The Bear and the Gardener facts for kids
The Bear and the Gardener is an old fable that comes from the East. It teaches us an important lesson: be careful about who you choose as a friend! This story warns against making friends with people who might not be very smart or careful. There are many different versions of this story around the world, both written down and told by word of mouth. It's a very famous type of story, known as Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 1586. The version by La Fontaine, a famous French writer, has been used to explain many different ideas about life.
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The Story of the Bear and the Gardener
The story became well-known in Western countries thanks to La Fontaine's Fables (Book VIII, Fable 10). The original French title, L'Ours et l'amateur des jardins, means "The Bear and the Garden Lover."
The fable tells how a lonely gardener meets a lonely bear. They decide to become friends and keep each other company. One of the bear's jobs is to keep flies away from his friend when the gardener takes a nap. A very annoying fly keeps landing on the gardener's face. The bear tries his best to shoo it away, but it keeps coming back.
Finally, the bear gets very frustrated. He picks up a large paving stone to crush the fly. Sadly, he accidentally kills the gardener along with the fly.
Lessons from the Fable
This story has several important lessons. One line in the poem says, "In my opinion it's a golden rule: Better be lonely than be with a fool." This means it's better to be by yourself than to have a friend who makes bad choices.
The story also teaches that it's better to have a smart enemy than a foolish friend. A smart enemy might be predictable, but a foolish friend can cause harm without meaning to.
The fable has given us some common sayings. In French, people say le pavé de l'ours, which means "the bear's paving stone." In Russian, after a version by Ivan Krylov, they say medvezhya usluga, meaning "a bear's service." Both phrases describe a bad idea or action that causes an unfortunate result, even if it was meant to help.
La Fontaine's version of the story also shows a lesson from Stoicism. This old philosophy teaches that everything should be done in moderation, even making friends. The story also highlights that the bear didn't understand the difference between a small, immediate goal (getting rid of the fly) and the most important goal (keeping his friend safe).
The Fable in England
The story became popular in England starting in the 1700s. This happened through translations or copies of La Fontaine's work. One of the first times it appeared was in Robert Dodsley's Select Fables (1764). In this book, it was called "The Hermit and the Bear" and had a less sad ending.
In Dodsley's version, a hermit had helped the bear earlier. Some versions say the hermit took a thorn from the bear's paw, like the story of Androcles and the Lion. Later, the bear was grateful and served the hermit. When a fly bothered the hermit, the bear hit him in the face while trying to swat it. After that, the two friends simply went their separate ways.
This milder version was used in rhyming books for children in the early 1800s. Examples include Mary Anne Davis's Fables in Verse (around 1818) and Jefferys Taylor's Aesop in Rhyme (1820). However, the Russian writer Krylov kept the sad ending in his version (1809). Later in the 1800s, people in England forgot where the story came from. They started to think it was one of Aesop's Fables.
Different Versions of the Story
La Fontaine found his fable in a translation of the Panchatantra stories. In those stories, the characters were indeed a bear and a gardener.
Older Indian Versions
The story originally comes from India. There are two even older versions with different characters:
- The Panchatantra version features a king's pet monkey. The monkey tries to hit a gnat with a sword and accidentally kills its master. The lesson here is: "Do not choose a fool as a friend."
- The Masaka Jataka from Buddhist scriptures tells of a carpenter's foolish son. He tries to hit a fly on his father's head with an axe. The lesson from this story is: "An enemy with sense is better than a friend without it." This is the same idea La Fontaine used to end his fable.
A different version appeared in Rumi's long poem, the Masnavi, from the 1200s. It tells of a kind man who saved a bear from a snake. The bear then felt loyal to its rescuer and accidentally killed him in the same way as the fable.
Other Oral Stories
There are even more versions of this story told by people, passed down through generations.
- In Pakistan, there's a story about "The Seven Wise Men of Buneyr." One of them tries to shoo flies from an old woman. He throws a stone and accidentally knocks her over.
- In Europe, there's a story about a foolish person who breaks a judge's nose with a stick while trying to get rid of a fly. In Italy, this is told about a character named Giufà. In Austria, it's about Foolish Hans.
- A similar event also appears in Giovanni Francesco Straparola's tale of Fortunio. This was written around 1550 in his book Facetious Nights. This collection contains the first known versions of several other European folk tales.
Art Inspired by the Fable
Because the fable comes from Eastern sources, it has been a very popular subject in Muslim miniatures from the East. These small, detailed paintings often show the bear with the stone raised in its paws.
- One example is in a 1663 copy of the Masnavi at the Walters Art Museum (you can see an image above).
- Another Persian illustration from a bit later also shows this scene.
- A watercolor painting from India, made by Sital Das around 1780 and now in the British Library, shows the bear looking at the gardener after he has killed him.
- Another Indian miniature was made in 1837 by Imam Bakhsh Lahori for a French fan of fables. It is now in the Musée Jean de la Fontaine and shows the bear in a beautiful garden.
Many Western artists have also illustrated La Fontaine's fable.
- Artists like Jean-Baptiste Oudry and Gustave Doré created illustrations for entire editions of La Fontaine's fables.
- However, Jean-Charles Cazin's 1892 oil painting, L'ours et l'amateur des jardins, doesn't even show the bear! It's a landscape painting of a southern farm with the old gardener sleeping in the front. An etching of this painting was made in 1901.
- Other art series that include the fable are the unique watercolors by Gustave Moreau from 1886.
- The colored etchings by Marc Chagall from 1951 also feature the fable, with L'ours et l'amateur des jardins being number 83 in his series.
- Finally, Yves Alix (1890–1969) made a lithograph of the fable for a special edition of 20 Fables in 1966. This book included works by many modern artists.
