THE LION IN LOVE Aesop’s ‘Lion in Love’ warns of the dangers of giving too much of ourselves for love, or for a love that does not appear to be requited. The scenario is a curious one: a lion falls in love with a girl and approached the father to ask permission to court his […]

A Daw with a String At’s Foot A jackdaw is caught and kept as a child’s pet escapes, but dies when the string still attached to his foot gets caught on the branch of a tree. A pitiful tale with an objectionable moral: stick with what you’ve got even if it be degrading servitude—you may […]

A jackdaw features as protagonist in five or six of Aesop’s fables. He gets into the same sort of problems every time and I have become quite fond of him. He’s a comic everyman, afigure ruled by appetite and envy, wanting to be something he is not, and failing, an emblem of all-too-human flaws. As […]

The Frogs Who Rode Snakeback appears in Book Three of the Panchatantra. Book Three describes an extended conflict between Crows and Owls. The crows hatch a plan to spy on their enemy. A crow poses as a traitor and joins the other side, when he returns his king praises him for his fortitude, but the […]

A jackdaw dresses itself in feathers borrowed from other birds. Two of Aesop’s fables are built around this action. They draw broadly the same moral. A condemnation of envy and pretension. But I don’t feel the actions of Jackdaw are entirely deserving of censure. Or in other words, is he really so bad? THE VAIN […]

Misadventures in the Land of Fables #14 My adventures in the land of fables have led me into the Himalyas, to Kasmir, and to the Panchatantra, a text first compiled in 350-400 CE by Vishnusharma, an octogenarian Brahmin. I did not literally venture into the mountains to retrieve this ancient literature, of course. I did […]