Misadventures in the Land of Fables #83
~~~
As promised, some thoughts on ’The Weasel and the File’ (Perry 59), a simple if peculiar fable:
A weasel slips into a blacksmith’s workshop and pounces on an iron file as if it were prey. Excited by the taste of blood, and not knowing that it is her own, the weasel licks the file until her tongue is completely worn away.
How the weasel could have made this mistake I will never know. Iron files, or any other tools, bear little resemblance to small rodents, the weasel’s customary prey. I imagine the mouthfeel is quite different. What was it thinking?
The Greek source declares that “the story is told against those who harm themselves in quarrels.” I’m not so sure about that. Yes, quarrelling may be as foolish and as harmful as chewing on an iron file. It’s futile. And there’s certainly something corrosive about persisting with a disagreement, making your point incessantly, not letting go. But I think there’s more going on here.
The most interesting error is not the mistaken choice of victim, but the failure to respond to the warning signs, the misinterpretation of the blood. What should have been understood as a warning sign works instead as an accelerant, an incentive. After all, blood without an associated sensation of pain is only half the signal you need to correct course. You wanted blood and you got blood, so you keep going. Laura Gibbs picks up on this aspect and ends her translation with a slightly different moral.
“This story shows that people who think there is a profit in some useless activity will get so carried away by what they are doing that they destroy themselves.”
The more I thought about this, the more I felt seen. If there were a way to summarise my life it would be this, albeit with a degree of hyperbole. It is more a matter of the refusal to give up than of getting carried away, and the real mistake is a lack of interest in economically profitable activity.
* You may be wondering why the woodcut image above depicts a small dragon rather than a weasel. It’s meant to be a viper. There’s a version which substitutes a viper for a weasel and it’s such an obscure fable that’s the only clean image I could find.