The Frog and the Mouse

"The Frog and the Mouse" is one of Aesop's Fables and exists in several versions. It is numbered 384 in the Perry Index. There are also Eastern versions of uncertain origin which are classified as Aarne-Thompson type 278, concerning unnatural relationships. The stories make the point that the treacherous are destroyed by their own actions.

The basic story is of a mouse that asks a frog to take her to the other side of a stream and is secured to the frog's back. Midway across, the frog submerges and drowns the mouse, which floats to the surface. A passing kite picks it from the water and carries the frog after it, eventually eating both. Other versions depict them as friends on a journey together or else exchanging hospitality.

The story was variously interpreted in the Middle Ages. Odo of Cheriton‘s version does not demonstrate treachery but only foolish association; through trusting to the frog’s offer, both lose their lives when the kite swoops upon them. The moral ballade based on the story by Eustache Deschamps demonstrates “How gentle words are frequently deceptive”. The mouse is escaping famine and accepts the frog’s offer to tow it across the river; the story then continues as Ysoppe dit en son livre et raconte (according to Aesop's account).Marie de France’s story is more circumstantial and concludes differently from most others. The mouse lives contentedly in a mill and offers hospitality to a passing frog. The frog then lures the mouse into crossing the stream on the pretense of showing her his home. While he is trying to drown his passenger, the pair are seized by the kite, who eats the frog first because it is fat. Meanwhile, the mouse struggles free of its bonds and survives.

At the start of the 15th century, the poet John Lydgate expanded Marie's story even further. The most significant additional detail is the mouse's moralising on the happiness of being satisfied with one's lot. It is as a result of this that the frog is preferred by the kite for its fatness, since the virtuous mouse, being content with little, is 'slender and lean'. Lydgate's account was followed by two more vernacular versions. In William Caxton's collection of the fables, it is a rat on pilgrimage who asks the frog's help to cross a river. A Scottish poem under the title The Paddock and the Mouse appears among Robert Henryson's Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian and is an expanded version of Eustache Deschamps’ version, in the course of which the frog offers to carry the journeying mouse over to the grain fields on the stream's other bank. Henryson interprets the tale in his concluding ballade, making the point that “Foul mind is hid by words both fair and free” and that it is better to be content with one's lot “Than with companion wicked to be paired”.

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