Myths, Fairytales and Legends

Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Myths, Fairytales and Legends’

13
The Doom of the Danaides Clay Lane

By day Danaus had to watch his fifty unhappy daughters marry their fifty cruel cousins, but the wedding night was yet to come.

The fifty daughters of Danaus, a mythical ruler dwelling on the banks of the River Nile, are chiefly remembered for murdering all but one of their fifty husbands on their wedding night, and for the hopeless doom to which the stern rulers of Hades put them. And yet what mortal, knowing the girls’ whole story, could not feel pity for them?

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14
A Tail of Woe William Caxton

Reynard the Fox was mortified to hear his efforts to rescue Isegrim’s wife from a frozen lake had been misinterpreted.

In his landmark 1481 translation of political satire ‘Reynard the Fox’, William Caxton told how the animals gathered at Stade near Hamburg to charge Reynard with a catalogue of shocking crimes, and how the wily Fox emerged without a stain on his character. The allegation underpinning the whole story was that Reynard had tried to force his attentions on Erswynd, wife of Isegrim the Wolf.

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15
The Lion’s Share Sir Roger L’Estrange

Following a succesful hunting partnership, the Lion explains how the spoils are to be divided.

Aesop’s Fable of the Lion and the Wild Ass is the origin of the phrase ‘the lion’s share’, meaning the largest portion by far. The version below comes from Sir Roger L’Estrange’s ground-breaking collection of 1669, just as he wrote it. “People should have a care” he advised “how they Engage themselves in Partnerships with Men that are too Mighty for them, whether it be in Mony, Pleasure, or Bus’ness.”

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16
The Fall of Icarus Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid)

Trapped in Crete with his son Icarus, the craftsman and inventor Daedalus realises a bold and desperate plan to get away.

In a paroxysm of envy, the great craftsman Daedalus murdered his nephew, who seemed likely surpass him in skill, and the sentence of Athens’s highest court was death. Daedalus managed to flee to Crete, but King Minos made life as hateful there as in any prison. So Daedalus fashioned wings for himself and his son Icarus, and prepared to fly to freedom.

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17
Lover’s Leap Joseph Addison

Joseph Addison tells the legend of the great Greek poetess Sappho and the Lover’s Leap.

Sappho was born in about 612 BC on the island of Mytilene (Lesbos), and became one of the great love poets of ancient Greece. She belonged to an intimate sorority dedicated to Aphrodite and the Muses; she had a daughter named Clëis; and she had three brothers. Few other facts are known. Even the tale of her death is a melodramatic legend; but it has furnished us with the ‘lover’s leap’.

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18
The Goat and the Lion P. V. Ramaswami Raju

A herd of goats is threatened by a pride of lions, and it falls to one brave billy to face the danger alone.

PV Ramaswami Raju published a collection of Indian Fables in 1887, shortly after he was called to the Bar and while he was teaching Indian languages at Oxford University and later at London. His fables are a creative blend of tradition and imagination: this one tells how one wily old goat saved the whole herd with an audacious bluff.

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