![]() His woodcut of the subject was to be reproduced there as a trencher, about the edge of which the gist of its moral is epitomised as needing to fear destruction of the soul rather than of the body. The illustrator of that book was Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, who eventually fled to England. Eduard de Dene's Dutch version of the tale makes an emblematic appearance under the title "A stout heart is the remedy for fear", where it is given a religious interpretation. In the first of these, he draws a parallel with human suffering and remarks that no-one really wishes to die in the shorter poem that follows, the conclusion is that learning to overcome our fears is part of growing up. Two Neo-Latin poems are dedicated to the fable by Hieronymus Osius in his collection of 1564. The Jewish version of Marie's near contemporary, Berechiah ha-Nakdan, makes the band of emigrants terrified even of the croaking of frogs at night before deciding to return home. In the story retold about 1190 in Marie de France's Ysopet, the hares have decided to move to another land but halt when they see frogs leaping into a pond to escape them and come to the conclusion that "never will they find a kingdom, or come to a place on this earth, where everyone may live without fear, work or sorrow". Seeing this, a more thoughtful hare calls off the decision to kill themselves if there are some creatures who can be frightened by hares, then their own lot cannot be as bad as they imagined. As they are dashing towards it, however, they disturb the frogs on the bank who all leap into the water. In some the hares are set in motion by the sound of wind in the leaves in others they call a meeting in which they come to the conclusion that their lives are so perpetually under threat that they may as well fling themselves into the river. There are several versions in both Greek and Latin. In the Aesopic fable of "The Hares and the Frogs" the stampede is more limited. A much later Western equivalent is the folk tale of Henny Penny, where the associated idiom is 'the sky is falling'. There the story is associated with the Indian idiom 'the sound the hare heard', meaning an impossibility. On hearing the sound of a falling fruit, a hare sets all the other animals fleeing in the belief that the earth was collapsing. The oldest form of a fable involving a stampede started by a hare appears in the form of a cumulative tale known in the Buddhist scriptures as the Duddubha Jataka (332). As well as having an Asian analogue, there have been variant versions over the centuries. The best known, often titled "The Hares and the Frogs", appears among Aesop's Fables and is numbered 138 in the Perry Index. Hares are proverbially timid and a number of fables have been based on this behaviour. Gustave Doré's print of La Fontaine's fable, 1867
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