Beast Fables Karl Steel Brooklyn College and Graduate Center, City University of New York ksteel@brooklyn.cuny.edu Word Count: 3261 Abstract: Medieval beast fables developed from late classical collections and, by the high middle ages, were part of the standard curriculum for training in literacy and interpretation. British adaptations of the tradition from Marie de France and Berechiah na-Nakdan in the twelfth century to William Caxton and Robert Henryson in the fifteenth used their animal characters to impart moral lessons, to condemn tyranny, to teach contentment with the so-called “natural order,” and to pay varying amounts of attention to the actual bodies of animals. Main Text Fables are short, didactic, fictional narratives, in prose or verse, which have at least one distinctly stated moral lesson, placed either before the tale (a promythium), after it (an epimythium), or sometimes within the narrative itself. While they can feature human characters speaking with beasts (the Sybaritic Fable), or, in the Libystic, conversations between “cities, trees, mountains, stones, or rivers” (Isidore Etymologies 1.40.2), the fable as it is typically understood is Aesopic, which mostly features animals talking with one another. Fables were among the most widespread medieval narrative genres, extant in many hundreds of manuscripts, often illustrated, in a wide variety of languages, and often represented in the visual arts. No other literary genre features characters who so often eat each other. In the fables, the powerful often maltreat the weak, the sly outwit the stupid, and struggles against one’s inherent nature lead to embarrassment or worse. The wolf, naturally ravenous, never progresses past A for “agnus” (sheep) in its reading lessons; the donkey, naturally meant for drudgery, is beaten when it tries to be petted like a lapdog; and the vole who wants to marry above his station – seeking the hand of the daughter of the sun, cloud, wind, or wall – ends by marrying just another vole. The most common animal characters represent not individuals but rather embody fixed traits: wolves are stupid, lions regal (or tyrannical), foxes sly, and all of these greedy, hungry, and often cruel; sheep, their frequent victims, are meek and, mostly, helpless. Other animals may show more variety: the deceptive frog, the sophisticated city mouse and the rustic but safety-loving country mouse, or irresponsible swallows, snared by a farmer when they refuse to plan for the future. Their human readers may be taught to know their place, to be clever enough to escape the cruel, or, if powerful, not to be like the wolf (“O thow grit lord that riches hes [has] and rent / Be nocht ane wolf thus to devoir the pure [poor]” (l. 2763), as the late fifteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson requested). The fixity of animal traits either contrasts with human free choice or tells humans themselves to know their place, and thus not to exercise free choice, for, as John Lydgate observes, both “man and beste” must live “aftyr theyr naturall disposicions” (l. 372). Like most literary genres, fables have a murky origin, although they presumably emerge from etiological myths centered on animals. Early examples, in chronological order from the eighth to the fifth centuries BCE, include Hesiod’s Works and Days, whose brief story of a hungry hawk and helpless nightingale illustrates the cruelty of a world unguided by human law; 2 Samuel 12:1-12, where Nathan rebukes King David with a tale of a poor man’s beloved ewe