The Lion and the Mouse is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 150 in the Perry Index. There are also Eastern variants of the story, all of which demonstrate mutual dependence regardless of size or status. In the Renaissance the fable was provided with a sequel condemning social ambition.
In the oldest versions, a lion threatens a mouse that wakes him from sleep. The mouse begs forgiveness and makes the point that such unworthy prey would bring the lion no honour. The lion agrees and sets the mouse free. Later, the lion is netted by hunters. Hearing it roaring, the mouse remembers its clemency and frees it by gnawing through the ropes. The moral of the story is that mercy brings its reward and that there is no being so small that it cannot help a greater. Later English versions reinforce this by having the mouse promise to return the lion's favor, to its sceptical amusement.
The Scottish poet Robert Henryson, in a version he included in his Morall Fabillis [1] in the 1480s, expands the plea that the mouse makes and introduces serious themes of law, justice and politics. The poem consists of 43 seven-lined stanzas of which the first twelve recount a meeting with Aesop in a dream and six stanzas at the end draw the moral; the expanded fable itself occupies stanzas 13–36. A political lesson of a different kind occurs in Francis Barlow's 1687 edition of the fables. There the poet Aphra Behn comments that no form of service is to be despised, for just as the humble mouse had aided the king of the beasts, so 'An Oak did once a glorious Monarch save' by serving as a hiding place when King Charles II was escaping after the battle of Worcester. [2]
The 16th-century French poet Clément Marot also recounts an expanded version of the fable in the course of his Épitre à son ami Lyon Jamet (Letter to his friend Lyon Jamet), first published in 1534. [3] This is an imitation of the Latin poet Horace's Epistles, addressed to friends and often applying Aesopian themes to their situations. In this case, Marot has been imprisoned and begs Jamet to help him get released, playing on his friend's forename and styling himself the lowly rat (rather than mouse). La Fontaine's Fables included a more succinct version of the story (II.11) in the following century. [4]
In Ivan Krylov's version (1833), the mouse, instead of disturbing the lion, requests permission to make a house upon his territory, stating it might one day prove useful in return. Resentful of the idea that a creature so pitiful might provide him a service, the lion angrily tells the mouse to flee while he's still alive. Only in the cage does the lion come to realize that his own pride was his downfall.
The fable has been a favourite with artists and sculptors. The Flemish painter Frans Snyders was responsible for at least two versions. [5] [6] One of these used to hang in the Great Hall at Chequers, the country house of the Prime Minister, and was retouched by Winston Churchill so as to highlight the barely visible mouse. [7] [8] [9] In 1973 the painting was restored and the overpainting removed; it now hangs in an ante room to the Great Parlour there. [8]
The fable was also the subject of a painting by the French artist Vincent Chevilliard (1841–1904) and exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1881. The Austrian artist Gustav Klimt incorporated a reference to the beginning of the story on the left hand side of his painting "The Fable" in 1883. There a lion sleeps beneath a shrub, on the leafless twigs of which mice are at play. [10]
Sculptors turned to the fable in the 20th century. One of them was the maker of church furniture, Robert (Mouseman) Thompson, who came by his name for incorporating a mouse into most of his carvings. He did this legitimately in the Church of Our Lady and St Michael in Workington, Cumbria, where the underside of one of the seats in the choir stalls, installed in 1926, depicts the fable of the lion and the mouse. [11]
A Marshall Fredericks statue of 1957 seeks to make the lion less threatening to children. The sculpture was commissioned for the Eastland Center in Harper Woods, Michigan. The lion is carved from limestone and has a large round head with stylized, uniformly coiled ringlets. Reclining on its back, it grins at the little mouse perched on its paw. This was cast from gilt bronze and gold plated, which led to its being stolen numerous times. One was returned 50 years after its theft and exhibited at the Detroit Historical Museum in 2007. [12] A copy of the whole statue is on exhibition in the sculpture garden of the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum. [13]
Another American sculptor, Tom Otterness, has made the fable the subject of an equally child-friendly sculpture among the 23 he installed on the outdoor terrace of the seaside Beelden aan Zee museum in Scheveningen, The Netherlands, in 2004. In this the lion is lying trussed up on its side, contemplated by the mouse that stands upright with its hands clasped behind its back. A similar piece of public art by German sculptor Peter Fritzsche (b.1938) is in Eisenhüttenstadt. His lion lies on its back with its legs bound and is perched on a plinth round the sides of which is carved a translation of Ivan Krylov's version of the fable. [14] This dates the work back to the days of the Communist administration.
Among French musical settings of La Fontaine's version of the fable, Le lion et le rat, have been Jacques Magner's of 1886 and that of 1905 by Jacques Soulacroix (1863-1937). [15] Other treatments of different versions have included Mabel Wood Hill's in her Aesop's Fables Interpreted Through Music (New York, 1920) for high voice and piano [16] and Werner Egk's Der Löwe und die Maus for small orchestra and children's choir, performed in 1931. The fable was also included in Edward Hughes' Songs from Aesop's fables for children's voices and piano (1965), as the second of Anthony Plog's set for narrator, piano and horn (1989/93) [17] and among the fables set by Yvonne Gillespie for narrator and full orchestra (2001). In addition, Julie Giroux made it the first movement in her A Symphony of Fables (2006) and David Edgar Walther included it in his 2009 opera cycle Aesop's Fables. [18] In 2012 it was one of the ten on David P. Shortland's Australian recording, Aesop Go HipHop, where the sung chorus after the hip hop narration advised against discrimination: "Little friends are great friends, don’t think short or tall". [19]
Illustrations of the fable have appeared on domestic objects, including a Chelsea plate in 1755 [20] and a tile in the Minton Aesop's Fables series during the 1880s. In 1990 it was to be used on one of a set of four Zambian stamps featuring folk tales. [21]
In 19th century Britain the political cartoonist John Doyle adapted the fable to one of his monthly series of prints in February 1844. In it the mouse nibbling at the net is Earl Russell, who prevailed on the House of Lords to free the leonine Daniel O'Connell from the imprisonment he had incurred for trying to repeal the Irish Act Of Union. [22] In the United States the fable was applied to a case of corrupt lobbying in a Puck cartoon for 23 July 1913. [23] Under the title 'Even a rat may help free a lion', the House of Representatives is shown enmeshed in the nets of "Lobbyism", from which Colonel (Martin) Mulhall is about to free it by his revelations of bribe-taking. [24]
In 1953 the fable was adapted to a two-minute animated cartoon ending with an advertisement for Coca-Cola as a promoter of friendship. [25] The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) twice adapted the story. As The Bear and the Mouse it was issued as a short feature film in 1966 using real animals with voice-over. [26] 10 years later the animated short The Lion and the Mouse appeared, directed by Evelyn Lambart and with an original score by Maurice Blackburn. [27]
Though the fable is frequently a subject of children's literature, Jerry Pinkney's The Lion & the Mouse (2009) tells it through pictures alone, without the usual text of such books, and won the 2010 Caldecott Medal for its illustrations. [28] The story is updated and adapted to fit the conditions of the Serengeti National Park, in which it is set. [29]
The Neo-Latin fabulist Laurentius Abstemius provided a sequel to the story with an opposite social message in his Hecatomythium (1499). In this the lion promises the mouse any reward it cares to name after setting him free. The mouse asks for the lion's daughter in marriage, but the bride steps on her husband by accident on the marriage night. [30] Where Aesop's fable teaches that no-one should be despised, however low in the social scale, this reinterpretation suggests that one should not try to rise out of one's class through marriage. A later verse treatment by Hieronymus Osius is followed by the same moral. [31] 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. [32]
The story that Abstemius could have had in mind when inventing his fable of an unequal marriage ridiculously terminated occurs in the Hebrew Bible. Amaziah, king of the lesser power of Judah, sent a challenge to Jehoash, king of Israel, who replied with a dismissive fable:
The characters are different there, but the core of the story about the end of presumptuous ambition remains the same.
The fable is introduced as an illustration into a longer Egyptian myth in a papyrus of indeterminate date towards the start of the Common Era. [33] A lion previously unacquainted with man comes across examples of his cruelty and exploitation of other animals and decides to hunt him down. On his way the lion spares a mouse that comes beneath his paw and it promises to return the favour. This the mouse does by gnawing the lion free when he is netted in a trap set by man. In general the evidence points to the tale being adapted from a Greek source. [34] There was a long established Greek trading colony in Egypt and the document appeared during the reign of the Ptolemaic dynasty, which was of Greek origin itself.
There is also an Indian variant of the story in the Panchatantra , but that is told of mice and elephants. Here too it is introduced into a larger context, in this case a discussion about appropriate friendship, and illustrates the advice 'Make friends, however strong or weak they be'. An elephant herd inadvertently tramples a tribe of mice, who send representatives to beg the elephant king to avoid their settlement in future. Later the herd is trapped and the grateful mice come to their rescue and free them. [35] When the story was carried to China by Buddhist monks, the benefitted animal reverted to a tiger, another member of the cat family. [36]
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.
A wolf in sheep's clothing is an idiom from Jesus's Sermon on the Mount as narrated in the Gospel of Matthew. It warns against individuals who play a duplicitous role. The gospel regards such individuals as dangerous.
"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.
Laurentius Abstemius was an Italian writer and professor of philology, born at Macerata in Ancona. His learned name plays on his family name of Bevilaqua (Drinkwater), and he was also known by the Italian name Lorenzo Astemio. A Neo-Latin writer of considerable talents at the time of the Humanist revival of letters, his first published works appeared in the 1470s and were distinguished by minute scholarship. During that decade he moved to Urbino and became ducal librarian, although he was to move between there and other parts of Italy thereafter as a teacher.
The Cat and the Mice is a fable attributed to Aesop of which there are several variants. Sometimes a weasel is the predator; the prey can also be rats and chickens.
Belling the Cat is a fable also known under the titles The Bell and the Cat and The Mice in Council. In the story, a group of mice agree to attach a bell to a cat's neck to warn of its approach in the future, but they fail to find a volunteer to perform the job. The term has become an idiom describing a group agreeing to perform an impossibly difficult task.
The Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian is a work of Northern Renaissance literature composed in Middle Scots by the fifteenth century Scottish makar, Robert Henryson. It is a cycle of thirteen connected narrative poems based on fables from the European tradition. The drama of the cycle exploits a set of complex moral dilemmas through the figure of animals representing a full range of human psychology. As the work progresses, the stories and situations become increasingly dark.
The Bear and the Travelers is a fable attributed to Aesop and is number 65 in the Perry Index. It was expanded and given a new meaning in mediaeval times.
The Country Cousin is a Walt Disney animated short film released on October 31, 1936 by United Artists. The winner of an Oscar at the 9th Academy Awards for Best Animated Short Film, the film was produced by Walt Disney, directed by Wilfred Jackson, and animated by Art Babbitt and Les Clark. As is true for most cartoons in the Silly Symphonies series, The Country Cousin was built around a musical score, which was written by Leigh Harline. The film's story was based on one of Aesop's Fables, The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. It was accompanied by a storybook for young children, which was common for many of the Silly Symphonies.
The Lion & the Mouse is a 2009 nearly wordless picture book illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. This book, published by Little, Brown and Company, tells Aesop's fable of The Lion and the Mouse. In the story, a mouse's life is a spared by a lion. Later, after the lion is trapped, the mouse is able to set the lion free. Adapting the fable, with the moral that the weak can help the strong, as a wordless picture book was seen as a successful way of overcoming the brief plot generally found in the source stories. While it was Pinkney's first wordless picture book, it was not the first time he had told the story, having previously included it in his Aesop's Fables, published in 2000. Pinkney, who had received five Caldecott Honors, became the first African American to win the Caldecott Medal for his illustrations in this book. His illustrations were generally praised for their realism and sense of place. The cover illustrations, featuring the title characters but no text, drew particular praise.
Still waters run deep is a proverb of Latin origin now commonly taken to mean that a placid exterior hides a passionate or subtle nature. Formerly it also carried the warning that silent people are dangerous, as in Suffolk's comment on a fellow lord in William Shakespeare's play Henry VI part 2:
The phrase out of the frying pan into the fire is used to describe the situation of moving or getting from a bad or difficult situation to a worse one, often as the result of trying to escape from the bad or difficult one. It was the subject of a 15th-century fable that eventually entered the Aesopic canon.
The young man and the swallow is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 169 in the Perry Index. It is associated with the ancient proverb 'One swallow doesn't make a summer'.
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 Fox and the Weasel is a title used to cover a complex of fables in which a number of other animals figure in a story with the same basic situation involving the unfortunate effects of greed. Of Greek origin, it is counted as one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 24 in the Perry Index.
The Ass and his Masters is a fable that has also gone by the alternative titles The ass and the gardener and Jupiter and the ass. Included among Aesop's Fables, it is numbered 179 in the Perry Index.
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.
The Bear and the Bees is a fable of North Italian origin that became popular in other countries between the 16th - 19th centuries. There it has often been ascribed to Aesop's fables, although there is no evidence for this and it does not appear in the Perry Index. Various versions have been given different interpretations over time and artistic representations have been common.
There are no less than six fables concerning an impertinent insect, which is taken in general to refer to the kind of interfering person who makes himself out falsely to share in the enterprise of others or to be of greater importance than he is in reality. Some of these stories are included among Aesop's Fables, while others are of later origin, and from them have been derived idioms in several languages.
Works related to The Lion and the Mouse, fable by Aesop at Wikisource