Fables – A short introduction

A story that features animals that behave and speak like human beings, to show human faults and foolishness is called a fable. It always gives moral lessons throughout the story by having good and bad characters and a strong plot making readers find the good or the moral.

It is a literary genre that dates back to the middle ages. The master of the fable is Aesop who was a Greek slave said to have written 655 fables or more during his lifetime. He wrote his fables around in the late mid 6th, 620–564 BCE. Fables were passed down from grandparents to grandchildren through storytelling.
In a fable elements are as follows; it is fiction that is imaginary. They are not long stories, but short. Personification is used, in other words, anthropomorphic qualities or characteristics are given. The setting is usually outside. The main idea of the fables is mostly friendship, kindness, patience, courage, honesty, being a good listener, and so on. And the most important element of it is giving moral lessons as we mentioned above.
Here are some titles of Aesop’s fables;

• The Lion and The Mouse
• The boy who cried, Shephard
• The Fox and The Crow
• The Wolf and the Crane
• The Gnat and the Bull
• The Plane Tree
• The Owl and the Grasshopper
• The Two Goats
• The Frog and the Mouse
• The Hare and the Tortoise
• The Fox and the Crow

In these fables, readers always get a lesson at the end of the story like in ” The lion and the mouse”. In that fable, the reader gets the idea of being kind might help him one day. Or in the story, “The Hare and the Tortoise, the reader learns that studying or working slowly but continuously makes sense rather than postponing and completing the task at the last moment which fails.

In conclusion, the most distinctive feature of fables, which distinguishes them from other genres, is that they convey human characteristics to animals and give lessons.