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Anthropomorphic cat guarding geese, Egypt, c. 1120 BCE. Fable is a literary genre defined as a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added explicitly as a concise maxim or ...
The adapted fable of "The Elm and the Vine, an illustration from Robert Dodsley's Select Fables of Esop, 1764 That the story was still known in England is suggested by Robert Dodsley's chance reference, that 'the gourd may reproach the pine' (the word Whitney used was 'deride'), in his essay on the fable genre, [ 11 ] although he did not choose ...
Walter Crane's illustration from Baby's Own Aesop, 1887. The Fir and the Bramble is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 304 in the Perry Index. [1] It is one of a group in which trees and plants debate together, which also includes The Trees and the Bramble and The Oak and the Reed.
The true Rockbud plant is a shelled plant containing lengthy tendrils that reach out to lap up water (and occasionally animal blood). [16] The size of fully grown rockbuds depends largely on climate. In colder climates they grow no larger than a human fist, while rockbuds in warm climates can grow to the size of a barrel. [ 17 ]
The Trees and the Bramble is a composite title which covers a number of fables of similar tendency, ultimately deriving from a Western Asian literary tradition of debate poems between two contenders. [1] Other related plant fables include The Oak and the Reed and The Fir and the Bramble.
Most subsequent textual treatments of the fable chose either one or the other theme, until the composite treatment in Benjamin Rabier's poster of 1906. [10] However, magic-realist painter Lukáš Kándl prefers to point towards the fable's moral in depicting plants breaking out of the ground, each sheathing a gold-coloured pearl. [11]
When the fable figured in 16th century emblem books, more emphasis was put on the moral lesson to be learned, to which the story acted as a mere appendage.Thus Hadrianus Junius tells the fable in a four-line Latin poem and follows it with a lengthy commentary, part of which reads: "By contrast we see the reed obstinately holding out against the power of cloudy storms, and overcoming the onrush ...
The earliest record of the fable is in an epigram by Leonidas of Tarentum, who lived in the area of southern Italy colonised by Greeks in the 3rd century BCE. [1] Later Greek references come from Western Asia, including another epigram by Evenus of Ascalon containing simply the vine's retort [ 2 ] and the prose collection of fables by ...