Week 5 Reading Notes B: Bidpai's Fables

File:Tortoise and Birds (North).JPG
Tortoise and Birds on Wikipedia
Continuing on with this week’s reading of Bidpai fables, I really enjoyed seeing the similarities and differences between these fables and Aesop’s.
The Hare, the Fox, and the Wolf originally reminded me of The Wolf and the Lamb by Aesop. In the Bidpai version, a little Hare is minding his business when a Wolf comes up. In both of these tales, the prey try to convince the Wolf, their Highness, to not eat them. The morals of these stories end up being very different, though. In Aesop’s, the Lamb is a pure creature who is devoured by the Wolf, and the moral is that those in power do not need reason for their actions. In Bidpai’s, the Hare is a vengeful creature who tries to have her enemy, the Fox, eaten instead of her. This backfires, and the Wolf still eats her.
I also noticed that in Bidpai’s tales, the morals of the fables are sometimes ambiguous. As Aesop’s fables are great for young readers because it is easy to pick out their morals, I imagine that this could be a bit harder with some of the Bidpai stories. For example, in The Frog, the Crab, and the Serpent, a mother Frog keeps trying to lay eggs, but a Serpent continuously eats them. The Crab gives her advice on how to potentially kill the Serpent by getting a Weasel to eat it. While the Weasel does eat the snake as planned, it also then eats the mother Frog and her tadpoles. It is curious why the mother should get eaten when she is just trying to ensure that her tadpoles live. Is the moral to not be a vengeful person? In this context, I think an explicitly stated moral, such as Aesop’s, would be very useful.
Reading through these tales gives me inspiration for writing my own stories. There are many examples of how keeping the basic plot the same while changing some key events still makes for very similar tales. If I approach my own story writing as taking inspiration from one source and still giving my own voice to it, such as Aesop took from Bidpai, my readers should have an easy time following my writing and understanding their sources.

“Bidpai.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 8 Sept. 2017, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidpai.
You can access these fables here: link

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introductory Post

Image
Personal image, Carlie and me Personal image, Yat Fan and me        Hello! My name is Bridget Clayton and I am a French major and Music minor at the University of Oklahoma. I am currently taking my last semester completely online, as I have already finished my French courses and gone through Capstone. I’m just finishing up some upper-division credits.        I was originally a Music major because I love playing clarinet. Throughout high school, clarinet was the most important part of my life. However, I went through a lot of personal and familial issues during my first two years at OU, and I was struggling in some key music courses, like music theory. French had been my minor, but I realized that I was doing exceptionally well in my language classes, and as I did not want to teach music, I switched my major and minor. My last semester was a big success. I was taking four French courses, including Capstone, and was in one of the bands a...
Read more

Week 10 Story: What Summer Thought of Being Taken from the Sky

Image
Image on  Flickr Once upon a time when the Earth was new, there was only one season, Winter. The people of Earth, whether of the plains, the mountains, or the oceanside, lived in fear of the North Wind. As the Earth was still so young, there was still plenty of magic in it. The North Wind possessed some of this magic and was so powerful that he could shapeshift into the form of a human. The waters of the Earth were always icy, if not completely frozen over. The ground was caked with snow and thus mostly infertile. Earth’s people made thick clothes and large fires to battle the North Wind’s blows, and they questioned why they were subjected to such harsh conditions. Perhaps you know the tale of the great O-jeeg who brought down the Summer from the heavens so that Earth’s peoples could enjoy its warmth. Brought down also were Spring and Autumn. These four seasons have since shared the responsibility of watching over the Earth. The North Wind was most di...
Read more