Robert Escobar

The Fox in Global Folk Tales Robert Escobar

This is the second installment in a series initiated with Children in Global Folk Tales. As mentioned in that volume, seemingly no previous folklore book or series had ever grouped stories by a single subject instead of by region, culture, or some larger grouping. Our approach allows for a cross-cultural survey of one specific thing as seen by many peoples. I have more entries planned and each will be a standalone work. After all, why would it be necessary to read about children in global folk tales before reading about the fox?
Speaking of our subject, this animal was never going to be an inhabitant of the planet overlooked by humanity. Its appearance and most of all behavior ensured people would think about it and in turn create stories about it. This trickster of the animal kingdom has of course been noted for its cunning and its ability to elude capture. These are admirable traits even if they were constantly deployed in a way that made the fox a problem for people, and not a trivial one. After all, the farms it purloined meals from were what people relied upon for their very survival. Quite a testament then to the fox's beguiling nature that it was often made a hero or anti-hero instead of a simple villain. You would be hard pressed to find evidence of the same regarding other classic predatory animals that constantly made it harder for people to feed themselves.
There is a grudging admiration for this small, sly beast in many of the stories you'll find in our subsequent chapters. It may deceive, steal, kill, and then do it again but it does so with a cleverness we can't help but chuckle at. So, yes, he is often a villain if an alluring one. At other times though, the fox is made the butt of the joke or loses in the end. It is difficult to not suspect that in these instances the storytellers were taking a bit of revenge on the fox in fiction as this was something difficult to manifest in reality. Sometimes the fox's missteps are due to a momentary and uncharacteristic lack of wits. Other times it is an abundance of greed. Finally, the fox can even be a force for good, at times no less than an agent of the divine. This last aspect goes all the way back to Mesopotamian myth where a fox is the messenger and emissary of the goddess Ninhursag. Therefore, the fox as story character is elusive, just like its real-life inspiration.