Audiobook · read by volunteers
Aesop's Fables, Volume 03 (Fables 51-75)
Aesop (620–564 BC)
Read by Kristin LeMoine, Duncan Dewar, Christine Dewar, Gesine, Dvortygirl, Marlo Dianne, Vicki Barbour, Marian Brown, Abraham60, ophul · 25 chapters · 29 min
About the book
Twenty-five fables, each over in a minute or two, and each with a point. Volume 3 of this series covers fables 51 to 75 and opens with a traveller and the driver of his hired donkey quarrelling over the animal’s shade, in The Ass and His Shadow. Before long you will meet The Monkey as King, The Quack Frog, The Dog in the Manger and, at the very end, The Boy and the Filberts, whose greedy hand gets stuck in the jar. The cast is a familiar one: animals who boast, bargain and bluster, and a handful of people who prove no wiser than the beasts. The English text is V. S. Vernon Jones’s plain, brisk version, which keeps every tale short and states its moral openly. Spread over about half an hour and a team of voices, it makes a pleasant interlude for a car journey, a bedtime or a coffee break.
Introduction
Aesop is the name attached to a body of fables that tradition dates to the sixth century BC. Almost nothing is known about the man, and some scholars even question whether he existed at all, yet the stories that carry his name are among the most widely told in the world. Most are small animal stories built to make a point about vanity, greed, patience or prudence, and over the centuries they have been retold in countless languages.
This is volume 3 of a twelve-volume LibriVox series, and it covers fables 51 to 75 in the English translation by V. S. Vernon Jones, published in 1912 and best known in an edition illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Vernon Jones tells each fable in a few lines of clear, spare prose and lets it end with its moral stated openly. The volume opens with The Ass and His Shadow and closes with The Boy and the Filberts. In between come tales whose morals have passed into everyday speech, such as The Dog in the Manger and The Quack Frog, and quieter ones such as The Old Lion and The Boy Bathing.
There are 25 fables, one to a track, read by a team of LibriVox volunteers, and the whole volume lasts about half an hour. No knowledge of the earlier volumes is needed, because each fable is complete in itself and there is no plot to follow. The pleasure lies partly in the brevity and partly in the arguing: listeners rarely agree on exactly what a fable is saying.
Why listen today? Because these stories have lasted more than two thousand years, and the human weaknesses they describe have changed very little. Play them in order or dip in at random, with children or on your own.
Public domain
Aesop died in 564 BC: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text