The Hare and the Tortoise

The race between the hare and the tortoise carries number 226 in the Perry Index of Greek fables. The fox chooses the course and fixes the goal, a detail the older Greek versions also keep. This English wording is by the Reverend George Fyler Townsend, whose collection of three hundred fables appeared in London in 1867. Aesop is a half-legendary figure of the sixth century BC.

Where this text comes fromThe tortoise speaks first and the hare never answers. That is the whole structure of this version: an insult, a reply that turns the insult into a challenge, and then a race that settles it without another word exchanged. Townsend translated three hundred of these into English in 1867 and his phrasing is the one most British readers of the following century grew up with, which is why the wording feels older than it is.

What you might not noticeThe tortoise gets the only speech in the fable, delivered laughing, and it is the line that sets up everything after it. The hare is given no dialogue at all. Source

What it trainsQuotation marks open and close a piece of dialogue here, preceded by a colon, so the colon and the opening quote arrive two keystrokes apart and both need Shift. Fourteen capitals, ten of them inside sentences, because the second word is set entirely in upper case and the animals are named as proper nouns throughout. Six commas, one semicolon, four full stops. Three sentences average nearly thirty-one words, which is long for a fable and comes from the reply being packed into a single breath.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg