Fable, narrative form, usually featuring animals that behave and speak as human beings, told in order to highlight human follies and weaknesses. A moral—or lesson for behaviour—is woven into the story and often explicitly formulated at the end.
The Western tradition of fable effectively begins with Aesop, a likely legendary figure to whom is attributed a collection of ancient Greek fables. Modern editions contain up to 200 fables, but there is no way of tracing their actual origins; the earliest known collection linked to Aesop dates to the 4th century BCE.
Fable flourished in the Middle Ages, as did all forms of allegory, and a notable collection of fables was made in the late 12th century by Marie de France. The medieval fable gave rise to an expanded form known as the beast epic, popular genre in various literatures, consisting of a lengthy cycle of animal tales that provides a satiric commentary on human society. Although individual episodes may be drawn from fables, the beast epic differs from the fable not only in length but also in putting less emphasis on a moral.
Two English poets reworked elements of the beast epic into long poems: in Edmund Spenser’s Prosopopoia; or, Mother Hubberd’s Tale (1591) a fox and an ape discover that life is no better at court than in the provinces, and in The Hind and the Panther (1687) John Dryden revived the beast epic as an allegorical framework for serious theological debate.
The fable has traditionally been of modest length, however, and the form reached its zenith in 17th-century France in the work of Jean de La Fontaine, whose theme was the folly of human vanity. His influence was felt throughout Europe, and in the Romantic period his outstanding successor was the Russian Ivan Andreyevich Krylov.
The fable found a new audience during the 19th century with the rise of children’s literature. Among the celebrated authors who employed the form were Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, Rudyard Kipling, Hilaire Belloc, Joel Chandler Harris, and Beatrix Potter. Though not writing primarily for children, Oscar Wilde, J.R.R. Tolkien, and James Thurber also used the form. Joel Chandler Harris in his Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880) derived many episodes from beast tales carried to the United States by African slaves. A sobering modern use of fable is to be found in George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), a scathing allegorical portrait of Stalinist Russia.
G.E. Bentley