The North Wind and the Sun is one of Aesop's Fables (Perry Index 46). It is type 298 (Wind and Sun) in the Aarne–Thompson folktale classification. The moral it teaches - the superiority of persuasion over force - has made the story widely known. It has also become a chosen text for phonetic transcriptions.
Story and application
The story concerns a competition between the North wind and the Sun to decide which is the strongest. 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. The Latin version of the fable first appeared centuries later in Avianus, as De Vento et Sole (Of the Wind and the Sun, Fable 4); early versions in English and Johann Gottfried Herder's poetic version in German (Wind und Sonne) named it similarly. 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). Gilles Corrozet, who had compiled a fable collection in French verse earlier than La Fontaine, twice featured the contest between the sun and the wind in his emblem books. In Hecatomgraphie (1540), the first of these, the story is told in a quatrain, accompanied by a woodcut in which a man holds close a fur cloak under the wintry blast while on the other side he strips naked beneath the sun's rays. It is titled with the moral "More by gentleness than strength" (Plus par doulceur que par force). The same illustration was used to accompany another poem in Corrozet's later Emblemes (1543), which counsels taking enjoyment and being careful as necessity demands, wisely adapting oneself to circumstances in the same way as one dresses differently for winter than for summer. 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". There is evidence that this reading has had an explicit influence on the diplomacy of modern times: in South Korea's Sunshine Policy, for instance, or Japanese relations with the military regime in Myanmar.
The fable in the arts Jean Restout made a painting of La Fontaine's fable for the Hôtel de Soubise in 1738. This showed a traveller on horseback among mountains under a stormy sky. In his print of the same subject, Jean-Baptiste Oudry reversed the perspective to show the god riding a cloud chariot with the horseback traveller merely a small figure below. This too was the perspective of Gustave Moreau's 1879 watercolour in the series he painted of the fables. In modern times, the fable has been made into a 3-minute animated film for children by the National Film Board of Canada (1972). It also figured as part of a 1987 set of Greek stamps.
The fable was the third of five in Anthony Plog's "Aesop's Fables" for narrator, piano and horn (1989/93); it is also one of the five pieces in Bob Chilcott's "Aesop's Fables" for piano and choir (2008). And, under the title "The Wind and the Sun", the English composer Philip Godfrey (b. 1964) has made a setting for children's choir and piano. La Fontaine's Phébus et Borée was choreographed in 2006 by Karine Ponties as part of Annie Sellem's composite ballet production of La Fontaine's Fables as a 25-minute performance for a male and female dancer. Its creator has commented on the fable's theme that 'it demonstrates people's vulnerability to cosmic forces and the inner links there are between natural events and our life as humans.' But for the Scottish artist Jane Topping (b. 1972), who referenced "The North Wind and the Sun" in her 2009 installation, the fable is to be interpreted in the context of subliminal persuasion via images.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
