Mythology and Folklore MLLL 3046

There once were two friends, Ganem and Salem, who were on a long journey through fruitless mountains. They were perpetually hungry, and their supply of drinking water was almost gone. While crossing one of these large mountains, the two stumbled across an inscription written in a large boulder. The words were: Dear traveler, we have prepared a great feast in your honor. Come to us, and you shall never want for anything more. You must first complete a daring task to earn your reward. If you are brave enough, crawl through the barren valley amidst the beasts and witches, never halting. You will find on the other side a statue of a great lion. Carry our beloved statue on your shoulders to the top of the next mountain. You must never take a break or falter in your step. Once you deliver our lion to us, you will receive great rewards. Salem, the wiser of the two friends, kept walking in the direction they were already headed. Realizing that Ganem was not following, he turned to ...

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 p...

King Dabshalim visits Bidpai to learn the fables of Kalila on  Wikimedia For this week’s reading, I read The Fables of Bidpai . These are like the Indian version of Aesop’s fables. I was thinking this as I read, and some of the explanatory notes suggest that Aesop really did draw inspiration from these stories. Overall, these stories are longer than Aesop’s fables, and where Aesop usually explicitly states the moral at the end of his tales or has one of the characters speak it, Bidpai usually does not state his moral. Something that I like about these fables as compared to Aesop is that Bidpai uses a wider range of characters and situations. Many of his fables are about people, where we usually do not read about humans in Aesop’s. For me, this makes reading these tales more of an experience that I can relate to. A lot of these stories are about either reward or punishment. The Rustic and the Nightingale is a tale of a bird who has destroyed some of a man’s roses. The man...