Misadventures in the Land of Fables #12

THE FROGS WHO DESIRED A KING

Funny, surreal, and brutal, ‘The Frogs Who Desired a King‘ is one of the strongest and historically most popular of Aesop fables. At its core, there is a cautionary ‘careful what you wish for’ message, but it is the political applications that account for its longevity.

This is the story:

Frogs decide they want a king and ask Zeus to provide one. Zeus sends them a tree stump or log. The stump of course does nothing and the frogs lose respect for it. They ask Zeus to send them another king and this time Zeus sets a water snake, or a heron, or a crane, upon them. The frogs are destroyed by their new king.

Political Analogy

The political upheavals of the past six centuries have prompted comment by way of this fable. The frogs tire of liberty and want a new regime. They relinquish their freedom and are ‘rewarded’ with a tyrant. Alongside this, the benign inaction of the ‘Stump King’ can be contrasted with the active predation of the Crane, representing two modes of governance.

This was not a fable I considered as a candidate for revision because the existing versions were already sufficiently provocative: the brutal ending was dark and glorious satire, the tree-stump/log as king was a perplexing, surrealist move—but the more I thought about it, the more I was intrigued. The ‘stump king’ was the loose end on which my imagination began to pick.

The Puzzle of the ‘Stump King’

Dumping a lump of tree into the pond was a dismissive act on Zeus’ part. A joke. But was he giving the frogs a hint? Was the stump a placeholder, a king who was not a king, which could allow them to avoid being told what to do and to continue as before? Or was it merely an expression of impatience by the self-centred god? Either way, it seemed to me the frogs’ attitude to the tree stump and the discussion it prompts regarding kingship was the crucial scene.

Once the initial fear and apprehension dissipates, the frogs make the stump the focal point of their lives, but its passivity soon leads to indifference and disrespect and even contempt. The image stuck in my mind, of the frogs climbing on top of their king, using it as diving platform, while some frogs took offence and perhaps grew angry that their king tolerated it and did not punish them.

The Discontent

The conflict between the frogs at this point suggested a reason for the discontent that set the events in motion. Previous versions had been vague or glib on the matter. Various reasons are glossed: Lafontaine describes them as “silly and frightened” and tired of democracy; Townsend too says they’ve grown weary of freedom; L’Estrange, well, it’s almost as if they feel deprived of a monarch (!), while Perry refers to “dissolute habits,” drawing I think on Phaedrus original latin.

For me, the hedonistic energy of the frogs climbing onto the back of their ‘king’ and diving into the water, as if it were a play pool, suggested not so much ‘dissolute habits’ but a clash between innocent chaos and order, perhaps even a generational conflict—the ‘tut-tutting’ about disrespect pointed in that direction. This was my point of entry. I recalled the frogs I’d seen in the local canal and in shallow woodland ponds, piled on top of each other, a jumble of limbs and eyes, slipping between algae and spawn. An image of simple, yet disorderly innocence.

The Plunge

I took the plunge, but soon after discovered the key scene had shifted from the tree-stump to these opening images. (Things often change once you start to write.) It was only the discontented frogs who wanted a king. Their desire for order was also a denial of a way of life and carried with it the threat of violence. It was a desire for destruction.

You can read my version here: the Frogs who wanted a King