Literary Allusions
The majority of allusions to Aesop's fable contrast the quietism of King Log with the energetic policy of King Stork. Thus American author Nathaniel Hawthorne mentions in his novel The House of the Seven Gables (1851) that 'We have all heard of King Log; but, in these jostling times, one of that royal kindred will hardly win the race for an elective chief-magistracy'. In more modern times, Science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, who often interested himself in examining political situations, referred to the differing styles of rule several times in his work: for example, in Glory Road (1963); The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1965); and The Number of the Beast (1980).
The fable is pressed into the service of political commentary in the title "King Stork and King Log: at the dawn of a new reign", a study of Russia written in 1895 by the political assassin Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, using the pen-name S. Stepniak. The book contrasts the policy of the reactionary Tsar Alexander III with the likely policy under Nicholas II, who had only just succeeded to the throne.
There is a glancing reference to the fable in the title of Alyse Gregory's feminist novel King Log and Lady Lea (1929). On the other hand, one of Margaret Atwood's four short fictions in a 2005 issue of the magazine Daedalus engages with it directly. Titled "King Log in Exile", it features the deposed king musing on his ineffective reign, from which it gradually emerges that his inertia hid not harmlessness but a corrupt selfishness.
Two modern poetical references are dismissive. Thom Gunn alludes to the fable in the opening stanzas of his poem "The Court Revolt". The situation described is a conspiracy in which many courtiers connive out of sheer boredom: 'King stork was welcome to replace a log'. New Zealand poet James K. Baxter, on the other hand, expresses a preference in his epigram Election 1960:
A democratic people have elected
King Log, King Stork, King Log, King Stork again.
Because I like a wide and silent pond
I voted Log. That party was defeated.
W. H. Auden recreated the fable at some length in verse as part of the three "Moralities" he wrote for the German composer Hans Werner Henze to set for orchestra and children's chorus in 1967. The theme of all three is the wrong choices made by people who do not sufficiently appreciate their good fortune when they have it. The first poem of the set follows the creatures' fall, from a state of innocence when In the first age the frogs dwelt at peace, into dissatisfaction, foolishness and disaster. Two centuries earlier, the German poet Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had given the theme an even darker reinterpretation in his "The Water Snake" (Die Wasserschlange). Taking its beginning from the Phaedrus version, the poem relates how a frog asks the snake why it is devouring his kind. 'Because you have invited me to,' is the reply; but when the frog denies this, the snake declares that it will therefore eat the frog because he hasn't. Part of a set of variations on Aesopic themes, this appears as the last in Gary Bachlund's recent setting of five fables by Lessing (Fünf Fabelen, 2008).
Earlier settings have included one by Louis-Nicolas Clérambault of words based on La Fontaine's fable (1730s) and Louis Lacombe's setting of La Fontaine's own words (Op. 72) for four men's voices as part of his 15 fables de La Fontaine (1875). It also figures as the third pf Maurice Thiriet's Trois fables de La Fontaine for four children singing a cappella.
Read more about this topic: The Frogs Who Desired A King
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