The fable contrasts the fate of one animal proud of the many stratagems at its disposal with another possessing one simple trick. In time of danger it is that one trick that proves more effective than the many options. A story of world-wide popularity and many variations, it is listed as type 105 in the
Aarne-Thompson-Uther folklore index. There is a proverb in a fragment attributed to the
ancient Greek poet
Archilochus: (the fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing). In
Erasmus' Adagia from 1500, the expression is recorded as
Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. This proverb seems to imply the existence of an ancient fable involving a hedgehog instead of a cat, as do some folktales from the
Balkans.
Eastern The analogous story of "Hundred-wit, Thousand-wit and Single-wit" appears in the fifth division of the
Panchatantra which considers the consequences of ill-considered action. The tale concerns two fish and a frog who debate how to avoid being taken by fishermen in the pond they inhabit. Single-wit the frog advises flight and is the only one to escape being caught. The story was also preserved in the Persian
Kalila and Dimna as a tale of three fish, one wise, one clever and one stupid. When the fish notice fishermen passing, the wise fish simply makes a quick exit from the pool, the clever fish manages to avoid being eaten by playing dead, while the stupid fish is caught and eaten.
Rumi, writing in the 13th century, used this story in Book IV of his
Masnavi, drawing from it the advisability of resigning one's identity into the wholeness of the Creator. The analogue in the ancient Indian
Mahabharata has the swan and the crow as protagonists. The swan has only one way to fly while the crow boasts of a hundred and one. The crow, however, gets himself into trouble with his displays of
aerobatics when he ends up far out over the ocean, unable to find a place to land. The swan flies down to the crow asking "Which of the hundred and one ways of flying is this?" before carrying him, suitably humbled, back to safety.
European Written records of this fable type do not appear in Europe after Archilochus until Medieval times. Here the boastful animal is generally the
fox, but the animal with the one trick may be the
hedgehog (Greece), the
crane (Russia), the
squirrel (Armenia), or the
cock or
dove. In western Europe, it is always the
cat, appearing in very similar versions, though with variation in the number of tricks the fox possesses. Some of the collections with this variation include the Anglo-Latin
Romulus (80 tricks),
Marie de France's
Ysopet (2 tricks, "and a whole sackful besides"), as well as the fable collections of
Odo of Cheriton (17 tricks in a bag) and
John Sheppey. The fox is known for his craftiness in Western fables, and sometimes the fabulists go into more naturalistic detail in their retellings. In the contemporary poem "
The Owl and the Nightingale", for instance, the
nightingale, arguing that its one ability (to sing in summertime) is worth more than all the skills of the
owl, describes some of the fox's devices, the feints and devious courses it takes to outwit the dogs: "The fox can creep along the hedge and turn off from his earlier route, and shortly afterwards double back on it, then the hound is thrown off the scent" (
þe uox kan crope bi þe heie an turne ut from his forme weie an eft sone kume þarto þonne is þe hundes smel fordo). For the preacher Odo, the cat represented those who know the single scheme, to "spring into heaven", while the fox stands for "attorneys,
casuists, tricksters" and others with a "bagful of tricks". The interpretation in the 13th century
Gesta Romanorum is very similar, making a distinction between "the simple men and women who know but one craft, that is to call to God", and those that make a living by the glibness of their tongues. The moral supplied by Marie de France is different, though perhaps complementary: that a wise man would be able to detect a liar, however plausibly he talked.
Berechiah ha-Nakdan followed her by including the tale as number 94 of his hundred
Fox Fables in Hebrew. His moral is different in emphasis again, contrasting simple, necessary labour with
status-consciousness. For him the fox represented those who despise and neglect basic work to look after themselves and sustain their families, those who say "our hand is too lofty to put sickle to standing grain" and boast of their professions: "I am a scribe; I am a smith, I am a tailor; I am a goldsmith, I am a merchant; I am a sage, and what other is there like me to equal me?" In
William Caxton's 1484 collection of Aesop's fables, this one is told about people who have pretensions of wisdom and subtlety, but who in fact are "grete fooles and knowynge no thynge". Another landmark in the fable's history was its inclusion in
Jean de La Fontaine's influential
Fables Choisies (IX.14, published in 1678). With La Fontaine, the fable has moved from the
pulpit to the
salon and his telling of this tale is typically lighter and more urbane in tone; the truth the tale points up for him is a question of expediency rather than the grave moral failure seen by earlier authors. Here the cat and the fox are travelling together and, as "the way was long and therefore wearisome, so they shortened it by arguing. Argumentation is a great help. Without it one would go to sleep. Our pilgrims shouted themselves hoarse. Then having argued themselves out, they talked of other things." The fable proceeds as in earlier versions and La Fontaine finishes with the practical moral: "Too many expedients may spoil the business. One loses time in choosing between them and in trying too many. Have only one; but let it be a good one." The American composer
Vincent Persichetti included this version as the fourth piece in his
Fables for narrator and orchestra (1943). ==The Hedgehog and the Fox==