The Tortoise and the Birds is a fable of probable folk origin, early versions of which are found in both India and Greece. There are also African variants. The moral lessons to be learned from these differ and depend on the context in which they are told.
A tale concerning a talkative tortoise appears in the Buddhist scriptures as the Kacchapa Jataka . [1] In this version, it is framed by the account of a talkative king who finds in his courtyard a tortoise that has fallen from the sky and split in two. His adviser explains that this had come about as a result of talking too much. A tortoise had become friendly with two geese who promised to take it to their home in the Himalayas. They would hold a stick in their beaks while the tortoise would grasp it in his mouth, but he must be careful not to talk. Children below made fun of it during the journey and when it answered back it fell to its destruction. Jataka tales were a favourite subject for sculpture and this story is found as a bas relief on various religious buildings in India and Java. Often depicted as synoptic narratives, the episodes encountered include the birds carrying the tortoise between them, its fall and its fate on reaching the Earth. [2] In the 9th century Mendut temple in Java, for example, the birds and tortoise appear at top right, while on the ground huntsmen take aim with bows. Immediately below, the same three are preparing the fallen body for food. [3]
As in the Mendut example, other versions of the story are depicted even in Buddhist contexts. In the Indian literary variation of the story in the Panchatantra , the tortoise and her friends live in a lake that is beginning to dry up. Pitying the future suffering of their friend, the geese suggest they fly off with her in the manner already described. On hearing the comments of people in the city they are passing, the tortoise tells them to mind their own business. After her fall in consequence, she is cut up and eaten. [4] The story was eventually included in the tales of Bidpai and travelled westward via translations into Persian, Syriac, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin. The last of these began to be translated into other European languages at the end of the Middle Ages. A still later retelling appears in the Hitopadesha , where the migration occurs because of the appearance of a fisherman. Cowherds below suggest that the flying tortoise would make a good meal and it falls while making an acid response. [5]
An Italian version of Bidpai's fables was early translated into English by Thomas North under the title of The Morall Philosophie of Doni (1570). [6] The story of the tortoise and the birds appears in a section illustrating the sentiment that 'a man hath no greater enemy than himself'. The French fabulist Jean de la Fontaine also found the story in an early digest of Bidpai's work and added it to his fables as La Tortue et les deux Canards (X.3). For him the story illustrates human vanity and imprudence. His tortoise tires of living in the same place and decides to travel. Two ducks offer to fly her to America but, while on their way, she hears people below describe her as 'the queen of tortoises' and shouts agreement. [7] It is on this that Alexander Sumarokov appears to have based his Russian version, in which the ducks set out to carry the tortoise to France. [8]
Travelling eastwards too, the story exists as a Mongolian folk tale with a different animal character. [9] [10] In this variation, a frog is jealous of geese discussing their coming migration and complains that they are fortunate to be able to fly to a warmer climate in winter. The geese suggest the stick plan to the frog and they set off. The frog is so delighted with himself that he cannot resist shouting down to the frogs he is leaving behind and soon rejoins them disastrously.
A variation on this appears in the Russian author Vsevolod Garshin's story called "The Traveler Frog" (Лягушка-путешественница), which was adapted into a cartoon in 1965. [11] There, the frog falls because it wants to tell those below that the traveling was its own idea, and not that of the ducks that carry him. Unlike in most variants, the frog falls into a pond and survives to boast of its supposed travels. [12]
There are two stories concerning a tortoise and various birds ascribed to Aesop, one in the Greek of Babrius and the other in the Latin of Phaedrus. In the Greek version, a tortoise yearns to see more of the Earth and persuades the eagle to fly up with it, promising in return 'all the gifts that come from the Eastern Sea'. Once they are above the clouds, the eagle drops it onto a mountaintop. The story was given the moral that one should be content with one's lot. It spread through Europe via Latin versions in the collections of Avianus and Odo of Cheriton. Thereafter it cross-fertilised with tellings of the Indian version of the fable. The tortoise's discontent is supplied to La Fontaine's fable from this source, as it is in Jefferys Taylor's poem The Tortoise. [13]
Babrius gives no reason for the eagle's treachery; Avianus suggests that this was because the promised payment was not forthcoming. [14] It is the uncertainty of life, into which treachery enters, that is the subject of the alternative version of the fable, told by Phaedrus as "The Eagle and the Crow" (2.6). It begins with the comment that 'no one is sufficiently well armed against the high and the mighty, and if there is a malicious advisor involved as well, then whoever falls victim to their criminal forces will be destroyed.' To illustrate this, he relates how an eagle has seized a tortoise but cannot eat it because of the protective shell. A passing crow advises the eagle to drop the animal 'from the starry heights' onto the rocks below, after which the two birds share its meat. [15] By the time the story is retold by Walter of England an element of treachery has been added. The crow meets the frustrated eagle on the ground and advises it to soar up and drop its prey. Waiting behind by the rocks, the crow flies off with the fallen tortoise before the eagle can return.
An Igbo fable concerning the tortoise and the birds has gained wide distribution because it occurs in the famous novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. [16] The tortoise, who is a West African trickster figure, hears of a feast to be given by the sky-dwellers to the birds and persuades them to take him with them, winged in their feathers. There he tells the hosts that his name is 'All-of-you' and, when they provide the food with the assurance that 'This is for all of you', claims the entire feast. The enraged birds claim their feathers back and leave. Only the parrot will agree to take a message to the tortoise's wife to pull the bedding from his house and leave it on the ground. Instead the parrot tells her to bring out all the hard things so that when the tortoise jumps down its shell is broken. He survives, however, and the broken shell is glued together. This provides the explanation of why the tortoise's shell is so uneven. Much the same story is now claimed by the Swazi people [17] and the Kikuyu.
Some retellings of the tortoise fables are extended in such a way as to suggest that two stories have been merged into one. In the case of the African fable, the tortoise gets back to earth safely but the birds decide to play him a return trick. A feast is provided on the ground but it is announced that this can only be eaten by those whose claws are clean. The birds fly to the river and return to alight on their food but the tortoise, having to crawl, gets its feet dirty in returning and is sent back to try again. This time it is he who misses the feast. [18]
In a Sri Lankan continuation of the Indian version of the fable, Ibba the tortoise similarly survives its fall to earth, only to get into the clutches of Nariya, the hungry jackal. Ibba suggests to Nariya that its shell will become soft if it is soaked in the river. At first Nariya keeps a paw on the shell but then Ibba persuades him that he is soft all over except for the dry patch under Nariya's paw. When the jackal raises it, Ibba swims to safety. [19]
Other versions merge stories more seamlessly. A narration in the Uncle Remus tradition from the former slave population of South Carolina combines Aesop's fable of the discontented tortoise with an African cumulative tale. Brer Terrapin grumbles so much about being earth-bound that the animals conspire to have him carried up and dropped to his death. Miss Crow takes him first and when she grows tired he is transferred in turn to the back of a buzzard, a hawk and King Eagle. When the eagle will not listen to his pleas to take him back, the tortoise climbs down a thread he ties to the eagle's leg and so escapes his fate. [20]
Joseph Jacobs similarly combines both fables of Aesop in his late retelling [21] Here the eagle is carrying the tortoise to a new home and is reminded by the crow that it is good to eat, whereupon the eagle drops it on a sharp rock and the two birds make a feast of it. This synthetic version and the moral given it, 'Never soar aloft on an enemy's pinions', is often mistaken as authentic nowadays.
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, which may at the end be added explicitly as a concise maxim or saying.
The Panchatantra is an ancient Indian collection of interrelated animal fables in Sanskrit verse and prose, arranged within a frame story. The surviving work is dated to about 200 BCE, but the fables are likely much more ancient. The text's author is unknown, but it has been attributed to Vishnu Sharma in some recensions and Vasubhaga in others, both of which may be fictitious pen names. It is likely a Hindu text, and based on older oral traditions with "animal fables that are as old as we are able to imagine".
Aesop's Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. Of diverse origins, the stories associated with his name have descended to modern times through a number of sources and continue to be reinterpreted in different verbal registers and in popular as well as artistic media.
"The Tortoise and the Hare" is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 226 in the Perry Index. The account of a race between unequal partners has attracted conflicting interpretations. The fable itself is a variant of a common folktale theme in which ingenuity and trickery are employed to overcome a stronger opponent.
The lion's share is an idiomatic expression which now refers to the major share of something. The phrase derives from the plot of a number of fables ascribed to Aesop and is used here as their generic title. There are two main types of story, which exist in several different versions. Other fables exist in the East that feature division of prey in such a way that the divider gains the greater part - or even the whole. In English the phrase used in the sense of nearly all only appeared at the end of the 18th century; the French equivalent, le partage du lion, is recorded from the start of that century, following La Fontaine's version of the fable.
"The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse" is one of Aesop's Fables. It is number 352 in the Perry Index and type 112 in Aarne–Thompson's folk tale index. Like several other elements in Aesop's fables, "town mouse and country mouse" has become an English idiom.
The Dog and Its Reflection is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 133 in the Perry Index. The Greek language original was retold in Latin and in this way was spread across Europe, teaching the lesson to be contented with what one has and not to relinquish substance for shadow. There also exist Indian variants of the story. The morals at the end of the fable have provided both English and French with proverbs and the story has been applied to a variety of social situations.
"The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs" is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 87 in the Perry Index, a story that also has a number of Eastern analogues. Many other stories contain geese that lay golden eggs, though certain versions change them for hens or other birds that lay golden eggs. The tale has given rise to the idiom 'killing the goose that lays the golden eggs', which refers to the short-sighted destruction of a valuable resource, or to an unprofitable action motivated by greed.
The Scorpion and the Frog is an animal fable which teaches that vicious people cannot resist hurting others even when it is not in their own interests. This fable seems to have emerged in Russia in the early 20th century.
The Farmer and the Stork is one of Aesop's Fables which appears in Greek in the collections of both Babrius and Aphthonius and has differed little in the telling over the centuries. The story relates how a farmer plants traps in his field to catch the cranes and geese that are stealing the seeds he has sown. When he checks the traps, he finds among the other birds a stork, who pleads to be spared because it is harmless and has taken no part in the theft. The farmer replies that since it has been caught in the company of thieves, it must suffer the same fate. The moral of the story, which is announced beforehand in the oldest texts, is that associating with bad companions will lead to bad consequences.
Ramsay Wood is the author of two sui generis modern novels which aim – via vernacular spiels within complex frame-story narratives – to popularize the pre-literate, oral story-listening drama of multicultural animal fables mimed and declaimed along the ancient Silk Road. His books blend The Jatakas Tales, The Panchatantra and the likely role of Alexander the Great's legacy in "bringing the Aesopian tradition to North India and Central Asia" via Hellenization in Central Asia and India. Wood's Kalila and Dimna – Selected Fables of Bidpai was published by Knopf in 1980 with an Introduction by Nobel laureate Doris Lessing.
The Fox and the Crow is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 124 in the Perry Index. There are early Latin and Greek versions and the fable may even have been portrayed on an ancient Greek vase. The story is used as a warning against listening to flattery.
The Ass in the Lion's Skin is one of Aesop's Fables, of which there are two distinct versions. There are also several Eastern variants, and the story's interpretation varies accordingly.
The Wolf and the Lamb is a well-known fable of Aesop and is numbered 155 in the Perry Index. There are several variant stories of tyrannical injustice in which a victim is falsely accused and killed despite a reasonable defence.
The Bear and the Gardener is a fable originating in the ancient Indian text Panchatantra that warns against making foolish friendships. There are several variant versions, both literary and oral, across the world and its folk elements are classed as Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 1586. The La Fontaine version has been taken as demonstrating various philosophical lessons.
The Cock, the Dog and the Fox is one of Aesop's Fables and appears as number 252 in the Perry Index. Although it has similarities with other fables where a predator flatters a bird, such as The Fox and the Crow and Chanticleer and the Fox, in this one the cock is the victor rather than victim. There are also Eastern variants of this story.
The Ass and the Pig is one of Aesop's Fables that was never adopted in the West but has Eastern variants that remain popular. Their general teaching is that the easy life and seeming good fortune of others conceal a threat to their welfare.
Jean de La Fontaine collected fables from a wide variety of sources, both Western and Eastern, and adapted them into French free verse. They were issued under the general title of Fables in several volumes from 1668 to 1694 and are considered classics of French literature. Humorous, nuanced and ironical, they were originally aimed at adults but then entered the educational system and were required learning for school children.
The Frog and the Mouse is one of Aesop's Fables and exists in several versions. It is numbered 384 in the Perry Index. There are also Eastern versions of uncertain origin which are classified as Aarne-Thompson type 278, concerning unnatural relationships. The stories make the point that the treacherous are destroyed by their own actions.
