SOURCE: Margaret Blount, "Folklore and Fable," in Animal Land: The Creatures of Children's Fiction, William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1975, pp. 23-41.

In the following excerpt, Blount compares the Aesopic fable to folktale and fairytale, and describes the effect that illustrating fables has on the interpretation of a fable.

'Long ago, when the animals could speak.' The golden age is somewhere in the past—perhaps in Eden or before the Flood, perhaps nearer, just beyond the memory of the oldest story teller; and in that time the gulf between animals and men had not been opened, the distinctions were not so sharp, magic was all about. As youthful things and creatures are always more alike than adult ones, as seeds are always more similar than plants and animals that grow more like themselves and so more different from each other every day, so in tales that belong to this...