Misadventures in the Land of Fables, #5

Our shadows are incomplete, imperfect imitations of ourselves. When the sun is high, they cower unformed at our feet, while later, they walk by our side, like children, devoted and playful, and small. But as the sun goes down, the shadows start to outgrow us; they stretch, as far as they dare, before turning back and waving, forgetting they are still attached. And should we pass a wall, a fence, or a rock face, they rise up and tower above us, roles reversed, and we find ourselves the inferior party.  Overshadowed, literally.

The Wolf and his Shadow

This sets the stage for Aesop’s fable ‘The Wolf and his Shadow’, in which a wolf impressed by the size of his shadow makes the error of over-estimating his powers.

ROAMING BY the mountainside at sundown, a Wolf saw his own shadow become greatly extended and magnified, and he said to himself, ‘Why should I, being of such an immense size and extending nearly an acre in length, be afraid of the Lion? Ought I not to be acknowledged as King of all the collected beasts?’ While he was indulging in these proud thoughts, a Lion fell upon him and killed him. He exclaimed with a too late repentance, ‘Wretched me! this overestimation of myself is the cause of my destruction.’
<Townsend>

The fable wastes no time getting to the point. In all extant versions, the wolf gets attacked the instant he concludes that his mighty shadow proves his pre-eminence among animals, as if the thought itself invites the attack. This strikes me as premature and abrupt. Unnecessarily so. Let the wolf enjoy his reveries as the sun goes down. It’s quite harmless to imagine oneself stronger than you really are. However, if the wolf were to act upon its delusions, that would be the point at which fantasy met reality, pride took a fall, and lessons would be learned.

So the scenario has scope for development and this is what prompted my version, The Old Wolf Admires His Shadow.

What, I asked, would the wolf do?

Aesop made his think of deposing the Lion, the undisputed king of beasts. This falls into some rather conservative tropes affirming a natural hierarchy among animals, with the Lion at the apex, and casting the wolf as a deluded challenger, an upstart who needs to be destroyed or humiliated. The wolf is punished merely for thinking himself the superior.

Clinging to Former Glory

But what if the wolf wanted to retrieve its former glory, as leader of the pack. This is both more plausible – what would a lion be doing roaming the mountains? – and more substantial, because it suggests an emotional basis for the delusion: the persistence of self-image, a clinging to the past. It might also account for the creature’s isolation, roaming the mountains, or desert. And it would point to the richer theme of acceptance, or non-acceptance, of mortality.

The meaning does not change, but the accent shifts.

For me, the wolf’s error is not to forget his place in the scheme of things, but to fail to come to terms with the waning of his powers.