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 […]
Misadventures in the Land of Fables #61
‘The Ant and the Grasshopper.’ This fable has always bugged me, if you’ll forgive the pun. I don’t know exactly when I first heard it, at school no doubt, but I do know I have always had objections. I probably don’t need to recite the story here, but I will, in its most blunt form, […]
Misadventures in the Land of Fables #60
An example of creative confusion. Two bird fables from Arthur Golding got conflated in my recollection while I was occupied with other business. Add an original thought of my own—they happen!—and a new fable was conceived, the off-spring of these three parents. In one fable, a ‘puttock’ (a bird of prey) seizes a nightingale and […]
Misadventures in the Land of Fables #59
There is no character development in the classic Aesopic fable. It is the reader who learns the lesson not the protagonist; the protagonist’s actions are constructed only to produce the lesson and for this purpose it is not necessary, or desirable, to develop what you might call a character. It’s not surprising then that fables […]
Misadventures in the Land of Fables #58
JACKDAW AND THE SONGBIRDS Weeks elapsed between the first draft of the new fable, ‘Jackdaw and the Songbirds,’ and its completion. I had other commitments. And I also contrived to delete my website. But we’re back. In the interim, however, I had forgotten what had inspired the idea. Fortunately, I had kept some notes. The […]
Misadventures in the Land of Fables #57
THE COCKEREL AND THE JEWEL It goes like this: A cockerel or rooster pecks for seeds scattered in the farmyard dirt. He finds instead a diamond and has this to say about it: “If your owner had found you, no doubt they’d have felt more delight than I who have no use for you. […]