FICTION | FABLE
What Is an Example of a Fable?
A look at a unique genre of short tales with examples
What Is a Fable?
A fable is a short story with key elements that sets it apart from other short stories.
Elements of Fables
- Is a fictional short story that’s brief and simplistic in language and form.
- Include animals, inanimate objects, or other non-human main characters.
- Cleverly teach a moral lesson about how to behave or understand the world.
Many well-known fables are attributed to Aesop who can be thanked for penning one of the most popular fables of all time, The Tortoise and the Hare.
Even today, the most famous fables are those attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave living around 600 B.C.E. It is unclear whether or not Aesop was a real person, or whether he was just one person, but he didn’t write his tales down himself — he was an oral storyteller instead. Although these fables are attributed to Aesop, who was a master storyteller, their origins are believed to be in folklore that was passed down orally for many years before Aesop started telling the fables. Aesop’s fables continued to be popular in ancient Greece, and many of them were eventually…
