# Animal Fables

Animal fables (állatmese) occur in the Hungarian treasury of tales in relatively small numbers (3.5 per cent). These can be divided into two large groups: moralizing tales, which are Hindu in origin and came to us partly through Eastern European oral tradition, partly by written Greek–Latin interposition. Many of these found their way into the Hungarian folk tale corpus through sermons. The other group originates in ancient European animal myths. Literature and folk tradition closely intertwine in this genre. We meet them on the one hand in the fables of Aesop, and on the other, the Aesopean collections of tales also have often preserved texts taken over from oral tradition. An animal fable characteristic of this group is The Fox and the Wolf (AaTh 1+AaTh 34 B AaTh 3*+AaTh 23*):

There was once in the world a wolf and a fox. The fox lay down on the cartroad. A driver who was going by put him up on the forage ladder, where there were three cheeses. The fox hung them on his neck, jumped down, and ran off. Then the wolf said to the fox:

“Where did you get this cheese?”

The fox said:

“Come right on, I will show you some cheese!”

They went to a lake. It was night, and the moon shone on the water, so he said:

“If you drink up all this water, that cheese will be there underneath it.”

Then the wolf got to work but could not drink it all up. He got sick from it.

So they went to a house where a wedding was being held, and music played on and on. Suddenly he said:

“We will play even more beautifully if you let us up onto the attic where the hens and strudels are kept.”

They let them up. When they had their fill, they jumped down and ran away.

They kept running, and found a big pointed stake. The fox said:

“You can’t jump across it!”

{570.} So the wolf jumped across it.

“Well, jump across it this way, with your back to it!”

The wolf tried to jump across it that way, but the stake went into his belly. The fox told him:

“Shake yourself, then you will get loose!”

The stake went in even further. Then the fox said:

“In the name of the Father and the Son,

I used to torture you for what you’d done

Because you devoured a horse

That never was.”

Besides those we have discussed, there are other different kinds of fables, and groups of various genres can be found in greater and lesser numbers in Hungary. Among these are noteworthy the short-story tales (novellamesék) (8.5 per cent), the foolish-devil tales (ostoba ördögmesék) (1.5 per cent), and the fool’s tales (bolondmesék) (6.5 per cent). Only a small fraction of tales (1 per cent) cannot be classified into any group.