Aesop’s Fables

Aesop is a slave and story-teller who was believed to live in ancient Greece around 620 to 560 BC. He collected many tales from diverse origins, and from generations to generations, Aesop’s tales had been retold and reinterpreted in many media. The first printed version of Aesop's Fables in English was published on March 26, 1484, by William Caxton [source: wiki]. Fables were advocated by John Locke to be targeted to children only on 1693, while previously they were targeted to adult only.

When I first opened the book (I read Wordsworth Classics’ edition), I was amazed by the table of contents. I had no idea that there were so many fables! There were probably more than 200 titles. The fables are usually very short; one page could contain two to three fables, with illustrations every few or more pages. And browsing all the titles (and they are stretched to eleven pages alone!), I can see that the ‘characters’ are quite varied; but the lion, fox, and wolf appear most often.

Plunging into the fables, I quickly realized that most of them have similar themes, and after around 40% I have got bored already. It felt like reading a same thing over and over again, with only the characters or the circumstances were changed. And so, I must pick another book as a change to be read along Aesop’s Fables. In the end I felt more exhausted than entertained by the fables, but realizing that I am reading some works which have been inherited for generations, I could appreciate it more.

There are few gems, anyway, from the 200+ tales, which I found inspiring and encouraging. Especially because some of the stories are equipped with the moral value as quotes. Some of my favorites are:

The Slave & the Lion – A slave run away from his master and finds a cave where a wounded lion stays. The slave takes care and saves the lion’s life, and they become best friends. Later on the master finds what the slave has done; and he is to be thrown to beasts as punishment. You could guess, I think, which beast would find the slave, and how the tale ends. I am always touched by the friendship between men and animals, and that’s why this tale becomes one of my favorites.

The Apes & the Two Travelers – Two travelers, one is a liar, while the other is an honest person, are treated by the King of Apes. The King is proud of his noble monarch and asks the travelers their opinion. The liar praises the apes and gets reward. The honest one, who feels that his honesty would get him more rewards that the liar, tells the truth, that he thinks they are merely apes. Again, you must have guessed the outcome. There is a difference between telling truth for the sake of the truth, or out of greediness. Anyway, virtue only comes from goodwill.

The Eagle & His Captor – A man catches an eagle then clips his wings before he sells him. The buyer takes the eagle home and lets his wings grow. When he is recovered, the eagle catches a hare and presents it to his benefactor. Now a fox tells him that he should have presented the hare to his first captor rather than his benefactor, so the captor will be his friend, and won’t clip his wings again if he catches him the second time. This is something we never, or rarely, consider. Good advice, indeed. And this time comes from a fox! :)

Three and a half stars for Aesop’s Fables.

~~~~~~~~~

I read the Wordsworth Classics paperback edition

This book is counted as:

January theme of Baca Bareng #BBI: Fable

65^th book for The Classics Club Project

The Jungle Book

Rudyard Kipling amazed me once again with his fables. After Just So Stories last April, now he amused me with the even better one: The Jungle Book. The main story of it is of Mowgli, a little boy who is adopted by a pair of wolves after his parents died. When Mowgli first appears before the wolves’ cave, Shere Khan—the Bengal tiger—is haunting him to make him his dinner. Father Wolf saves him, and brings him to the wolf pack conference. He is at first rejected by the forum, until Bagheera—the black panther—guarantees him. Bagheera then becomes Mowgli’s best friend, along with Baloo—the bear—who teaches him the law of the jungle.

Shere Khan is angry of losing Mowgli; he wants to kill him but could not do that as long as Akela becomes the leader. Right after Akela is dethroned by his people, they repel Mowgli who is not a wolf like them—thanks to Shere Khan’s provocation too—and Mowgly doesn’t have any choices than leaving the jungle to live with his own kind. So now Mowgli must live by his own while Shere Khan keeps haunting him. At the end, Mowgli must have a fight with Shere Khan; what will he do? And will he survive it?

Thanks to the Disney version of Mowgli, I used to imagine The Jungle Book as childish as what we see on TV. But I was surprised and amazed at the same time, finding that the original story is much deeper than that. What Kipling portrayed in The Jungle Book is what we find in our own world. How difficult it is for us to accept others who are different from us, who have not the same origin or culture. We used to be suspicious of them, that we could not see a villain with wicked plan among us, because he is ‘one of us’; just like the wolves who blindly trust Shere Khan more than Mowgli.

The fight of Mowgli and Shere Khan is both thrilling and emotional. It is in difficult times that love and friendship would be purified. I was touched by Bagheera’s and Baloo’s love to their little friend, and their respect to old Akela. Kipling also highlighted how men praise freedom, but at the same time they could not live without a leader. The law of the jungle is something we should adopt in our society too; look how the entire animals work together to help Mowgli, although he is not their own kind. Humanity surmounts differences. The goods fight together against the bad, each contributes his talent.

Apart from Mowgli’s adventure, this book also contains three great fables. There is Kotick—the white seal—who persistently searches a new saver home for his people after he saw his friends being slaughtered by men. It portrays our society too; we often refuse to see the injustice among us, just because it ‘has been like that for a long time’. Most of us accept that as faith, and we surrender our dignity and life in the hand of more powerful authorities. When there is finally someone brave enough like Kotick, who is willingly to take risks for our salvation; instead of helping him, we laugh at him as a foolish dreamer. That makes us an easy victim of colonialism and oppression.

The second one is about a young mongoose called Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, who is carried away by flood—separated from his parents—to a bungalow, where he is finally adopted by a human family as a pet. From his new friends in the garden—a tailorbird and a mouse—he gets acquainted with a pair of huge cobra: Nag and Nagaina (they reminded me of Voldemort’s Nagini! :D). The cobras plan to kill the humans for taking the garden which they have been previously dominated. Rikki-Tikki is angry when he overhears their brutal plan, so he builds a strategy to fight both cobras. The attack scenes are quite horrible; I was shivered imagining how the family must have been terribly terrified while a huge cobra suddenly showed up while they were dining. You would not know whether you should run away or keep still; well…normally you wouldn’t escape that brutal attack, if you don’t have a protector. Rikki-Tikki is an example of real hero; even though he is a stranger, he fights bravely to save the family and the inhabitants of the garden, simply because it is wrong to kill the innocent who is weaker; and so it is his duty to protect them.

The third story is my most favorite: the story of Little Toomai, the son of an elephant hunter. His father drives Kala Nag—an old elephant, the cleverer and most senior among the others. One day the boss, Peterson Sahib, is amazed by Little Toomai, and professes that one day he might become a good elephant hunter. When Little Toomai asks his permission to enter the stockade (which is normally too dangerous for a little boy), he promises that he can do that only after witnessing an ‘elephant dance’, which in their culture means ‘never’. It is believed that numbers of elephants sometimes dance in a clearing. Nobody has ever seen it, but some flattened grounds are the proof.

One night Kala Nag seems to ‘hear the call’ from the native elephants. He slips out of his pickets, and picks Little Toomai on his back as the boy is excited to go with him. Kala Nag walks towards a clearing up in a hill where many other elephants are gathering too, while Little Toomai is watching silently from the elephant’s back. There he witnesses the elephants stamping their feet up and down, making the ground tremble; that is the elephant dance, a dance no other human being have ever seen.

I like the story mostly because of the mystical air surrounds the elephant dance. Kipling writes wonderfully Kala Nag’s journey in the dark and foggy night when the jungle seems to be alive, and especially when the elephants start moving, ‘talking’, and finally dancing for two hours, making the ground a dance floor. The sensation is really amazing!

And finally I closed the last page of The Jungle Book totally entertained and amused. Bravo to you, Mr. Kipling, for making my end of year reading so enjoyable, intense, and interesting. Without any doubt, I grant five whole stars for The Jungle Book. Really, I have never thought that I would love a children book (which I have never read as a child) this much!

~~~~~~~~~

*I read the translation edition from Atria (part of Serambi Publishing group)*

*This book is counted as:*

64^th book for The Classics Club Project