| Sun | |
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Real Name |
Sun |
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First Appearance |
Aesop's Fables |
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Created by |
Aesop |
Origin[]
The Sun appears prominently as a main character in two of Aesop's Fables.
The first tale concerns a competition between the North Wind and the Sun to decide which is the stronger. The challenge was to make a passing traveler remove his cloak. However hard the wind blew, the traveler only wrapped his cloak tighter to keep warm, but when the Sun shone, the traveler was overcome with heat and soon took his cloak off.
The fable was well known in Ancient Greece; Athenaeus records that Hieronymus of Rhodes, in his Historical Notes, quoted an epigram of Sophocles against Euripides that parodied the story of Helios and Boreas.
It was only in mid-Victorian times that the title "The North Wind and the Sun" began to be used. In fact, the Avianus poem refers to the characters as Boreas and Phoebus, the divinities of the north wind and the Sun, and it was under the title Phébus et Borée that it appeared in La Fontaine's Fables (VI.3).
Victorian versions of the fable give the moral as "Persuasion is better than force", but it had been put in different ways at other times. In the Barlow edition of 1667, Aphra Behn taught the Stoic lesson that there should be moderation in everything: "In every passion moderation choose, For all extremes do bad effects produce". In the 18th century, Herder came to the theological conclusion that, while superior force leaves us cold, the warmth of Christ's love dispels it, and Walter Crane's limerick version of 1887 gives a psychological interpretation, "True strength is not bluster". But for Guy Wetmore Carryl in his humorous rewriting of the fable, "The Impetuous Breeze and the Diplomatic Sun", tact is the lesson to be learned. There the competition is between the man and the wind; the sun only demonstrates the right way of achieving one's end.
While most examples draw a moral lesson, La Fontaine's "Mildness more than violence achieves" (Fables VI.3) hints at the political application that was present also in Avianus' conclusion: "They cannot win who start with threats".
In The Frogs and the Sun, a group of frogs lament at the marriage of the sun. This would mean the birth of a second sun and the frogs suffer already from the drying up of the ponds and marshes in which they live.
The fable was included in Nicholas Bozon's collection of moralising stories (Contes moralisés) during the 1320s. Prefaced with a Latin comment that great lords impoverish others, it pictures the Sun asking his courtiers to find him a rich wife. They take the problem to Destiny, who points out the danger that would follow from having a second sun. A century later, John Lydgate tells the story of "The Sun's Marriage" in his Isopes Fabules. Here it is prefaced by an attack on tyranny, which the story is to illustrate. The Sun asks the assembly of gods for advice on taking a marriage partner and they disallow such a union
Public Domain Appearances[]
All published appearances of the Sun from before January 1, 1930 are public domain in the US.
Some notable appearances are listed below:
Public Domain Literary Appearances[]
- Aesop's Fables
- The North Wind and the Sun
- The Frogs and the Sun