IN THE FABLE tradition short stories about animals, usually accompanied by pithy morals, convey the perspectives of different animals, birds, and inanimate objects by making these agents speak to one another, or to humans. To take an example, in one fable the dog and the wolf converse and exchange pleasantries using human language as the dog naively explains the benefits of the chain around his neck to the wolf, but in another sense they are both chained by the human language they use to speak. Fabulous animals and birds also make sounds that are placed in dialogue with, and in relation to, forms of utterance that directly mirror human language and discourse. Fables represent animal protagonists in a space in-between sound and language. These protagonists contribute to soundscapes in which meanings attached to the sounds of ecology and life are constantly open to reinterpretation. The muzzles of animals and the beaks of birds become points of reference to the human mouth in ways that highlight patterns of anthropomorphic representation, while troubling the distinction between human and animal.

Fables have the capacity to expose divergent human and animal points of view, and to create new ones when speech and utterance are contrasted with sound. The word ‘fable’ itself poses a significant problem for understanding how medieval authors conceptualized the categories of sound and language in relation to such texts. The fables as a genre can be described as didactic, fictional narratives with at least one distinctly stated moral lesson. The moral of each short tale is usually placed after it (an epimythium) but may also feature before it (a promythium), or within the tale itself. However, this somewhat restrictive notion of what constitutes a fable is testimony to modern perspectives on a genre that has continued to be reproduced to the present day. The Etymologies by Isidore of Seville describe fables instead according to their relationship to the spoken word, noting that ‘poets named “fables” (fabula) from “speaking” (fari), because they are not actual events that took place, but were only invented in words’. According to Isidore, ‘the conversation of imaginary dumb animals among themselves may be recognized as a mirror image of the life of humans’. Isidore adds that there are two types of fable: the Aesopian, in which ‘dumb animals’ or inanimate things converse among themselves, and Libystican, in which humans are imagined conversing with animals.