The Lesson

A few years ago, I picked up an Aesop's Fables book from Costco. The book was inexpensive, and I was bored. It turns out that it's a reprint of a version that came out in 1912. I came across it again at the start of the weekend, and read it here and there when I had some time.

One thing that I noticed is that some of the stories had their moral made explicit, and others did not. Those that did had a short aphorism at the end of the tale, such as the classic "SLOW AND STEADY WINS THE RACE." Reading these stories as an adult, I was struck by the degree to which the aphorisms tended to not match the text of the story they were mated to. In some cases. you could see the resemblance. Although if I were going to boil down the story of The Tortoise and the Hare to a single sentence, it wouldn't be "Slow and steady wins the race," I can see how you arrive at it from there.

There was another story, The Farmer and the Stork, in which a farmer, setting traps for the cranes that raided his fields, also catches a stork. The stork pleads for his life, but the farmer says, in effect, that since the stork was in the field with the cranes, it will die like the cranes. "Birds of a feather flock together" seems like an odd choice for the moral to that tale, although I can understand the superficial similarity. The Blacksmith and His Dog, in which a blacksmith pseudo-scolds his dog for sleeping while he works, but always being there for mealtimes is given the moral: "Those who will not work deserve to starve," despite the fact that the story is quite clear that the smith only pretended to be put out by his dog's behavior.

In a way the whole thing comes off as if a person had a small store of random aphorisms in need of homes when someone dropped a load of old fables and folktales into their lap to marry together as best they could. The disconnect between the stories and the aphorisms that serve as the morals to some is interesting, because eventually, one starts to see the hand of class. Things like "There is always someone worse off than yourself," and "There is no eye like the master's" point to this. "It matters little of those who are inferior to us in merit should be like us in outside appearances," and "It is absurd to ape our betters," make the class judgements more explicit; although, perhaps, "It sometimes happens that one man has all the toil, and another all the profit," and "Might makes right," take the award for that.

It comes across as a very Victorian (for lack of a better word) enterprise. I suspect that the attaching of aphorisms to the stories is an artifact of even earlier times, when the fables were turned first into sermons and miniature morality plays. In the end, it seems unnecessary, the stories are simple and straightforward enough that even most children could be expected to understand the lessons each is meant to convey. And so it become a sort of window into the past, courtesy of lapsed copyrights. It's kind of a shame that the morals to fables have apparently become fixed. I wonder which of our own aphorisms we would place on them today, and how they would be received in a century's time.