Alejandro Joseph Serrano
There are definitely some instances of when the moral of the story in Aesop’s fables, some of which had just been shoehorned in to give the story some semblance of meaning. In one infamous fable that makes no sense, as well as the moral provided by the translator, is the fable “The Camel Who Shat in the River,” which has such a confusing message in both the original text and the included moral, that it had taken a good portion of the class to find several different layers with no real conclusion; instead, it was decided that it should be left up to interpretation. However, the fable I will discuss today will not deal with the shitting camel, but rather the fierce Lion and the little Frog, affectionately called, “The Lion and The Frog.”
In the story of The Lion and The Frog, the Lion hears a frog croak, and he believes it comes from a large creature. He waits so he can see the loud beast, but when he sees that it is but a small frog, he crushes it under his paw and exclaims, “So much noise from one so small!” The moral underneath then goes on to state that, “This fable applies to people who are all noise and have no substance to them.” Now, I feel as if there are several confusing articles to this fable. First of all, it doesn’t seem like the Lion’s style to just kill another animal without the intention of eating it. As is seen in other fables, he would either kill other animals so that he may consume them or he would converse with them in a regal fashion. In the fables assigned, he has not killed a single animal without reason, except in this one.
Second, the moral feels as if it were a tad confusing. When the moral says it, “applies to people who are all noise and have no substance to them,” it makes it sound as if the main character of the story is the frog. However, it makes very little sense since he is only presented to the Lion for such a short time before meeting an untimely end. With such a grim demise for one croak, despite how loud it was to the lion, it has very little bearing on the story. If the Frog had more dialogue or even had more to do in the story, then maybe the fable would at least make the moral have some sense in the end.
In the end, although the moral of the fable did not feel as if it were a strong enough moral, it now feels also feels mildly ironic that the story is all noise with a moral to match, and yet neither has the substance to support each other.
Environmental Justice in Beast Fables 