Aesop's Fables: A Version for Young Readers

Æsop's Fables: A Version for Young Readers

MODERN versions of sop go back no further than 480 A.D. In their earliest use they are related to the folklore current among all primitive peoples. This folklore had risen in Greece to the rank of literary form a thousand years before the above-mentioned revival in Germany, France, and England. As the creation of sop it was the answer to a need for trenchant, but veiled, characterization of men and measures in the dangerous times of the Tyrants. In mirth-provoking utterances, quite apart from personal criticism, things could be intimated with all the force of specific judgments, yet in such veiled form that to resent them was tacit confession that they applied. Later on, when free speech became safer, the grammarians and rhetoricians raised these clever, pithy stories to the literary form they have since maintained. [xiv] There is for sops Fables no authorized original version. Always, it appears, they were subject to interpolations and special versions. They took on metrical forms in Latin, and in later times in French. It is the particular distinction of a real fable that it bears this amplification, yet can at any time and from any true version shake off the accessories of particular phrasing and in its bare facts meet all the requirements of a literary and artistic whole. It is this static character which has made the fable of such value to language students. Even little children, comparing different versions, learn to distinguish the raw material of a real story from its varying renderings. Subjoined is an account of sop, called the Inventor and Father of Fable in its present form. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 49010
Author: Aesop, 620? BCE-564? BCE
Release Date: May 21, 2015
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Contributor (Author): Stickney, J. H. (Jenny H.), 1840-

Illustrator: Bull, Charles Livingston, 1874-1932