Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The Monkey and the Cat is best known as a fable adapted by Jean de La Fontaine under the title Le Singe et le Chat that appeared in the second collection of his Fables in 1679 (IX.17). It is the source of popular idioms in both English and French, with the general meaning of being the dupe (or tool) of another (e.g., a cat's-paw). In the fable ...
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 Farmer and the Viper is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 176 in the Perry Index. [1] It has the moral that kindness to evil will be met by betrayal and is the source of the idiom "to nourish a viper in one's bosom". The fable is not to be confused with The Snake and the Farmer, which looks back to a situation when friendship was possible ...
The moral drawn in Mediaeval Latin retellings of the fable such as those of Adémar de Chabannes and Romulus Anglicus [7] was that one should learn from the misfortunes of others, but it was also given a political slant by the additional comment that "it is easier to enter the house of a great lord than to get out of it", as William Caxton expressed it in his English version. [8]
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.
The fable in literature. 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 ...
La Fontaine's Fables. 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 ...
Aesop (left) as depicted by Francis Barlow in the 1687 edition of Aesop's Fables with His Life. 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 varied and unclear origins, the stories associated with his name have descended to modern ...