What The Oldest Stories Have To Teach
A potted history of Aesop’s Fables, and what they have to teach.
Comments (4)
I hunted down the Penguin complete works paperback as a result of watching your video, and I've been reading it in bits. There are many fables that are quite peculiar. We know the best ones, but there are even more which are almost nonsensical. Until I have a chance to hunt down scholarship on some of the weird stories, I'll have to assume I'm missing some bit of cultural context that is the reason that these apparent outlier-fables would be preserved for thousands of years.
Yeah what I learned in my research is that many of them need context. Definitely some of them don't have a clear moral - at least not in the english translations that we're reading.
I loved Esopo's tales so much when I was a kid that I bought a La Fontain's book for my kids.
Nice! That gives me an idea to give them as a stocking stuffer to my little niece this Christmas