No music today.
Summary: A bunch of animals do a bunch of things. Like half the animals are dumb, lazy, etc. The other half are responsible. They learn stuff.
Commentary: I'm curious about how today's readings were listed. "Vol. 17, pp. 43-44; also pp. 31-43." I went back and double-checked the scan I have of the original list, and it's the same. Why not just write 31-44?
The introduction is also interesting for this one. The Grimm's tales are described as descending from animist myths of the common folk, while Aesop's fables are more enlightened. Interesting, given that Aesop himself was a slave. Similar to last night, who knows how many of them were actually collected by Aesop, vs just put in a collection with his name on it. At least a few are mostly from after his death.
Not surprisingly, it's a pain to track down the exact versions Elliot used. T5FSOB is awful about listing translators, and I couldn't find any edition easily accessible with the same fables in the same order. I wound up skipping a handful that weren't in the archive I was using, but I got a couple dozen and that seems good enough.
There's a wide variety here, so hard to kind of pin down any single angle. It's kind of understatedly dark in a fun way (contrasting with, say Anderson's almost gratuitous grossness). Always fun to see an "authentic" (in so far as a translation of a semi-anonymous collection can be) version of stories we've seen 1000 times.
When people die, they get random one word exclamations. That's fun.
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