Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. In this edition, I'm writing about the fable genre with help from scholars Patrick Olivelle, Christos A. Zafiropoulos, Harriet Spiegel, and others, helping you analyze a fable, and discussing ways to bring fables to your story craft.
Fables are a ubiquitous story form, found throughout the history of story transmission and in the folkloric traditions of people all over the world. Perhaps the oldest and most widespread of these are the Panchatantra and the collection of tales attributed to Aesop, who might or might not have been a real person. These two pillars of the fable genre will be the focus of my attention here, along with a brief foray into Harriet Spiegel's translation of Marie de France's Fables for contrast.
Folkloric Definition of the Fable
Zafiropoulos offers an excellent definition of the Greek fable in his work on the Collectio Augustana, which is the oldest complete collection of Greek fables we have (2001, 23). He writes that:
The Greek fable is a brief and simple fictitious story with a constant structure, generally with animal protagonists (but also humans, gods, and inanimate objects, e.g. trees), which gives an exemplary and popular message on practical ethics and which comments, usually in a cautionary way, on the course of action to be followed or avoided in a particular situation. (Zafiropoulos 2001, 1)
This gives us a great deal to work with, but it also needs unpacking.
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