The Walnut Tree
The Walnut Tree is one of Aesop's fables and numbered 250 in the Perry Index. It later served as a base for a misogynistic proverb, which encourages the violence against walnut trees, asses and women.
A fable of ingratitude
There are two related Greek versions of the fable. Illustrating the ingratitude of those who requite good deeds with cruelty, it concerns a walnut tree (καρυα) standing by the roadside whose nuts the passersby used to knock off by throwing sticks and stones. It then complained, 'People gladly enjoy my fruits, but they have a terrible way of showing their gratitude.'[1] Its complaint is related to a debate on gratitude that occurs in a parallel Indian story from the Panchatantra. There a mango tree is asked whether it is lawful to return evil for good and replies that its experience of man is violent treatment despite providing him with fruit and shade.[2] On the other hand, the 18th century German rationalist, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, questioned whether there are real grounds for gratitude in his fable of "The Oak Tree and the Swine".[3] The pig feeding at the foot of an oak is reproached for its motives of pure greed by the tree and replies that it would only feel grateful if it could be sure that the oak had scattered the acorns there out of love for it.
The Greek fable was later the subject of an epigram by Antipater of Thessalonica:
- They planted me, a walnut-tree, by the road-side
- to amuse passing boys, as a mark for their well-aimed stones.
- All my twigs and flourishing shoots are broken,
- hit as I am by showers of pebbles.
- It is no advantage for trees to be fruitful; I, indeed,
- bore fruit only for my own undoing.[4]
This in turn gave rise to Latin versions, in one of which the tree is represented as being pelted with rods. There was also a much longer poem, at one time ascribed to Ovid but now thought to be an imitation, in which the nut tree complains at length of the violent way in which it is despoiled.[5] In this more leisurely work of 182 lines, as well as Aesop's fable of the nut tree being the subject, there is a glance at another concerning The Travellers and the Plane Tree. While the fruit tree is treated with no respect, 'barren plane trees have more honour for the shade they provide' (at postquam platanis sterilem praebentibus umbram uberior quavis arbore venit honor).
In Renaissance times the fable was taken up by the compilers of emblem books, starting with the originator of this genre, Andrea Alciato. Eventually numbered 193 in the many editions of his Emblemata, it bore the device In fertilitatem sibi ipsi damnosam (fruitful to its own ruin), deriving from the last line of the original epigram by Antipater. Many of the illustrations accompanying this feature boys stoning the tree and gathering its fruit from the ground.[6] In others, however, youths are shown with substantial sticks in their hands, as in the illustration here, and so suggest the folk belief that beating it made the tree more fruitful. A German 'figure poem' (figurengedichte) of 1650, in which the words are so spaced as to form a tree shape, mentions both sticks and stones as the weapons used by 'peasant girls and boys' to bring down the nuts.[7] Inspired by Alciato's emblem,[8] the poem is presented as the nut tree's soliloquy and goes on to make the wider point that the ingratitude of returning evil for generosity is a malaise that infects all social relations.
The proverb of a woman, an ass and a walnut tree
A few decades before Alciato first published his emblem, Aesop's fable had served as basis for an independent version by Laurentius Abstemius in his Hecatomythium, published in the 1490s. Numbered 65, De nuce, asino et muliere describes how a woman asked the abused tree 'why it was so foolish as to give more and better nuts when struck by more and stronger blows? The tree replied: Have you forgotten about the proverb that goes: Nut tree, donkey and woman are bound by a similar law; these three things do nothing right if you stop beating them.'[9] The moral that Abstemius draws from it is that people talk too much for their own good. However, this proverb is cited as an example of misogyny.[10][11]
The Italian proverb based on this lore was perpetuated in Britain for the next two centuries. George Pettie's translation of the Civil Conversations of Stefano Guazzo (1530–93), a book first published in Italy in 1574, records that he had once come across the proverb 'A woman, an ass and a walnut tree, Bring more fruit, the more beaten they be'. What is now the better known English version appears shortly after in the works of John Taylor,
- A woman, a spaniel and a walnut tree,
- The more they're beaten the better still they be.
Roger L'Estrange includes Abstemius' story in his Fables of Aesop and Other Eminent Mythologists a century later. His shortened version runs: 'A Good Woman happen'd to pass by, as a Company of Young Fellows were Cudgelling a Wallnut-Tree, and ask'd them what they did that for? This is only by the Way of Discipline, says one of the Lads, for 'tis natural for Asses, Women, and Wallnut-Trees to Mend upon Beating.'[12] L'Estrange's idiomatic comment, 'Spur a Jade a Question, and he'll Kick ye an Answer,' indicates his opinion of the sentiment. People's conversation will betray their true quality. Edmund Arwaker, on the other hand, gives the story another twist in his versified telling of the fables, Truth in Fiction (London, 1708). The talkative woman questions the tree in the course of a solitary walk and it replies in this way in order to silence her.[13]
Whatever may have been people's opinion of how well a woman, ass or dog respond to punishment, the belief that this was beneficial in the case of walnut trees persisted. One encyclopaedia of superstitions reports that in country districts 'it was a common persuasion that whipping a walnut tree tended to increase the produce and improve the quality of the fruit’ and that this took place in early spring.[14] Another explanation is that 'the old custom of beating a walnut-tree was carried out firstly to fetch down the fruit and secondly to break the long shoots and so encourage the production of short fruiting spurs.’[15]
References
- ^ Aesopica site
- ^ Stanley Rice, Ancient Indian Fables and Stories, London 1924, p. 34
- ^ Fables and Epigrams of Lessing translated from the German, London 1825, Fable 33
- ^ The Greek Anthology, trans. W.R.Paton, London 1917, Vol 3, IX.4
- ^ A companion to Ovid, Peter E. Knox, Oxford UK 2009, pp 213-4
- ^ Alciato at Glasgow
- ^ Peter Maurice Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem, University of Toronto, 1998, pp.148-9
- ^ Robert Stamper, "Toward an Understanding of the Figure Poems in Johann Hellwig's Die Nymphe Noris, 1997
- ^ Online text
- ^ Mišterová, Ivona (2009). "Misogyny and Misogamy in The Taming of the Shrew: A Sketch of Shakespearean Productions". Acta Fakulty Filozofické Západočeské Univerzity V Plzni. ISSN 1802-0364. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
- ^ Cubbon, Sophie (2000). "The Dismantling of Patriarchy". UCL Jurisprudence Review. 2000: 253. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
- ^ Online text
- ^ “The nut-tree and the lady or the inquisitor silenced”, pp.138-9
- ^ Radford, Edwin and Mona A., Encyclopaedia of Superstitions 1949, p.247; online version
- ^ Miles Hadfield, British Trees, London 1957; quoted in the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs
- v
- t
- e
Fables
- The Ant and the Grasshopper
- The Ass and his Masters
- The Ass and the Pig
- The Ass Carrying an Image
- The Ass in the Lion's Skin
- The Astrologer who Fell into a Well
- The Bear and the Travelers
- The Belly and the Members
- The Bird-catcher and the Blackbird
- The Bird in Borrowed Feathers
- The Boy Who Cried Wolf
- The Cat and the Mice
- The Cock and the Jewel
- The Cock, the Dog and the Fox
- The Crow and the Pitcher
- The Crow and the Snake
- The Deer without a Heart
- The Dog and Its Reflection
- The Dog and the Wolf
- The Dove and the Ant
- The Farmer and the Stork
- The Farmer and the Viper
- The Fir and the Bramble
- The Fisherman and the Little Fish
- The Fowler and the Snake
- The Fox and the Crow
- The Fox and the Grapes
- The Fox and the Lion
- The Fox and the Mask
- The Fox and the Sick Lion
- The Fox and the Stork
- The Fox and the Weasel
- The Fox and the Woodman
- The Frog and the Ox
- The Frogs Who Desired a King
- The Goat and the Vine
- The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs
- The Honest Woodcutter
- The Horse and the Donkey
- The Horse that Lost its Liberty
- The Lion and the Mouse
- The Lion, the Bear and the Fox
- The Man with Two Mistresses
- The Mischievous Dog
- The Miser and his Gold
- The Moon and her Mother
- The Mountain in Labour
- The Mouse and the Oyster
- The North Wind and the Sun
- The Oak and the Reed
- The Old Man and Death
- The Old Woman and the Doctor
- The Rose and the Amaranth
- The Satyr and the Traveller
- The Sick Kite
- The Snake and the Crab
- The Snake in the Thorn Bush
- The Tortoise and the Hare
- Town Mouse and Country Mouse
- The Travellers and the Plane Tree
- The Trees and the Bramble
- The Two Pots
- The Walnut Tree
- Washing the Ethiopian White
- The Weasel and Aphrodite
- The Wolf and the Crane
- The Wolf and the Lamb
- The Woodcutter and the Trees
- The Young Man and the Swallow
- An ass eating thistles
- The Bear and the Gardener
- Belling the Cat (also known as The Mice in Council)
- The Blind Man and the Lame
- The Boy and the Filberts
- Chanticleer and the Fox
- The Dog in the Manger
- The drowned woman and her husband
- The Elm and the Vine
- The Fox and the Cat
- The Gourd and the Palm-tree
- The Hawk and the Nightingale
- The miller, his son and the donkey
- The Monkey and the Cat
- The Priest and the Wolf
- The Scorpion and the Frog
- The Shepherd and the Lion
adaptations
- Aesop's Film Fables
- The Grasshopper and the Ants
adaptations
- Demetrius of Phalerum
- Phaedrus
- Babrius
- Avianus
- Dositheus Magister
- Alexander Neckam
- Adémar de Chabannes
- Odo of Cheriton
- John Lydgate
- Kawanabe Kyōsai
- Laurentius Abstemius
- Roger L'Estrange
- Gabriele Faerno
- Hieronymus Osius
- Marie de France
- Robert Henryson
- Jean de La Fontaine
- Ivan Krylov
- Nicolas Trigault
- Robert Thom
- Zhou Zuoren