From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents 1 Definitions 2 Characteristics 3 History 4 Classic fabulists 5 Modern fabulists 6 Notable fables 7 See also 8 Notes 9 References 10 External links

A fable is a brief, succinct story, in prose or verse, that features animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized (given human qualities), and that illustrates a moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim.

A fable differs from a parable in that the latter excludes animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as actors that assume speech and other powers of humankind.

Usage has not always been so clearly distinguished. In the King James Version of the Bible, the translators rendered "μύθος" ("mythos") as "fable" in the New Testament,^[1] in First and Second Timothy, Titus and First Peter.

The word "fable" comes from the Latin "fabula" ("a story"), from "fari" ("to speak").

Used in a pejorative sense, a "fable" may refer to a deliberately invented or falsified account. A non-authorial person who, wittingly or not, tells "tall tales", may be termed a "confabulator". In its more general sense, though, the word "fable" refers simply to a genre of short stories designed to impart a moral lesson.

An author of fables is termed a fabulist, while the word "fabulous" means "pertaining to fables". A character referred to as "fabulous" (such as The Lone Ranger) simply means that he was fictional, in the traditional meaning of the word. In recent decades the word's metaphorical meanings have often been taken as literal. "Fabulous" has acquired a meaning equivalent to "outstanding".

Fables can be described as a didactic mode of literature. That is, whether a fable is handed down from generation to generation as oral literature or constructed by a literary tale-teller, its purpose is to teach a lesson or value, or to give sage advice. Fables also provide opportunities to laugh at human folly, when they provide examples of behavior to avoid rather than to emulate.

Fables frequently have animals as their central characters, and they are often given anthropomorphic characteristics, such as the ability to speak and to reason. For instance, medieval French fabliaux might feature Reynard the fox, a trickster figure, and offer a subtext mildly subversive of the feudal order of society. The ancient Aesop, too, had presented a wide range of animals as the protagonists of his short fables, including his famous tortoise and hare who engage in a race, and the fox who rejects grapes that are out of his reach as being sour. Similarly, the 18th-century Polish fabulist Ignacy Krasicki employs animals as the title actors in his verse fable, "The Lamb and the Wolves." In the same way, he uses plants in "The Violet and the Grass."

Personification may also be extended to things inanimate, as in Krasicki's "Bread and Sword." An example of personified forces of nature may be found in his "The Stream and the River."

Divine beings may also appear in fables as active agents in human life. For instance, Aesop's Fables feature most of the Greek pantheon, including Zeus and Hermes.

The fable is one of the most enduring forms of folk literature, spread abroad, modern researchers agree^[2] less by literary anthologies than by oral transmission. Fables can be found in the literature of almost every country. Fables that originated in India were carried into Persia and from there spread into Greece and the Western world from the fourth century BCE. The varying corpus denoted Aesopica or Aesop's Fables includes most of the best-known western fables, which are attributed to the legendary Aesop, supposed to have been a Greek slave of the 6th century BCE. When Babrius set down fables from the Aesopica in verse for a Hellenistic Prince "Alexander," he expressly stated at the head of Book II that this type of "myth" that Aesop had introduced to the "sons of the Hellenes" had been an invention of "Syrians" from the time of "Ninos" (personifying Nineveh to Greeks) and Belos ("ruler")^[3]. Several parallel animal fables in Sumerian and Akkadian are among those that E. Ebeling introduced to modern Western readers^[4]; there are comparable fables from Egypt's Middle Kingdom^[5], and Hebrew fables such as the "king of trees" in Book of Judges 9 and "the thistle and the cedar tree" in II Kings 14:9.^[6] Many other familiar ones include “The Crow and the Pitcher,” “The Hare and the Tortoise,” and “The Lion and the Mouse.”

Hundreds of fables were composed in ancient India during the first millennium BC, often as stories within frame stories. These included Vishnu Sarma's Panchatantra, the Hitopadesha, Vikram and The Vampire, and Syntipas' Seven Wise Masters, which were collections of fables that were later influential throughout the Old World. Earlier Indian epics such as Vyasa's Mahabharata and Valmiki's Ramayana also contained fables within the main story, often as side stories or back-story.

Epicharmus of Kos and Phormis are reported as having been among the first to invent comic fables.^[7]

Fables had a further long tradition through the Middle Ages, and became part of European literature. During the 17th century, the French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695) saw the soul of the fable in the moral — a rule of behavior. Starting with the Aesopian pattern, La Fontaine set out to satirize the court, the church, the rising bourgeoisie, indeed the entire human scene of his time. La Fontaine's model was subsequently emulated by Poland's Ignacy Krasicki (1735-1801) and Russia's Ivan Krylov (1769-1844).

In modern times, the fable has been trivialized in children's books. Yet it has also been fully adapted to modern adult literature. For instance, James Thurber used the ancient style in his books, Fables for Our Time and The Beast in Me and Other Animals. George Orwell's Animal Farm satirizes Stalinist Communism in particular, and totalitarianism in general, in the guise of animal fable. Felix Salten's Bambi is a Bildungsroman — a story of a protagonist's coming-of-age — cast in the form of a fable.

• Valmiki (ca. 6th century BCE), author of the Hindu epic Ramayana.
• Vyasa (ca. 6th century BCE), author of the Hindu epic Mahabharata and scribe of the Vedas.
• Vaisampayana (ca. 6th century BCE), pupil of Vyasa, expanded the Mahabharata with many fables.
• Aesop (mid-6th century BCE), author of Aesop's Fables.
• Vishnu Sarma (ca. 200 BCE), author of the anthropomorphic political treatise and fable collection, the Panchatantra.
• Bidpai (ca. 200 BCE), author of Sanskrit (Hindu) and Pali (Buddhist) animal fables in verse and prose.
• Syntipas (ca. 100 BCE), Indian philosopher, reputed author of a collection of tales known in Europe as The Story of the Seven Wise Masters.
• Gaius Julius Hyginus (Hyginus, Latin author, native of Spain or Alexandria, ca. 64 BCE - 17 C.E.), author of Fabulae.
• Phaedrus (15 BCE - 50 CE), Roman fabulist, by birth a Macedonian.
• Marie de France (12th century).
• Berechiah ha-Nakdan (Berechiah the Punctuator, or Grammarian, 13th century), author of Jewish fables adapted from Aesop's Fables.
• Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452 – 1519).
• Biernat of Lublin (Polish, 1465? – after 1529).
• Jean de La Fontaine (French, 1621 – 95).
• John Gay (English) (1685 - 1732)
• Ignacy Krasicki (Polish, 1735 – 1801).
• Dositej Obradović (Serbian, 1742? – 1811).
• Félix María de Samaniego (Spanish, 1745 – 1801), best known for "The Ant and the Cicade."
• Tomás de Iriarte (Spanish, 1750 – 91).
• Ivan Krylov (Russian, 1769 – 1844).

• Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910).
• Nico Maniquis (1834 - 1912).
• Ambrose Bierce (1842 - ?1914).
• Sholem Aleichem (1859 - 1916).
• George Ade (1866 - 1944), Fables in Slang, etc.
• Don Marquis (1878 - 1937), author of the fables of archy and mehitabel.
• Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924).
• Damon Runyon (1884 - 1946).
• James Thurber (1894 - 1961), Fables For Our Time.
• George Orwell (1903 - 50).
• Dr. Seuss (1904 - 1991)
• Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904 - 1991).
• José Saramago (born 1922).
• Arnold Lobel (1933 - 87), author of Fables, winner 1981 Caldecott Medal.
• Ramsay Wood (born 1943), author of Kalila and Dimna: Fables of Friendship and Betrayal.
• Bill Willingham (born 1956), author of Fables graphic novels.

• The Jataka Tales
  • The Sky Is Falling
• Aesop's Fables by Aesop
  • The Boy Who Cried Wolf
• Panchatantra (Fables of Bidpai) by Vishnu Sarma
• Baital Pachisi (Vikram and The Vampire)
• Hitopadesha
• Seven Wise Masters by Syntipas
• Fables and Parables by Ignacy Krasicki
• The Emperor's New Clothes
• Stone Soup
• The Little Engine that Could
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull
• Watership Down
• The Lion King
• The Fox and the Cock by James Thurber
• Animal Farm by George Orwell

• Allegory
• Anthropomorphism
• Apologue
• Apologia
• Fairy tale
• Fantastique
• Ghost story
• Parable
• Proverb

• Buckham, Philip Wentworth [1827]. Theatre of the Greeks. 
• King James Bible; New Testament (authorised).

• Animal Symbolism List of frequently described animals and their characteristics
• The Dragon-Tyrant
• Fables - Collection and guide to fables for children
• Imaginexus A collection of interconnected stories that anyone can edit
• Beast Fable Society An academic society focused on fables and related genres