What are folk tales

   Each and every nation has plenty of folks. A folk tale is a story that comes from the oral convention. The folk tale is a story, passed down orally from generation to generation. These folk tales were not written down, but existed only in the memory of people. Each storyteller told those stories in a little different, making them more attractive and interesting as the ages passed. Different folktales bear the characteristics of the culture, traditions and customs of the people from where they were belong. 

       In their original versions, most folk tales were not children's stories or it was not appropriate for kids, because they were rude and often violent.In many cases, like in the folk tales we can find, the characters are animals with human characteristics.

 

Aesop's Fable

This fable is from Aesop's fables...

    The Dog and the Shadow

 There was dog lived in a village. It happened when the Dog had got a piece of meat and was carrying it home in his mouth to eat it in peace. Now on his way of home he had to cross a piece of wood lying across a running stream. When he crossed, he looked down and saw his own shadow reflected in the water underneath. Thinking it was another dog with another piece of meat, he made up his mind to have that also. So he made a snap at the shadow in the water, but as he opened his mouth the piece of meat fell out, dropped into the water and it was never seen more. 

The moral of the story:

Beware you can lose the thing what you get by grasping at the greediness.

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Aesop's Fables - The Man and his Gold

This fable is from Aesop's fables...

The Man and his Gold

    

     The Man and his Gold

 There was a miser who sold his property and bought a chunk of gold. Then the man buried his gold just outside the city walls. He constantly went there to visit and inspect it. One of the workmen noticed the man's behavior and suspected the truth. For that reason, after the man had gone away, he took the gold chunk. When the man came back and found that the hiding place was empty, he began to cry and scratch his hair. Someone saw the man's extravagant misery and asked him what was happen. The miser man told him the reason why he cried. Then the man said to the miser, “Enough of your grieving! Take a stone and put it where the gold was and make believe the gold is still there. It’s not as if you ever made any use of it!”

The moral of the story:

There is no point in owning something unless you don’t use it for yourself.

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About Aesop's Fables

    Generally fables are close to the imaginative atmosphere of fairy tales about animals. Observing the life and characteristics of animals, the fabulists makes a comparison between them and the moral characteristics of men.
    The images of animals have a parabolic meaning. The donkey is use to express the characteristics of a hard working and stupid man, the sheep - of the gentle and harmless, the snake - of the evil, wicked and unkind, and the wolf exposes the nature of an evil and cruel man.
         In that sense Aesop reviews the essential morals of his time, giving them a humorous evaluation. Aesop often relates people with animals and plants. This particular sense of expression has been combined with Aesop's fables throughout the centuries. This was started from ancient Greece, going into Rome, Byzantium and reaching the civilizations to civilizations and surviving until today. Since the time of Aesop, the fable was a powerful tool to expose and ridicule our characteristics and vices as people and as a society.
     In ancient Greek and Roman education, the fable was one of the exercises in prose composition and public speaking—wherein students would be asked to learn fables, increase upon them, formulate their own and finally use them as convincing examples in their speeches. Plato wrote in "Phaedo" that Socrates whiled away his jail time turning some of Aesop's fables "which he knew" into verses.
     Aesop's fables may be short, but it offers a wise lesson in the end. It helps us to discover ourselves. It helps us to find out the hidden lesson behind the images presented by the author.

Aesop

A Little is known about the life of Aesop. According to historical facts he was a slave, who lived in the sixth century BC in ancient Greece. Some legends suggest Aesop was an ugly hunchbacked slave, although his real appearance is a mystery. One thing is known for sure - Aesop was a very smart, creative and imaginative man... 

Aesop was a fabulist or story teller credited with a number of fables now collectively known as Aesop's Fables. His existence remains uncertain and no writings by him survive, many tales credited to him were gathered across the centuries and in many languages in a storytelling tradition that continues to this day. Many of the tales are characterized by animals and non-living objects that speak, solve problems, and generally have human characteristics.

The earliest Greek sources, including Aristotle, specify that Aesop was born around 620 BC in Thrace at a site on the Black Sea coast which would later become the city Mesembria. In the Roman imperial period Phaedrus, who adapted the fables into Latin, say that Aesop was born in Phrygia. 

What is fable

Fable is among the oldest forms of folk literature. Fables can be found in the literature of almost every country all over the world. The word "fable" comes from the Latin "fabula" ("little story"). In general, a fable consists of a story and a short moral conclusion at the end. The main characters in most fables are animals. The purpose of these stories is to mock negative human behavior.

Sometimes these fables are passed down from generation to generation and from place to place. Sometimes these fables are constructed by a literary tale-teller and its purpose is to impart a lesson or a value. The last sentence of that usually tells what lesson you can conclude from the fables.

Many collections of fables exist in the world: such as the Panchatantram from ancient India, Aesop's from ancient Greece, Phaedrus' from ancient Rome, La Fontaine's fables composed in France in the 17th century, and Joel Chandler Harris's African American fables, the Uncle Remus stories.

There are some famous Fable authors:
   Aesop (mid-6th century BCE), author of Aesop’s Fables.
   Vishnu Sarma (ca. 200 BCE), author of the anthropomorphic political treatise and fable collection, the Panchatantra.
   Phaedrus (15 BCE – 50 CE), Roman fabulist, by birth he is a Macedonian
   Jean de La Fontaine (French, 1621 – 1695).
   Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (German, 1729–1781).
   Ivan Krylov (Russian, 1769 – 1844)