Misadventures in the Land of Fables #28
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‘The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs’ is one of those fables that have stuck. Like ‘sour grapes’ and ‘crying wolf,’ the phrase “to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs’ has become common parlance, crossing the blood/brain barrier from narrative to idiom. It captures the self-defeating destructive tendencies of greed.
The story has elements of the folk tale. An extraordinary scenario in which a goose suddenly begins to lay golden eggs, bestowing instant wealth upon its owner, a farmer (lord or peasant), but this prove not to be enough for the farmer. He wants more gold and he wants it sooner. When the goose cannot provide, he kills it, ostensibly to gain access to the reserves of gold inside the bird.
The stupidity of this decision is brutally obvious.
HOW COULD YOU BE SO STUPID?
Attempting to extract gold from the inside of the bird was never going to work. It betrays a childish concept of egg production, as if the constituent elements were held inside the bird like raw materials and the eggs manufactured rather than synthesized. You wonder if the killing is more an act of rage and desperation than merely a dimwitted strategy.
But why the desperation? The farmer has become wealthy. He has a good thing going. Why not wait? The extant versions of the fable do not elaborate on the nature of his discontent, but the pitfalls of greed are well-established. There are always more ways to spend your money; there are always people more wealthy and more powerful, and your ambitions rise like floodwater bringing you within reach of the ceiling above, convinced you can break through.
(Perhaps you have to assume the value of the bird’s output was, per egg, relatively modest. Life changing only in that first instance and as an accumulation thereafter. As Goldings puts it “an egg of gold, which undoubtedly was a great maintenance to her house and household.”)
THE HEN OR THE GOOSE?
There is some disagreement over whether the bird should be a goose or hen. The Greek source, Babrius, may be ambiguous, speaking only of a bird (I think), while the Latin, Avianus, refers to a goose. Caxton and Jacobs choose the goose, but La Fontaine, Townsend, Goldings and Gibbs are in the chicken camp. I don’t know if this indicates which source they used, but the difference is not trivial.
Hens are kept for their eggs and lay regularly, every day, all year round. Geese, on the other hand, have many other uses and lay only in ‘season,’ March through April. So, while a hen might provide a reliable supplier of gold, the output of a goose would be less frequent and subject to long hiatus. I’m not sure the authors knew this—I mean, I did not know this until I began to research my own version—I wonder if the farmer would have known this, if they did not have responsibility for the yard animals or the kitchen.
THE VICTIM’S POINT OF VIEW
I had already chosen the goose when I became aware of its natural limitations in egg production. It proved quite useful in the human story. However, my version also considers the goose’s point of view. What happens to the goose is perhaps more interesting, dramatically-speaking; its story has greater amplitude—and only partly because it is brutally murdered at the end. When you start to imagine how the goose may have been treated once its powers were discovered, a rollercoaster journey unfolds from innocent simplicity to celebrity and special treatment, culminating in unreasonable demands and the most obscene violation. The poor bird was a victim of its own talents.
Read it here: ‘The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs‘. Don’t forget to comment and share. Or buy me a coffee.
