Misadventures in the Land of Fables #62
Regular readers may have noticed I’ve been referencing a volume of fables called ‘A Moral Fabletalk’ on and off throughout the year. I forget where I first encountered it, but I confess I only recently got around to reading the accompanying introductory essays. I discovered the manuscript was never published. Golding was a Tudor author known for his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but this manuscript, his translations of Aesop (mainly), were found in a library archive. If only we could contribute to his Patreon, or ‘buy him a coffee.’
I also learned of the manuscript’s complex ancestry, the layers upon layers. As the editors write, the “immediate source text was Arnold Freitag’s Mythologia Ethica (1579), a Latin translation of a French translation of a Dutch text derived from earlier French sources that drew not just on European fable traditions but also on the popular genre of the emblem.” No wonder some of these fables are unfamiliar and peculiar.
‘Of a Mule’ is one that has not been ascribed to Aesop. (An index compiled by the academic Ben Edwin Perry, lists the fables ascribed to Aesop: Perry Index.”)
A mule has had the good fortune to avoid the usually heavy burdens of his kind. Like the ugly duckling in reverse, it comes to think of itself as the equal of the horses alongside whom it is stabled, but when it demands to be led to the racecourse to prove its worth, it realizes that it is not a horse but merely the “foal of a stale, forworn, slow-paced ass.”
For some reason, in my recollection of the story, I imagined the mule being set-up by the horses, and laughed at, but Golding confines the perspective to the mule itself. He describes this as an example of experience showing a man the limits of his ability. Chastening. A lesson I am not keen to embrace.
My reading picked up on the sense of superiority that had no basis in the creature’s achievements. It was fortunate, privileged, and not particularly talented. Like so many, it preferred to understand its blessings as an extension of itself, as evidence of its worthiness. Being challenged on this draws an angry reaction.
You can read the new fable here: ‘The Braying Donkeys‘