Aesop's Fables

A new translation by V. S. Vernon Jones.
With an introduction by G. K. Chesterton.
Pictures by Arthur Rackham.
Published in 1912.

Introduction

Long ago, people told short animal stories called fables. Each fable teaches a lesson, called a moral. Many fables are called "Aesop's Fables." But here is something funny: Aesop probably did not make up most of these stories! People all over the world made them up over a very long time. Aesop just became famous for collecting them.

This happens a lot in history. When a story is very old and everybody knows it, nobody remembers who told it first. It becomes anonymous — that means no name is attached to it. But people like to give credit to one person. That person becomes famous, even though the story really belongs to everyone.

Think about King Arthur. His story might come from real history, or from old Welsh legends. But we still call it "Arthur's story," because two writers named Mappe and Malory wrote it down first. It is the same with old fairy tales. We don't know exactly where they came from. But we still call the best collection of them "Grimm's Fairy Tales," because two brothers named Grimm wrote down the best versions.

Aesop was maybe a real person. He might have been a slave from a place called Phrygia. He probably lived about 2,600 years ago, around the time of a king named Croesus. Some old stories say Aesop was not very handsome, and that he had a sharp, clever tongue. Some say people got so angry with him that they threw him off a cliff at a place called Delphi! We don't know if that happened because he said mean things, or because he said true things people did not want to hear.

Aesop reminds us of another famous storyteller: Uncle Remus. Uncle Remus was a made-up character, but he was based on real slaves who told wonderful animal stories. Both Aesop and Uncle Remus show us something important: even slaves, who had very hard lives, could become loved and famous for the clever stories they told. And both of them told their best stories about animals.

But the tradition of fables did not start with Aesop, and it did not end with him either. Fables were told before he was born, and they kept being told after he died. This is a lot like Grimm's Fairy Tales. Two German students, named Grimm, collected fairy tales — but they did not invent them. It is the same with Aesop. He collected fables. He probably did not invent them.

Fables and fairy tales are different. Here is the biggest difference: a good fable never has real people in it. A good fairy tale always does.

In a fable, animals act like game pieces, like in chess. Each piece always moves the same way