The North Wind and The Sun - The Story and Its Application

The Story and Its Application

The story concerns a competition between the North wind and the Sun to decide which is the stronger of the two. The challenge was to make a passing traveler remove his cloak. However hard the North Wind blew, the traveler only wrapped his cloak tighter, but when the Sun shone, the traveler was overcome with heat and had to take his cloak off.

The fable was well known in Ancient Greece and was alluded to in an anecdote concerning the dramatist Sophocles. After persuading a lad to have sex with him,

This boy laid his own cloak on the ground under them, and they wrapped themselves in Sophocles' cape. After the act the boy snatched Sophocles' cape and went off leaving Sophocles his own boyish cloak. The incident was widely reported. Euripides heard of it and made a joke out of it, saying that he had had that boy too and it did not cost him anything; Sophocles had let himself go and had paid with ridicule. When Sophocles heard that, he composed an epigram against Euripides in the following sense, alluding to the story of the North Wind and the Sun, and at the same time satirising Euripides' adulteries:

It was the Sun, and not a boy, whose heat stripped me naked;

As for you, Euripides, when you were kissing someone else's wife

The North Wind screwed you. You are unwise, you who sow

In another's field, to accuse Eros of being a snatch-thief.

The Latin version of the fable first appears 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) also give it as such. It is only in mid-Victorian times that the title "The North Wind and the Sun" begins to be used. In fact the Avianus poem refers to the characters as Boreas and Phoebus, the gods of the north wind and the sun, and it is under the title Phébus et Borée that it appears in La Fontaine's Fables (VI.3).

Victorian versions give the moral as "Persuasion is better than force", but it has been put in different ways at other times. In the Barlow edition of 1667, Aphra Behn teaches the Stoic lesson that there should be moderation in everything: "In every passion moderation choose,/For all extremes do bad effects produce", while La Fontaine's conclusion is that "Gentleness does more than violence" (Fables VI.3). In the 18th century, Herder comes 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". Most of these examples draw a moral lesson, but La Fontaine hints at the political application that is 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 Burma.