Rumanian Bird and Beast Stories Rendered into English

by Unknown

Indian literature is full of such animal tales, approximating often to some of the Rumanian fables. The collections of Frere, Temple, Steele, Skeat, and Parker abound in such animal tales, in which the more nimble and quick-witted, though small and weak, animal regularly gets the best of the bigger and stronger, yet duller and slower rival. No moral lesson is squeezed out of the tales, and the animal is not a thinly-disguised human being. Yet there can be no greater fallacy than, guided by this similarity, to assume a direct Indian origin for the Rumanian fables.

None of these animal tales finish with the usual “moral,” known to us from Aesop onward. Nor do the people seem to be influenced by these artificial fables. In the literary European fable the animal is merely a disguised human being. The animals are performing acts which have nothing of the animal in them. The Indian and Oriental fable differs in this respect from the European, inasmuch as in a good number of them the animal character of the performing beasts is faithfully preserved. Exactly the same happens with the Rumanian animal fables. The cat does not play the rôle of the queen, and the fox is not a sly courtier. Cat is cat, and fox is fox. And yet they were not unaware of the fables of Aesop. I have found these fables in many old Rumanian manuscripts, and one of the first printed popular books of the country was the Collection of Aesop.

Unquestionably a good many proverbs are intimately connected with tales. The “moral” in Aesop has often dwindled down to a simple proverb, or has expanded out of it. These proverbs are, as it were, succinct conclusions drawn out by the people. Anton Pann (in the middle of the last century)—to whom the Rumanian popular literature will for ever remain indebted—therefore calls his Collection of Proverbs and Tales “Povestea vorbii,” i.e. “The tale which hangs by the Proverb.” One and all of the hundred tales found in the second and last edition of this book are mostly of a purely popular origin. The process throughout is not to invent a story for the moral, but the “moral,” such as it is, is to flow naturally from the story.

This is not the place to discuss the origin of the animal fable in general. But one cannot overlook the fact that all the Indian fables—with the exception of some embodied in the Panchatantra—are found in modern collections. All that we know of them is that they live actually in the mouth of the modern people. They may be old, they may be of more recent date.

Against these modern collections must be set now the story of Ahikar, which carries us back at least to the fifth century B.C., and is thus far the oldest record of animal tales. It has become one of the popular stories which circulated in a written form, and became the source of many a quaint proverb, as probably also of some animal tales.

The recent discovery among the Papyri of Elephantine in Southern Egypt of the Story of Ahikar has carried back the knowledge of allegorical beast fables to at least the fifth century B.C. For not only do we find in that story the prototype of the life of Aesop, but also a number of maxims and saws, and not a few beast tales, which are mentioned by Ahikar in order to teach his ungrateful nephew Nadan. We find there, e.g. the prototype of “pious” wolf, who appears in the Ahikar story as an innocent student, but who cannot take in the lesson given to him, his mind wandering to the sheep. There are other wolf, fox, rat and bird fables in the Rumanian and, still more so, in the Oriental and other versions. Ahikar himself relates the beast tales, allowing Nadan to draw the lesson. By the manner in which these tales are referred to, it is obvious that they must have been well known tales current among the people.

The real importance of this discovery lies in the fact that we have here a number of cleverly-used popular animal tales, more than two thousand years old, whose home was in all probability Syria or Egypt, embedded in a collection which has deeply influenced the apocryphal Book of Tobit, and to a certain degree even the writers of the New Testament, as shown by Professors Rendel Harris and Conybeare in the Introduction to their edition of the Story of Ahikar (second edition). The claim for an Indian origin of these fables will have to be abandoned, unless someone could show older writings from India, and the possible road by which these fables could have reached the Western shore of Asia Minor and been taken up by the peoples of Syria and Egypt at such an early date. It is not at all unlikely that some of the fables, just as they travelled westwards, also travelled eastwards and found a home in India as they found a home in Rumania and Russia. If one remembers now that the fabulous “Life” of Aesop ascribed to Planudes is almost identical with part of that of Ahikar, as I have shown, as far back as 1883 in my History of the Rumanian Popular Literature (Bucharest 1883, p. 104 ff.), it will not be difficult to account for the West-Asiatic origin of the fables themselves.

From a Rumanian MS. of the eighteenth century, I have since published the fuller narrative of that version in an English translation (the Journal of the Royal As. Soc., 1900, pp. 301–319). The two tales contained therein have also been reprinted here at the end of the collection, especially as they vary somewhat from the other ancient and mediæval recensions of the Story of Ahikar. This story has become one of the Rumanian popular chap-books in the shortened version of Anton Pann. The practical application of the fable, the “moralisation,” is a second stage, limited, as it seems, to the purely literary composition. The people put their own interpretations upon the fables and often dispensed with any such interpretations.

We are brought back again to the same centre, Syria and Byzance, for the dissemination of these fables. Such tales were then within the reach of the teaching of the various sects, such as Manichaeans, Bogomils, Cathars, etc., and travelled with them from East to West, where they met the other current of the Aesopian fables transmitted to the West through Latin and Arabic sources. According to this theory the religious sectarians made deft use also of animal tales, for the purpose of inculcating a moral, of drawing a lesson, of holding up the Church and State to the ridicule and contempt of the masses, and thus creating the animal satire, the best type of which is the cycle of Reynard the Fox. I am not oblivious of the fact that an allegorical use has been made of animal tales in the Arabic literature, such as the “Judgment of the Animals,” under the title of Hai ben Yokdhan, written in Arabic by Ibn Tophail, translated into English by Simon Ockley in 1711, in which the lion holds a court, and animal after animal appears to accuse man; or the collection of Sahula (thirteenth cent.) in his ancient apologue Mashal ha-kadmoni. But there is no real connection between this cycle and that of Reynard the Fox.

Any reference to the epic of Reynard the Fox must be incidental. It can only be alluded to here, and not followed up in detail. A real Western origin for these tales, taking them separately or as “branches,” as they appear in the old French versions, has not been found, nor any explanation for their sudden appearance in the eleventh or twelfth century.