The Lion and the Mouse
Encyclopedia
The lion and the mouse is one of Aesop's Fables
, numbered 146 in the Perry Index
. In the Renaissance
the fable was provided with a sequel condemning social ambition.
threatens a mouse
that wakes him up. The mouse begs forgiveness and makes the point that such unworthy prey would bring the lion no honour. The lion then agrees and sets the mouse free. Later, the lion is netted by hunters; hearing it roaring, the mouse remembers its clemency and frees it by gnawing through the ropes. The moral of the story is that mercy brings its reward and that there is no being so small that it cannot help a greater. Later English versions reinforce this by having the mouse promise to return the lion's favor, to its sceptical amusement.
The Scottish poet, Robert Henryson
, in a version he included in his Morall Fabillis in the 1480s, expands the plea that the mouse makes and introduces serious themes of law
, justice
and politics
. The poem consists of 43 seven-lined stanzas of which the first twelve recount a meeting with Aesop in a dream and six stanzas at the end draw the moral; the expanded fable itself occupies stanzas 13-36. A political lesson of a different kind occurs in Francis Barlow's 1687 edition of the fables. There the poet Aphra Behn
comments that no form of service is to be despised, for just as the humble mouse had aided the king of the beasts, so 'An Oak did once a glorious Monarch save' by serving as a hiding place when King Charles II was escaping after the battle of Worcester
.
The 16th century French poet Clément Marot
also recounts an expanded version of the fable in the course of his Épitre à son ami Lyon Jamet (Letter to his friend Lyon), first published in 1534. This is an imitation of the Latin poet Horace
's Epistles, addressed to friends and often applying Aesopian themes to their situations. In this case, Marot has been imprisoned and begs Jamet to help him get released, playing on his friend's forename and styling himself the lowly rat (rather than mouse). Jean de la Fontaine
included a more succinct version of the story in his Fables (II.11, 1668) in the following century.
so as to highlight the barely visible mouse. In 1973 the painting was restored and the overpainting removed; it now hangs in the Great Parlour of the Palace of Westminster
.
In the 19th century the political cartoonist John Doyle
adapted the fable to one of his monthly series of prints in February 1844. In it the mouse nibbling at the net is Earl Russell
, who prevailed on the House of Lords to free the leonine Daniel O'Connell
from the imprisonment he had incurred for trying to repeal the Irish Act Of Union. The fable was also the subject of a painting by the French artist Vincent Chevilliard (1841–1904) and exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1881. The Austrian artist Gustav Klimt
incorporated a reference to the beginning of the story on the left hand side of his painting "The Fable" in 1883. There a lion sleeps beneath a shrub, on the leafless twigs of which mice are at play.
Illustrations of the fable also appeared on domestic objects, including a Chelsea plate in 1755 and a tile in the Minton Aesop's Fables series during the 1880s.
Sculptors turned to the fable in the 20th century. One of them was the maker of church furniture, Robert (Mouseman) Thompson, who came by his name for incorporating a mouse into most of his carvings. He did this legitimately in the Church of Our Lady and St Michael in Workington
, Cumbria, where the underside of one of the seats in the choir stalls, installed in 1926, depicts the fable of the lion and the mouse.
A Marshall Fredericks
statue of 1957 seeks to make the lion less threatening to children. The sculpture was commissioned for the Eastland Center in Harper Woods, Michigan. The lion is carved from limestone and has a large round head with stylized, uniformly coiled ringlets. Reclining on its back, it grins at the little mouse perched on its paw. This was cast from gilt bronze and gold plated, which led to its being stolen numerous times. One was returned 50 years after its theft and exhibited at the Detroit Historical Museum
in 2007. A copy of the whole statue is on exhibition in the sculpture garden of the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum
.
Another American sculptor, Tom Otterness
, has made the fable the subject of an equally child-friendly sculpture among the 23 he installed on the outdoor terrace of the seaside Beelden aan Zee
museum in Scheveningen, The Netherlands, in 2004. In this the lion is lying trussed up on its side, contemplated by the mouse that stands upright with its hands clasped behind its back.
by Aesop's Film Fables
in 1922; there was also a two minute cartoon incorporating the fable and ending with an advertisement for Coca Cola as a promoter of friendship that was issued in 1953. In 1966 the National Film Board of Canada
(NFB) adapted the story as The Bear and the Mouse; it was issued as a short feature film using real animals with voice-over
. This film was followed 10 years later by an NFB animated short The Lion and the Mouse, directed by Evelyn Lambart
.
The story is a favourite subject of children's literature
. Jerry Pinkney
's The Lion & the Mouse
(2009) tells it through pictures alone, without the usual text of such books, and won the 2010 Caldecott Medal
for its illustrations. The story is updated and adapted to fit the conditions of the Serengeti National Park
, in which it is set.
provided a sequel to the story with an opposite social message in his Hecatomythium (1499). In this the lion promises the mouse any reward it cares to name after setting him free. The mouse asks for the lion's daughter in marriage, but the bride steps on her husband by accident on the marriage night. Where Aesop's fable teaches that no-one should be despised, however low in the social scale, this reinterpretation suggests that one should not try to rise out of one's class through marriage. A later verse treatment by Hieronymus Osius is followed by the same moral. In England, both the Francis Barlow
(1687) and Roger L'Estrange
(1692) collections include both versions of the fable, as does Samuel Croxall
(1721). He, however, reads into the story a lesson on lack of judgment.
The story that Abstemius could have had in mind when inventing his fable of an unequal marriage ridiculously terminated occurs in the Hebrew Bible
. Amaziah, king of the lesser power of Judah, sent a challenge to Jehoash, king of Israel, who replied with a dismissive fable: 'A thistle in Lebanon sent to a cedar in Lebanon, saying, Give your daughter to my son for a wife, and a wild beast of Lebanon passed by and trampled down the thistle'. (2 Kings 14.9; repeated in 2 Chronicles 25.18, English Standard Version) The characters are different there, but the core of the story about the end of presumptuous ambition remains the same.
. A lion previously unacquainted with man comes across examples of his cruelty and exploitation of other animals and decides to hunt him down. On his way the lion spares a mouse that comes beneath his paw and it promises to return the favour. This the mouse does by gnawing the lion free when he is netted in a trap set by man. In general the evidence points to the tale being adapted from a Greek source. There was a long established Greek trading colony in Egypt and the document appeared during the reign of the Ptolemaic dynasty
, which was of Greek origin itself.
There is also an Indian variant of the story in the Panchatantra
, but that is told of mice and elephants. Here too it is introduced into a larger context, in this case a discussion about appropriate friendship, and illustrates the advice 'Make friends, however strong or weak they be'. An elephant herd inadvertently tramples a tribe of mice, who send representatives to beg the elephant king to avoid their settlement in future. Later the herd is trapped and the grateful mice come to their rescue and free them. When the story was carried to China by Buddhist monks, the benefitted animal reverted to a tiger, another member of the cat family.
Aesop's Fables
Aesop's Fables or the Aesopica are a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE. The fables remain a popular choice for moral education of children today...
, numbered 146 in the Perry Index
Perry Index
The Perry Index is a widely-used index of "Aesop's Fables" or "Aesopica", the fables credited to Aesop, the story-teller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BC...
. In the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
the fable was provided with a sequel condemning social ambition.
The fable in literature
In the oldest versions, a lionLion
The lion is one of the four big cats in the genus Panthera, and a member of the family Felidae. With some males exceeding 250 kg in weight, it is the second-largest living cat after the tiger...
threatens a mouse
Mouse
A mouse is a small mammal belonging to the order of rodents. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse . It is also a popular pet. In some places, certain kinds of field mice are also common. This rodent is eaten by large birds such as hawks and eagles...
that wakes him up. The mouse begs forgiveness and makes the point that such unworthy prey would bring the lion no honour. The lion then agrees and sets the mouse free. Later, the lion is netted by hunters; hearing it roaring, the mouse remembers its clemency and frees it by gnawing through the ropes. The moral of the story is that mercy brings its reward and that there is no being so small that it cannot help a greater. Later English versions reinforce this by having the mouse promise to return the lion's favor, to its sceptical amusement.
The Scottish poet, Robert Henryson
Robert Henryson
Robert Henryson was a poet who flourished in Scotland in the period c. 1460–1500. Counted among the Scots makars, he lived in the royal burgh of Dunfermline and is a distinctive voice in the Northern Renaissance at a time when the culture was on a cusp between medieval and renaissance sensibilities...
, in a version he included in his Morall Fabillis in the 1480s, expands the plea that the mouse makes and introduces serious themes of law
Law
Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...
, justice
Justice
Justice is a concept of moral rightness based on ethics, rationality, law, natural law, religion, or equity, along with the punishment of the breach of said ethics; justice is the act of being just and/or fair.-Concept of justice:...
and politics
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
. The poem consists of 43 seven-lined stanzas of which the first twelve recount a meeting with Aesop in a dream and six stanzas at the end draw the moral; the expanded fable itself occupies stanzas 13-36. A political lesson of a different kind occurs in Francis Barlow's 1687 edition of the fables. There the poet Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn was a prolific dramatist of the English Restoration and was one of the first English professional female writers. Her writing contributed to the amatory fiction genre of British literature.-Early life:...
comments that no form of service is to be despised, for just as the humble mouse had aided the king of the beasts, so 'An Oak did once a glorious Monarch save' by serving as a hiding place when King Charles II was escaping after the battle of Worcester
Royal Oak
The Royal Oak is the English oak tree within which King Charles II of England hid to escape the Roundheads following the Battle of Worcester in 1651. The tree was located in Boscobel Wood, which was part of the park of Boscobel House. Charles confirmed to Samuel Pepys in 1680 that while he was...
.
The 16th century French poet Clément Marot
Clément Marot
Clément Marot was a French poet of the Renaissance period.-Youth:Marot was born at Cahors, the capital of the province of Quercy, some time during the winter of 1496-1497. His father, Jean Marot , whose more correct name appears to have been des Mares, Marais or Marets, was a Norman from the Caen...
also recounts an expanded version of the fable in the course of his Épitre à son ami Lyon Jamet (Letter to his friend Lyon), first published in 1534. This is an imitation of the Latin poet Horace
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...
's Epistles, addressed to friends and often applying Aesopian themes to their situations. In this case, Marot has been imprisoned and begs Jamet to help him get released, playing on his friend's forename and styling himself the lowly rat (rather than mouse). Jean de la Fontaine
Jean de La Fontaine
Jean de La Fontaine was the most famous French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, and in French regional...
included a more succinct version of the story in his Fables (II.11, 1668) in the following century.
Artistic interpretations
The fable has been a favourite with artists and sculptors. The Flemish painter Frans Snyders was responsible for at least two versions. One of these used to hang in the Great Hall at Westminster and was retouched by Winston ChurchillWinston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
so as to highlight the barely visible mouse. In 1973 the painting was restored and the overpainting removed; it now hangs in the Great Parlour of the Palace of Westminster
Palace of Westminster
The Palace of Westminster, also known as the Houses of Parliament or Westminster Palace, is the meeting place of the two houses of the Parliament of the United Kingdom—the House of Lords and the House of Commons...
.
In the 19th century the political cartoonist John Doyle
John Doyle (artist)
John Doyle , known by the pen name H. B., was a political cartoonist, caricaturist, painter and lithographer....
adapted the fable to one of his monthly series of prints in February 1844. In it the mouse nibbling at the net is Earl Russell
John Russell, 1st Earl Russell
John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, KG, GCMG, PC , known as Lord John Russell before 1861, was an English Whig and Liberal politician who served twice as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the mid-19th century....
, who prevailed on the House of Lords to free the leonine Daniel O'Connell
Daniel O'Connell
Daniel O'Connell Daniel O'Connell Daniel O'Connell (6 August 1775 – 15 May 1847; often referred to as The Liberator, or The Emancipator, was an Irish political leader in the first half of the 19th century...
from the imprisonment he had incurred for trying to repeal the Irish Act Of Union. The fable was also the subject of a painting by the French artist Vincent Chevilliard (1841–1904) and exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1881. The Austrian artist Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt was an Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. His major works include paintings, murals, sketches, and other art objects...
incorporated a reference to the beginning of the story on the left hand side of his painting "The Fable" in 1883. There a lion sleeps beneath a shrub, on the leafless twigs of which mice are at play.
Illustrations of the fable also appeared on domestic objects, including a Chelsea plate in 1755 and a tile in the Minton Aesop's Fables series during the 1880s.
Sculptors turned to the fable in the 20th century. One of them was the maker of church furniture, Robert (Mouseman) Thompson, who came by his name for incorporating a mouse into most of his carvings. He did this legitimately in the Church of Our Lady and St Michael in Workington
Workington
Workington is a town, civil parish and port on the west coast of Cumbria, England, at the mouth of the River Derwent. Lying within the Borough of Allerdale, Workington is southwest of Carlisle, west of Cockermouth, and southwest of Maryport...
, Cumbria, where the underside of one of the seats in the choir stalls, installed in 1926, depicts the fable of the lion and the mouse.
A Marshall Fredericks
Marshall Fredericks
Marshall Maynard Fredericks was an American sculptor.-Biography:Fredericks was born of Scandinavian heritage in Rock Island, Illinois on January 31, 1908. His family moved to Florida for a short time and then settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where he grew up...
statue of 1957 seeks to make the lion less threatening to children. The sculpture was commissioned for the Eastland Center in Harper Woods, Michigan. The lion is carved from limestone and has a large round head with stylized, uniformly coiled ringlets. Reclining on its back, it grins at the little mouse perched on its paw. This was cast from gilt bronze and gold plated, which led to its being stolen numerous times. One was returned 50 years after its theft and exhibited at the Detroit Historical Museum
Detroit Historical Museum
The Detroit Historical Museum is located at 5401 Woodward Avenue in the city's Cultural Center Historic District in Midtown Detroit. It chronicles the history of the Detroit area from cobblestone streets, 19th century stores, the auto assembly line, toy trains, fur trading from the 18th century,...
in 2007. A copy of the whole statue is on exhibition in the sculpture garden of the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum
Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum
The Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum is an art museum that focuses on the life and works of sculptor Marshall Fredericks. The museum is affiliated with Saginaw Valley State University, and is located in university's Arbury Fine Arts Center in University Center, Michigan. Admission is...
.
Another American sculptor, Tom Otterness
Tom Otterness
Tom Otterness is an American sculptor whose works adorn parks, plazas, subway stations, libraries, courthouses and museums in New York---most notably in Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City and in the 14th Street/8th Avenue subway station---and other cities around the world...
, has made the fable the subject of an equally child-friendly sculpture among the 23 he installed on the outdoor terrace of the seaside Beelden aan Zee
Beelden aan Zee
Beelden aan Zee museum in the Scheveningen district of The Hague, founded in 1994 by the sculpture collectors Theo and Lida Scholten, is the only Dutch museum which specializes in exhibiting sculpture....
museum in Scheveningen, The Netherlands, in 2004. In this the lion is lying trussed up on its side, contemplated by the mouse that stands upright with its hands clasped behind its back.
Popular applications
The fable was made into an animated cartoonAnimated cartoon
An animated cartoon is a short, hand-drawn film for the cinema, television or computer screen, featuring some kind of story or plot...
by Aesop's Film Fables
Aesop's Film Fables
Aesop's Film Fables was a series of animated short subjects, created by American cartoonist Paul Terry. Terry came upon the inspiration for the series by young actor-turned-writer Howard Estabrook, who suggested making a series of cartoons based on Aesop's Fables. Although Terry later claimed he...
in 1922; there was also a two minute cartoon incorporating the fable and ending with an advertisement for Coca Cola as a promoter of friendship that was issued in 1953. In 1966 the National Film Board of Canada
National Film Board of Canada
The National Film Board of Canada is Canada's twelve-time Academy Award-winning public film producer and distributor. An agency of the Government of Canada, the NFB produces and distributes documentary, animation, alternative drama and digital media productions...
(NFB) adapted the story as The Bear and the Mouse; it was issued as a short feature film using real animals with voice-over
Voice-over
Voice-over is a production technique where a voice which is not part of the narrative is used in a radio, television production, filmmaking, theatre, or other presentations...
. This film was followed 10 years later by an NFB animated short The Lion and the Mouse, directed by Evelyn Lambart
Evelyn Lambart
Evelyn Lambart was a Canadian animator and technical director with the National Film Board of Canada, known for her early collaborations with Norman McLaren as well as her later films, as sole director....
.
The story is a favourite subject of children's literature
Children's literature
Children's literature is for readers and listeners up to about age twelve; it is often defined in four different ways: books written by children, books written for children, books chosen by children, or books chosen for children. It is often illustrated. The term is used in senses which sometimes...
. Jerry Pinkney
Jerry Pinkney
Jerry Pinkney is an American illustrator of children’s books, and winner of the 2010 Caldecott Medal. He has received a Caldecott Honor citation five times, the Coretta Scott King Award five times, four New York Times Best Illustrated Awards , four Gold and four Silver medals from the Society of...
's The Lion & the Mouse
The Lion & the Mouse
The Lion & the Mouse is a children's picture book written and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. Published in 2009, the book retells Aesop's fable of The Lion and the Mouse...
(2009) tells it through pictures alone, without the usual text of such books, and won the 2010 Caldecott Medal
Caldecott Medal
The Caldecott Medal is awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children , a division of the American Library Association, to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children published that year. The award was named in honor of nineteenth-century English...
for its illustrations. The story is updated and adapted to fit the conditions of the Serengeti National Park
Serengeti National Park
The Serengeti National Park is a large national park in Serengeti area, Tanzania. It is most famous for its annual migration of over one and a half million white bearded wildebeest and 250,000 zebra...
, in which it is set.
The anti-fable
The Neo-Latin fabulist Laurentius AbstemiusLaurentius Abstemius
Laurentius Abstemius was an Italian writer, professor of Belles Lettres at Urbino, and librarian to Duke Guido Ubaldo under Pope Alexander VI. Born at Macerata in Ancona, he distinguished himself, at the time of the revival of letters, as a writer of considerable talents...
provided a sequel to the story with an opposite social message in his Hecatomythium (1499). In this the lion promises the mouse any reward it cares to name after setting him free. The mouse asks for the lion's daughter in marriage, but the bride steps on her husband by accident on the marriage night. Where Aesop's fable teaches that no-one should be despised, however low in the social scale, this reinterpretation suggests that one should not try to rise out of one's class through marriage. A later verse treatment by Hieronymus Osius is followed by the same moral. In England, both the Francis Barlow
Francis Barlow
Francis Barlow may refer to:*Francis Barlow , British painter, etcher, and illustrator*Francis C. Barlow , US lawyer, politician, and general-See also:*Frank Barlow...
(1687) and Roger L'Estrange
Roger L'Estrange
Sir Roger L'Estrange was an English pamphleteer and author, and staunch defender of royalist claims. L'Estrange was involved in political controversy throughout his life...
(1692) collections include both versions of the fable, as does Samuel Croxall
Samuel Croxall
Samuel Croxall was an Anglican churchman, writer and translator, particularly noted for his edition of Aesop's Fables.-Early career:...
(1721). He, however, reads into the story a lesson on lack of judgment.
The story that Abstemius could have had in mind when inventing his fable of an unequal marriage ridiculously terminated occurs in the Hebrew Bible
Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible is a term used by biblical scholars outside of Judaism to refer to the Tanakh , a canonical collection of Jewish texts, and the common textual antecedent of the several canonical editions of the Christian Old Testament...
. Amaziah, king of the lesser power of Judah, sent a challenge to Jehoash, king of Israel, who replied with a dismissive fable: 'A thistle in Lebanon sent to a cedar in Lebanon, saying, Give your daughter to my son for a wife, and a wild beast of Lebanon passed by and trampled down the thistle'. (2 Kings 14.9; repeated in 2 Chronicles 25.18, English Standard Version) The characters are different there, but the core of the story about the end of presumptuous ambition remains the same.
Eastern versions
The fable is introduced as an illustration into a longer Egyptian myth in a papyrus of indeterminate date towards the start of the Common EraCommon Era
Common Era ,abbreviated as CE, is an alternative designation for the calendar era originally introduced by Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century, traditionally identified with Anno Domini .Dates before the year 1 CE are indicated by the usage of BCE, short for Before the Common Era Common Era...
. A lion previously unacquainted with man comes across examples of his cruelty and exploitation of other animals and decides to hunt him down. On his way the lion spares a mouse that comes beneath his paw and it promises to return the favour. This the mouse does by gnawing the lion free when he is netted in a trap set by man. In general the evidence points to the tale being adapted from a Greek source. There was a long established Greek trading colony in Egypt and the document appeared during the reign of the Ptolemaic dynasty
Ptolemaic dynasty
The Ptolemaic dynasty, was a Macedonian Greek royal family which ruled the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt during the Hellenistic period. Their rule lasted for 275 years, from 305 BC to 30 BC...
, which was of Greek origin itself.
There is also an Indian variant of the story in the Panchatantra
Panchatantra
The Panchatantra is an ancient Indian inter-related collection of animal fables in verse and prose, in a frame story format. The original Sanskrit work, which some scholars believe was composed in the 3rd century BCE, is attributed to Vishnu Sharma...
, but that is told of mice and elephants. Here too it is introduced into a larger context, in this case a discussion about appropriate friendship, and illustrates the advice 'Make friends, however strong or weak they be'. An elephant herd inadvertently tramples a tribe of mice, who send representatives to beg the elephant king to avoid their settlement in future. Later the herd is trapped and the grateful mice come to their rescue and free them. When the story was carried to China by Buddhist monks, the benefitted animal reverted to a tiger, another member of the cat family.
External links
- 15th-20th century book illustrations online