Mythology and Folklore MLLL 3046

La Cigale et la Fourmi on  Flickr Fourmi was a hard worker, and never took a break from preparing for the future. His friends would often ask him to go out for a drink or to go to the movies, but he replied that he had to save money. He had a lot of expenses for being so young, and he took his job very seriously. Some of his friends thought of him as the “party pooper”, but they knew that he was the most sensible one out of their group. He was more studious than any of them combined. When his friends went to parties on the weekends, Fourmi was preparing for the next exam. This way, he always made excellent grades while his friends were just managing C averages. The only one of the friend group who was either not in school or working a full-time job was Cigale. He was a guitar player, and even though he had a part-time job, his goal was to become a professional musician. No matter the amount of skill he had, Cigale could never manage to secure more than two ...

The Ant and the Grasshopper on  Wikimedia The second part of Aesop’s Fables compiled by Jacobs deals with lesser-known fables and/or characters who are used less frequently. These include Insects, People, and Birds. Because I have not read about these characters as much as I have Lions, Wolves, and Foxes, I was excited to read these fables. Just like the tales for Reading A, some of Jacobs’ tales are followed by Crane’s renditions. Crane turned these popular fables into short poems of about five verses each. It is generally easier to understand the context and dialogue of Jacobs’ fables, but I found that occasionally it was clearer to read the morals explicitly expressed at the end of Crane’s. Also, Crane sometimes changes the characters used in the fables, or alters the plot of the fable, but keeps the moral about the same. It is also interesting to read how two similar stories can be interpreted by two different readers/authors, because there are some instances in ...

The Fox and the Crane on  Wikimedia For this week, I decided to read more of Aesop’s fables. There are so many of them, and each one comes with a valuable lesson or a critique of society. There are fables compiled by both Jacobs and Crane, and they are interesting to read back to back. They keep the same plot overall, but where Jacobs’ fables are usually a few paragraphs long and have a good amount of context and dialogue, Crane’s version of the tales are short poems. In Crane’s edition, he often places two of these short poems side by side on the same page of his book if they have similar morals, and there are illustrations to go along. It was informative to see how two authors could take the same basic plot and moral of a story, yet write on them completely differently. Also, occasionally I found that Crane’s morals, which he always states explicitly at the end of his poems, are sometimes clearer. We all read some of the Lion fables earlier in this course. The Lion and...