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Many Aesopic fables are little more than a description of a situation or an action; to call them stories would be to stretch the definition. The situation does not develop, there is no turning point, sometimes there’s no conflict at all. A character makes an observation, a comment aimed at another and this all that is required to articulate the lesson. I love fable, but these are the fables I tend to pass over.

Yet if you stay a moment longer, peer at them up close, it’s possible to find something of value. (Or to put it another way, if you think about them, they’ll have given you something to think about!)

The Oxen and the Axle-trees

Take the fable of the Oxen and the Axle-trees, for example.

A HEAVY WAGON was being dragged along a country lane by a team of Oxen. The Axle-trees groaned and creaked terribly; whereupon the Oxen, turning round, thus addressed the wheels: ‘Hullo there! Why do you make so much noise? We bear all the labor, and we, not you, ought to cry out.’
Those who suffer most cry out the least.

It’s one of the more evocative of Aesop’s fables, conjuring images of mud and hedgerows and the dogged weariness of farm labour.

Two long-established versions (the Townsend and the Vernon Jones) are nearly identical and clearly derive from the same source (Babrius). Yet the epimythium—the last line stating the moral of the story—is different in each. Townsend points to the stoicism of the oxen; Jones denounces the complainant:

“Those who suffer most cry out the least” versus “They complain most who suffer least.”

Two sides of the same incident perhaps, but a significant shift of emphasis. I prefer Townsend. The stoicism in his version lends nobility to the oxen in their suffering, while there is something mean-spirited in dismissing the complaints of the cart.

And besides, you have to wonder if the axle might be grieving for the lost of the forest: cut down, branches lopped, worked and shaved, before being fashioned into the undercarriage of a cart. Who has greater cause to lament?

UP-DATE: I developed the idea of the axle’s lament into a new version of the fable here.

The Boy and the Filberts

‘The Boy and the Filberts’ appears in only some collections of Aesop. (It’s attributed to the stoic philosopher Epictetus.) Mundane and commonplace, and featuring human protagonists rather than an animal, it’s a fable I have disregarded until recently.

A BOY put his hand into a jar of filberts and grasped as many as his fist could possibly hold. But when he tried to pull it out again, he found he couldn’t do so, for the neck of the jar was too small to allow of the passage of so large a handful. Unwilling to lose his nuts but unable to withdraw his hand, he burst into tears.
A bystander, who saw where the trouble lay, said to him, “Come, my boy, don’t be so greedy. Be content with half the amount, and you’ll be able to get your hand out without difficulty.”
Do not attempt too much at once.

Hard to argue with that advice, but wouldn’t all but the youngest child already have understood what needed to be done. It’s not unusual for the bystander to be replaced by a parental figure, the mother, in particular, making the fable more of a lesson for the nursery. As a result, if or when applied to adult situations, the tone becomes patronizing and loses its powers of persuasion.

The problem I think is that the action ends too soon. We are supposed to assume the boy merely wipes his eyes and follows the adult’s advice. It’s all too obvious and too easy. There should be a reaction to the bystander’s intervention. What if the boy does not like the solution offered? What if he already knows how to free his hand? Perhaps he is crying because he is frustrated with the state of the world, not because his hand is stuck in a jar. In that case, he decides to ignore the advice and comes up with another solution, albeit with its own problems.

This is my version: ‘The Girl and the Jar of Nuts’. I think you’ll find it more interesting.

The phrase ‘the lion’s share’, meaning the largest portion, comes from Aesop. A number of fables describe an unequal dividing of spoils implemented by the most powerful member of a hunting party, a lion.

It goes something like this: the lion teams up with either two or three weaker animals (a cow, a goat, a fox, an ass, a sheep), they hunt as a team, then the lion asserts himself and sends the others on their way with a small part of the haul, if anything. He provides spurious legal reasons for claiming the first portions, while the last is sometimes retained with threats of violence or ‘misfortune’.

Here’s an example (by Laura Gibbs, 2002)

A cow and a she-goat and a long-suffering sheep decided to become the lion’s companions. They went into the forest together and there they caught an extremely large stag which they divided into four portions. Then the lion said, ‘I claim the first portion by right of my title, since I am called the king; the second portion you will give me as your partner; then, because I am strongest, the third portion is mine … and woe betide anyone who dares to touch the fourth!’ In this way the wicked lion carried off all the spoils for himself.¹

A Lesson for Business

Many writers construed the story as a caution against partnerships with those who wield more power and influence. You will lose in the end. This relates to another group of fables in which an outside party is brought to resolve a dispute over spoils, seeing that it is the stronger than the plaintiffs, the outside party, a lion, or a wolf, or a jackal (as found in an ancient Indian version), settles in its own favour.

An Exercise of Power

The version that stuck with me is more cynical than all of these. And more brutal. You can find my version here [coming soon]. Below is the Townsend version.

The Lion, the Fox and the Ass entered into an agreement to assist each other in the chase. Having secured a large booty, the Lion on their return from the forest asked the Ass to allot his due portion to each of the three partners in the treaty. The Ass carefully divided the spoil into three equal shares and modestly requested the two others to make the first choice. The Lion, bursting out into a great rage, devoured the Ass. Then he requested the Fox to do him the favor to make a division. The Fox accumulated all that they had killed into one large heap and left to himself the smallest possible morsel. The Lion said, ‘Who has taught you, my very excellent fellow, the art of division? You are perfect to a fraction.’ He replied, ‘I learned it from the Ass, by witnessing his fate.’¹

Townsend derived this lesson from this version: “Happy is the man who learns from the misfortunes of others.” That’s not quite how I would put it.

The lion carries out the threat which, in the other versions, is merely implicit. Addes to the injustice of unequal shares, we have the outrage of the murder and, more significantly, the intimidation the act performs on the witness. The lion shows contempt for those he considers inferior. He turns his theft into an obscene lesson (obscene in the sense of ‘tending to corrupt’) by forcing the others to divide the spoils in his favour.

I wouldn’t call the fox who emerges from these events ‘happy’. I’d call him ‘traumatised’ or ‘crushed’. I wonder how you would articulate the meaning of this fable?

¹ I found both these version in the Aesopica section of Laura Gibbs’ valuable on-line resource: http://mythlore.net

Many of Aesop’s fables are about predators. There must be over twenty featuring wolf, almost as many with wily but weaker the fox, as well as the lion, eagle, hawk, and snake. Tales of cunning, brutality, betrayal, but also mercy and cooperation.

‘The Wolf and the Lamb’

One of the most well-known fables, though one I admit I had forgotten, is ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’. A short, civilized dialogue which sees a wolf search for a reason to kill the lamb it has in its clutches; when its reasons are refuted, the wolf kills the lamb anyway.

It’s an old story. In origin, as well as meaning. There are antecedent versions of the fable from India and Persia. A panther accuses a goat of treading on its tail, a hawk accuses a partridge of stealing its shade (but it’s the middle of the night!) And Aesop provides another less exotic variation featuring a cat who toys with killing a cockerel.

The Human Dimension

The first thing to note about this story—apart from its brutal conclusion—is the ‘unnatural’ behaviour of the predator. A wolf would not hesitate to kill. A wolf would not worry about the justification. Nor would a panther or hawk. This introduces the human dimension with the wolf representing the threat of a powerful opponent, the tyrant, the state, an imperial or colonial aggressor, a bully.

It is an apt scenario for political metaphor, apt as a criticism of those who would wish to appear reasonable and justified in exercising their power over others. (Wikipedia cites a cartoon in Punch magazine (1893) denouncing French military ambitions in Thailand.)

But this unnatural behaviour, the delay in committing the murder, is also perplexing and in many versions the narrator feels the need to explain it, if only by revealing the predator’s decision to “not to lay hands on him” until he has reason. I don’t like this aspect of the storytelling. It’s clunky. It’s a weakness. (‘The Cat and the Cock’ has the advantage here of a predator who no longer has to kill for its dinner, who frequently ‘toys’ with its victims.)

The Wolf and the Lamb ~ Revised

‘The Wolf and the Lamb’ should be written from the victim’s point of view.

It is the lamb who experiences the surprise reprieve when the wolf hesitates, and the lamb whose hopes are further encouraged by refuting the wolf’s accusations, and it is the lamb who is misled and betrayed. We do not need to know why the wolf searches for an excuse to kill, we just need to watch out how it plays out.

The fable speaks to the innocent and powerless and warns not to trust reason or the law if the powerful are not bound by it also. It is the the potential victim who needs to learn this lesson. Innocence and righteousness offers no protection against the aggression of the powerful.

You’ll find my version on the fables page on this site, while below are links to a couple of earlier versions (at mythfolklore.net)

Josef Jacobs (1922)

Townsend version (1867)

Fables are not literary texts. They are both less and more.

They are brief, simple fictions with an exemplary message whose value resides almost exclusively in the quality of that message. Their pleasures are to be found primarily in the clarity and economy with which that message is rendered. Think of fables as a proverb expressed in narrative, a narrative short enough to be recounted in conversation as you might an anecdote or a poem.

It’s hard to establish authorship of a fable, unless of course the author is modern (e.g. James Thurber). The most enduring collection is attributed to Aesop, a slave who rose to the rank of diplomat in Ancient Greek, but many likely pre-dated this period and no original texts survive. What survives are adaptations, rendering in prose or verse. (Plato relates that his mentor, Socrates set some in verse while awaiting trial.)

The Fox and the Grapes

Fables persist because their insights are true and recognizable. Consider this three-line tale ‘The Fox and the Grapes’: A fox sees some tasty-looking grapes but despite her best efforts cannot reach them; giving up, she tells itself the grapes weren’t ripe and would have been sour anyway. A succinct analysis of what we might now call ‘re-framing’ that gave us the expression ‘sour grapes’.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Typically, a fable features animal protagonists, or inanimate objects, conversing like humans—proud, boastful, cunning, foolish—but one of the most enduring fables ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ is an entirely human drama. This may be part of its allure. There are also disadvantages. With human characters, we tend to introduce psychology and motivation and these concerns undermine metaphor and can therefore interfere with the clarity of the message.

There was a boy tending the sheep who would continually go up to the embankment and shout, ‘Help, there’s a wolf!’ The farmers would all come running only to find out that what the boy said was not true. Then one day there really was a wolf but when the boy shouted, they didn’t believe him and no one came to his aid. The whole flock was eaten by the wolf.

Its lesson, stated at the end (in an epimythium), goes something like this “There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth.”

False Alarms, or a Liar’s Comeuppance

But this meaning can be contested. When the boy cried wolf he was raising the alarm without good reason and thus the phrase has come to refer to a loss of credibility through persistent exaggeration rather than dishonesty. It is popular with political commentators seeking to play down fears or stress the value of credible reputation.

Victorian adaptations tended to supply the boy with motivation for his misbehaviour. The boy was amusing himself, or covering up for his negligence. In short, a lack of application to his work.

But there are more angles to the events in this simple story, which can offer additional and competing insights. See this adaptation, published on Twitter last year: ‘The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf’

~~~

“Fee! Fie! Foh! Fum!
I smell the blood of an Englishman.
Be he living or be he dead
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”

My father loved to bellow this speech, a self-dramatising performance of a giant or ogre warning his cowering victims, intimidating them. A huge, lumbering, self-satisfied threat of a strangely endearing, bread-making monster.

It’s an old old old speech (or quatrain, a kind of poem) already deeply embedded in British culture by the time Shakespeare had Edgar refer to it in King Lear. The lines feature in most fairy tale encounters with giants, those that occur on these British Isles, in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and ‘Jack the Giant Killer’, but not only with Jack, as we shall see.

The funny seemingly meaningless alliterated syllables of the first line have been interpreted as a coherent phrase in ancient Gaelic meaning ‘Behold food, good to eat, sufficient for my hunger’, which expresses the hostility of native Celts to the invading Angles and Saxons. (It is perhaps no accident that giants tend to be found in Cornwall and Wales.)

Where my father learnt the speech, I don’t know. Possibly from his parents, or the playground. I suppose it was passed directly through him to me and my sisters, but I’ve been re-reading one of my favourite books from childhood—a collection of English fairy tales, adapted by Ann MacLeod, published by Paul Hamlyn—and it pops up in three of the stories.

English Fairy Tales (MacLeod/Janaček, Hamlyn 1965)

The collection has exemplary versions of some of the more famous tales, both Jacks, Beauty and the Beast, Goldilocks, the adventures of Tom Thumb, but there are other gems, such as Molly Whipple, Idle Jack, and The Princess and the Hazelnuts (more widely known as ‘Kate Crackernuts’).

‘Idle Jack’ reminds me of the character of Giufà found in Sicilian folk tales, in turn derived from Nasrudin of Turkish lore. Tales of an idiot. Innocent, comic, and subversive, at least of our everyday assumption and our work ethic. The English Jack, like his cow-selling namesake, is forced by his single-mum to do something constructive for the family. He gets a series of jobs, but proves neglectful and incompetent when it comes to payment. And yet, as is typical of the story type, Jack’s simple-minded clowning gets an undeserved reward.

Girl Heroes

I’ve never quite accepted the assertion that female characters in folk tales were either villains or damsels in distress. Some of the ‘classics’, especially those popularised by Disney, fit this description, but there are many exceptions and I’ve been aware of these since a young age. Courageous and resourceful from the start, ‘Molly Whipple‘ is what you might call a generic fortune-seeking male hero, but she’s a girl. I was going to say she kills giants, but—if you’ll forgive the spoiler—she doesn’t go that far: she outwits and humiliates.

Despite the evil step-mother premise, ‘Kate Crackernuts‘ presents another courageous female protagonist alongside a sisterly devotion seemingly immune to envy and rivalry. After the step-mother, the villains here are the faeries who have enthralled a young princess, forcing him to dance all night, leaving him weak and comatose in the day. Kate manages to rescues the prince while at the time relieving her sister of a wicked spell.

Sorry, another spoiler! — but you always know how these things are going to turn out.

illustrations by Czech artist, Ota Janaček

My interest in folk tales began, I think, with the Well-loved Tales series published by Ladybird in the late 1960s. A number of these pocket-sized books were to be found knocking around the house when I was growing up, bought for my elder sister, if not for me. I remember the covers. Neither iconic nor especially pleasing, in some cases, quite ugly.

The Troll beneath the Bridge

Some stories stick with you more than others and not always because of their accomplishments. For me, the Well-love tale that stuck more than any other was ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’. There’s not much to it. A simple scenario in which three goats outwit a troll who lurked beneath a bridge. But the threat of the troll captured my imagination. My family often went for walks in the woods and every bridge we came to evoked this threat, this thrilling possibility of destruction. I still feel it, every time I see a shadowy space beneath a bridge where I troll might lie in wait.

I also have a fond recollection of several of the less-celebrated stories. Comedies that must have been passed down for centuries among Germanic and Eastern European peasants. The careful-what-you-wish-for trope in ‘The Magic Porridge Pot’ may have resonated because we ate a lot of porridge in our house, while ‘The Enormous Turnip’ is nothing more than a silly chain tale about digging up an outsized root vegetable had no relevance at all to a boy who never had to work the land. But you don’t expect anything to grow so big!

Foodstuff supplied more comedy adventures in ‘The Gingerbread Boy.’ I identified with the cheeky, boy-shaped gingerbread biscuit, his quest for freedom and the taunts aimed at his pursuers: ‘I ran away from the old man and woman, I can run away from you too’ (subtext: chase me). To this day, I am disheartened the little fella—spoiler alert—gets eaten by the fox in the end.

The Brothers Grimm

The Well-loved Tales were my introduction to the Brothers Grimm, with ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ a favourite. It had the best cover and the most detestable villain. The series may also have been my first acquaintance with ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and the English folk tales ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ and ‘The Three Little Pigs’ but all three of these were, and still are pervasive, retold time and again in books, at primary school, in the theatre, on television. Well-loved.

Nine of the ten stories in Dr Heinrich Hoffman’s seminal picture book are what you would call cautionary tales. Misbehaving or disobedient kids get their comeuppance: some consequences are rather lenient – the boy who walks around with his head in the clouds gets rescued from the river and loses only his writing book; some are quite predictable – ‘If you don’t eat your dinner, you’ll grow thin and die,’ ‘play with matches and you’ll start a fire and burn to death’; others are startling and memorable.

The first story, ‘Shockheaded Peter’ is little more than an image, a full-length portrait of a slovenly boy accompanied by one stanza (the book is written in verse). But what an image! The text describes a boy whose finger nails have never been cut and whose hair has never encountered a comb, but the drawing insinuates something more (see above). The corkscrew nails seem deadly, razor-sharp and nearly six inches long. His soft feminine features and his open palms reveal a helpless vulnerability as if a savage, feral nature were engulfing him, his lethal nails preventing others from getting close. (This is Tim Burton’s ‘Edward Scissorhands’.)

Cruel Frederick is a complete shit, a cocky, cruel brute in a blue cap who tortures animals and servants until the family dog bites back. Frederick gets confined to bed while the dog sits at the dinner table and gobbles up his “pies and puddings”. Serves you right. (A similar role reversal is found in the non-cautionary tale where a hare steals a hunter’s rifle and chases him through the forest in a precursor to Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd.)

The Great Tall Tailor

The most memorable character, however, is a bogeyman: the “great tall tailor” invoked by a mother to scare her child from sucking its thumb. The child cannot help itself and the maniac appears wielding scissors a metre long to lop off its thumbs.

The door flew open, in he ran,
The great, long, red-legged scissor-man.
Oh! children, see! the tailor’s come
And caught out little Suck-a-Thumb.
Snip! Snap! Snip! the scissors go;
And Conrad cries out “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
Snip! Snap! Snip! They go so fast,
That both his thumbs are off at last.

This is the stuff of nightmares, the stuff that creeps you out, the stuff you can’t shake – Freddie from ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’, the Childcatcher from ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’.