's complaining about getting less drink than Sophie and when he's frustrated about not being able to see), but is otherwise very articulate. Sophie is significantly taller than him, but she also looks very young.
• The Green Mile: John Coffey seems to be a middle-aged man, but no one has been able to find any records of his birth, or anything about him for that matter, as if he just "fell out of the sky". Due to his supernatural abilities, it's possible that he's been alive for centuries or more.
• The title character from Harold and the Purple Crayon is old enough to walk around, seems pretty intelligent, can draw very well, and yet doesn't have much hair and wears a onesie.
• It was initially unclear how old Harry Potter's parents were when they died. While their friend Sirius (who is the same age) is referred to as "young Sirius Black" in the first book, his friendship with the Potters isn't revealed until the third book, and the "young" could easily be taken as Early-Installment Weirdness. In a 2001 interview, however, it was indirectly confirmed that they did indeed die young—less than four years after graduating (the interview in question was about Snape's age). However, the first movie, which was released the same year, contradicted this to make them appear middle-aged, and until the final book, their age at the time of their deaths was something you'd have to be pretty observant to know.
• The bird protagonist and their classmates in How to Be Comfortable in Your Own Feathers can fly, but they go to school and the protagonist looks smaller than Mother Bird.
• I Need A Wee: Alan putting off going to the bathroom makes him seem like a little kid, but his being at the fair with only his friends seems to put him at around preteen age at the youngest, unless there's an Intergenerational Friendship happening.
• L. Frank Baum's Land of Oz books:
  • Apart from her being a "little girl," Dorothy's age is never made clear. The original illustrations for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz portrayed her as only about five or six, but later illustrators have sometimes made her look as old as twelve. The Giant Horse of Oz eventually implies that she's eleven, though this takes place several years after her first visit to Oz. And of course, due to Adaptation Displacement, the general public tends to imagine her as sixteen-year-old Judy Garland.
  • Ozma's age is never concrete either, besides Baum saying she wasn't any older than sixteen. One book pins her as looking like she's in her early teens while another book pins her as looking 14-15. Some illustrations have her as an adult (or at least a teenager), while some have her as a child similar to Dorothy. Typically she's depicted as being a few years older than Dorothy; however, it's also stated that she's an immortal fairy. Well, sometimes - Baum was very inconsistent with Ozma's backstory. To make things more confusing, her male alter ego Tip is almost always depicted as a preteen boy and acts very boyish as well.
  • A character from one of Baum's later sequels has her age given as "old enough to make jam," which should tell you everything you need to know for his concern about identifying his characters' ages.
• Little Bear:
  • The bear himself is fully verbal and can wander around without parental supervision but has never been to school and is clearly a cub.
  • Cat, Hen, and Duck are clearly fully-grown animals but they're pretty naive.
  • Emily is a schoolgirl but her age is not revealed in the books, though the cartoon has her turning seven in one episode (while looking at least ten).
• Mog: Nobody's ages are outright said except for Mog's adopted kittens in "Mog's Kittens", Matilda's kittens, and Rumpus, who are all kittens so they're under a year old. Mog herself has her first Christmas in "Mog's Christmas" and her second in "Mog's Christmas Calamity", so that makes her about two or three years old. Debbie hasn't developed breasts, so she's probably twelve at the oldest, and Nicky is shorter than her (so probably younger) but not a toddler.
• Momo: Momo is an orphan kid with no recollection of her birthdate, so small and slim that nobody could tell whether she was eight of already twelve.
• Most characters in The Moomins have a vague age. One can guess that Moominpappa and Moominmamma are most likely middle-aged adults, but their son Moomintroll could be anything from a young boy to a teenager. Little My is shown to have been born before Moomintroll and Snufkin, but looks and acts like she's much younger than them. However, the vaguest age has to be Snufkin's: sometimes, he seems to be around Moomintroll's age (which is itself vague), at other times, he's extraordinarily mature and independent, Walking the Earth on his own for months at a time. He also smokes, which is treated as not a big deal, though that might be due to the books being written in the 1950s.
• Professor Cole in Murderess, who can transform into a teenage boy and back.
• The Neverending Story:The main character Bastian is described as being a boy of ten or twelve.
• In Peep And Egg, both titular characters look like chicks, but Peep seems like she's an adult what with her running the show and behaving maturely. Egg is meant to be newly-hatched but acts more like a toddler than a baby, and in "I'm Not Using the Potty", he reads.
• The title character of Peter Pan. He still has all his baby teeth, which would imply that his physical age is just five or six, but his intelligence level seems higher than that (of course he is Really 700 Years Old) and all the female characters have crushes on him. Ditto for Wendy, who is said to be the same size as Peter, but whose maturity level is far past the "still has only baby teeth" phase. Unsurprisingly, most adaptations ignore the baby teeth issue and make both Peter and Wendy seem about twelve years old. Tiger Lily's age is also vague: in general she seems like a young adult, since every brave in her tribe is said to want to marry her, and yet she also has a crush on the eternal child Peter. It varies among adaptations whether she's portrayed as a young woman or a child around Peter's age.
• In the Rainbow Magic series, it's never stated how old Rachel and Kirsty are supposed to be. They could be anywhere from very young to middle school aged.
• In Sam, Bangs & Moonshine, Sam seems about eight and Thomas seems about four, but they're allowed to be alone for most of the day and Thomas can even ride his bike to Sam's house.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events:
  • Sunny is exceptionally clever for a baby, and her physical development occurs in a deliberately uneven, contradictory way; for example, even after she learns to walk, she is small enough to sleep in a casserole dish. Her exact age is not specified for the first twelve books, and flashbacks to "before Sunny" carefully avoid giving her older siblings' ages at the time, forestalling calculation. The thirteenth book stated that Sunny was about two, which would mean she was about six months at the most in book one, and eighteen months have passed since.
  • Carmelita Spats. In the book where she is introduced, she seems old enough to be the leader of a Girl Posse and to be one of the most popular girls in school — but, in the later books, she acts much younger.
• Snow White: Snow White is said to be seven years old when she first becomes the fairest in the land, but at the end of the story, she marries the prince. There's no explanation for this, though different illustrators have handled it differently: some show her spending years with the seven dwarfs and growing up before the queen finds her (though why would it take the queen years to consult her magic mirror again?), some show her still growing while "dead" in her glass coffin and some also portray the prince as a small boy and have a romanticized child marriage in the end. Most adaptations (like Disney's, which aged her to fourteen) cut out the "seven years old" reference and just portray her as a young woman from the start.
• In The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, Captain's age is never specified and he gives off conflicting cues depending on the audience. It is unlikely that he's Really 700 Years Old, but Demane mentions that Captain's been in the mercenary business for a couple decades already. His looks are very vague, age-wise, and his behaviour is that of a hardened veteran towards the band and that of an occasionally insecure 20-something when alone with Demane.
• Just about everyone in Tailchaser's Song. Tailchaser mentions that he is turning 9 months old in chapter 8, Pouncequick is young enough that even several months into the novel he's still a kitten, Eatbugs is elderly and is actually a young-looking amnesiac Physical God, Roofshadow is older than Tailchaser but still young enough to be an Implied Love Interest, and Hushpad is around Tailchaser's age. Everyone else is unclear.
• Thumbelina: Thumbelina is sent to a woman who wants a child in the beginning, and the walnut shell where she sleeps is described as her "cradle." Yet the whole story revolves around different animals wanting to marry her and she finally does marry a fairy king in the end. It varies among illustrators whether she's portrayed as a little girl or a young woman.
• Applies to many characters in Trash of the Count's Family, though some people's estimated ages are more specific than others. Eruhaben is almost 1000, and Choi Han is "decades" old, though he still looks 17.
• Varjak from Varjak Paw is repeatedly referred to as a kitten but already looks like an adult cat (albeit smaller). Due to how cats age, it's unknown if this means he's a preadolescent or a teenager. Cats are considered kittens until they are one years old and six-month olds can be almost as large as their parents.
• Aging the characters in Warriors can be difficult. Cats are considered kittens until they're 12 months old, but in Warriors cats stop being kits at 6 moons. However, instead of being adults, they're treated more like mature teenagers and are noted to still be growing. It's also shown that the Clans used a different aging system early on, with Moth Flight being implied to be apprentice-aged despite having an adult name and being pregnant.
• Winnie the Pooh:
  • Pooh himself will apparently be ninety-nine when Christopher Robin, who's six, is a hundred, which should logically mean he is five, and he has the naivete of a five-year-old, yet he lives alone and seems to have a somewhat adult mentality despite his naivete.
  • Piglet's name suggests he's a kid, and he thinks he's three or four, but he too lives alone and he has an even more grown-up personality than Pooh. Then again, he still occasionally behaves like a kid, and while he is literate, he can't spell his name.
  • Roo is sometimes called "baby Roo" but he is clearly not an infant. He seems to be pretty physically capable and articulate, yet he's clearly a kid, he's illiterate (just smudging the page instead of signing his name in the last story) and one book has him take a nap, suggesting he is a preschooler. He also is sometimes depicted as going for a ride in his mother's pouch, but this too tends to fluctuate. The more recent Disney cartoons tend to place him around a preschool to early elementary-school level, along with his companion, Lumpy.
  • Tigger is a mystery. He arrives in the forest wandering around alone, but he's even more naive than Pooh, not even knowing what his likes, dislikes, and skills are. He lives with Kanga, but it's a little unclear whether he's meant to be her son or her flatmate. In the cartoons, he has an adult voice, but his voice is never described in the books. Also, in at least some of the cartoons, he clearly has his own home instead of living with Kanga.