Week2

Fairy tale

For a comparison of fairy tale with other kinds of stories, such as myths, legends and fable, see Traditional story.

1865 illustration of Tom Thumb and the Giant

A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features folkloric fantasy characters, such as dwarves, elves, fairies, giants, gnomes,goblins, mermaids, trolls, unicorns, or witches, and usually magic or enchantments. Fairy tales may be distinguished from other folk narratives such as legends (which generally involve belief in the veracity of the events described)and explicitly moral tales, including beast fables. The term is mainly used for stories with origins in European tradition and, at least in recent centuries, mostly relates tochildren's literature.

Fable

For other uses, see Fable (disambiguation). For a comparison of fable with other kinds of stories, see Traditional story.

Anthropomorphic cat guarding geese, Egypt, ca. 1120 BCE

Fable is a literary genre: a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized (given human qualities, such as the ability to speak human language) and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added explicitly as a pithy maxim.

The Fox and the Grapes

The Fox and the Grapes is one of the Aesop's fables, numbered 15 in the Perry Index. The narration is concise and subsequent retellings have often been equally succinct. The story concerns a fox that tries to eat grapes from a vine but cannot reach them. Rather than admit defeat, he states they are undesirable. The expression "sour grapes" originated from this fable.

The illustration of the fable by François Chauveau in the first volume of La Fontaine's fables, 1668

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

The Boy Who Cried Wolf is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 210 in the Perry Index. From it is derived the English idiom "to cry wolf", defined as "to give a false alarm" in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and glossed by the Oxford English Dictionary as meaning to make false claims, with the result that subsequent true claims are disbelieved.

Francis Barlow's illustration of the fable, 1687

Shakespeare-Sigh no more ladies

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more. 

    Men were deceivers ever, 

One foot in sea, and one on shore, 

    To one thing constant never. 

Then sigh not so, but let them go, 

    And be you blithe and bonny, 

Converting all your sounds of woe 

    Into hey nonny, nonny. 

Sing no more ditties, sing no more 

    Of dumps so dull and heavy. 

The fraud of men was ever so 

    Since summer first was leafy. 

Then sigh not so, but let them go, 

    And be you blithe and bonny, 

Converting all your sounds of woe 

    Into hey, nonny, nonny.