The phrase ‘the lion’s share’, meaning the largest portion, comes from Aesop. A number of fables describe an unequal dividing of spoils implemented by the most powerful member of a hunting party, a lion. It goes something like this: the lion teams up with either two or three weaker animals (a cow, a goat, a […]

Many of Aesop’s fables are about predators. There must be over twenty featuring wolf, almost as many with wily but weaker the fox, as well as the lion, eagle, hawk, and snake. Tales of cunning, brutality, betrayal, but also mercy and cooperation. ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’ One of the most well-known fables, though one […]

  Fables are not literary texts. They are both less and more. They are brief, simple fictions with an exemplary message whose value resides almost exclusively in the quality of that message. Their pleasures are to be found primarily in the clarity and economy with which that message is rendered. Think of fables as a […]

~~~ “Fee! Fie! Foh! Fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he living or be he dead I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.” My father loved to bellow this speech, a self-dramatising performance of a giant or ogre warning his cowering victims, intimidating them. A huge, lumbering, self-satisfied threat of a […]

My interest in folk tales began, I think, with the Well-loved Tales series published by Ladybird in the late 1960s. A number of these pocket-sized books were to be found knocking around the house when I was growing up, bought for my elder sister, if not for me. I remember the covers. Neither iconic nor […]