The wolf as a shepherd
The wolf as shepherd (French Le Loup devenu berger ; German also The wolf as shepherd ) is the third fable in the third book of the collection of fables Fables Choisies: Mises En Vers by Jean de La Fontaine .
The poem tells how once the wolf disguised himself as a shepherd to lure some sheep away from the pasture, when the shepherd, the dog and almost the whole herd were sleeping. The shepherd's staff, smock and bagpipes were well done, and he even wrote the name of the shepherd Guillot on his hat. However, when he tried to imitate the shepherd's voice, he managed only a terrible howl. The wolf's howl woke the real guillot, the dog and all the sheep, and now the wolf could neither defend himself nor flee because of the disguise. The moral is that what a wolf is should appear as a wolf, frauds always come to light.
The name Guillot , which La Fontaine chooses for his heroes (and antiheroes) here and in many other fables, is one of the many typically bucolic and pastoral names that have been in use since the Middle Ages. A fictional Gaillot le mentear (Guillot the Liar) can be detected in the 16th century . La Fontaine apparently saw the word sycophant , with which he characterizes his "false guillot", as very unusual, since he required a footnote to it, and defined it as a cheater.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jean de La Fontaine: Fables Choisies. Livre Troisieme. Fable III. Le Loup devenu Berger. P. 7 , accessed on May 8, 2020 (French).
- ↑ Alexander Gelley: Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity . Stanford University Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0-8047-2490-6 , pp. 124 ( google.de [accessed on May 8, 2020]).
- ^ Jean de La Fontaine: Fifty More Fables of La Fontaine . University of Illinois Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0-252-06650-4 , pp. 157 ( google.de [accessed on May 8, 2020]).