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A moral (from Latin morālis) is a message that is conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. [1] The moral may be left to the hearer, reader, or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim. [2] A moral is a lesson in a story or real life. [3]
A later verse treatment by Hieronymus Osius is followed by the same moral. [32] In England, both the Francis Barlow (1687) and Roger L'Estrange (1692) collections include both versions of the fable, as does Samuel Croxall (1721). He, however, reads into the story a lesson on lack of judgment. [33]
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 moral lesson taught by these stories is summed up by the English proverb 'Once bitten, twice shy'. The episode of the rats holding a council is similar to the fable of The Mice in Council who suggested hanging a bell on the cat, but that only developed during the Middle Ages and has a completely different moral.
The English writer W. Somerset Maugham reverses the moral order in a different way in his short story, "The Ant and The Grasshopper" (1924). It concerns two brothers, one of whom is a dissolute waster whose hard-working brother has constantly to bail out of difficulties.
The Latin version of the fable first appeared centuries later in Avianus, as De Vento et Sole (Of the Wind and the Sun, Fable 4); [3] early versions in English and Johann Gottfried Herder's poetic version in German (Wind und Sonne) named it similarly. It was only in mid-Victorian times that the title "The North Wind and the Sun" began to be used.
In his retelling of the story, Lydgate had drawn the lesson that the one "Who all coveteth, oft he loseth all", [18] He stated as well that this was "an olde proverb" [19] which, indeed, in the form "All covet, all lose", was later to be quoted as the fable's moral by Roger L'Estrange. [20]
The story is recorded in both Greek and Latin sources. In the former, the farmer dies reproaching himself "for pitying a scoundrel", while in the version by Phaedrus the snake says that he bit his benefactor "to teach the lesson not to expect a reward from the wicked." The latter sentiment is made the moral in Medieval versions of the fable.