‘The Cat who Served the Lion’ (from Hitopadesha book II) is a tale of an enforcer who gets their comeuppance. A lion hires a cat to deal with a mouse who seems intent on irritating him. He rewards the cat with tasty morsels from his table, but the cat does its job too well. Confined […]

I talked last week of my discovery of a whole new landscape of fables in Frederic Taber Cooper’s ‘An Argosy of Fables.’ Well, it seems this landscape was fraught with danger, a jungle of deep shadows and grave consequences. I was familiar with Aesop’s work, and the later latin upstarts often attributed to the ancient […]

You think you’ve seen them all and then, wait, another old collection of fables turns up. Just before New Year, I discovered ‘An Argosy of Fables‘ by Frederic Taber Cooper. An illustration from the volume popped up in my recommendations on the image sharing service Pinterest. A vivid composition of three monkeys on the branch […]

Just before Christmas I published a fable on my Facebook page. Followers may not have realised what it was: the fable consisted of only one line and was accompanied by a Christmas greeting. (The pessimistic tone was hardly full of Christmas cheer. Sorry about that.) But it raised a question: can a fable consist of […]

The latest fable is an original, and also pleasingly short. Nor was it inspired by a picture, or even by real life, although I have often disturbed hares hunkered down in the middle of woods as the hunting dog does in the tale. If you’d like to read the fable before proceed with these comments, […]