The Tortoise and the Hare | Bedtime Stories for Kids

"The Tortoise and the Hare" is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 226 in the Perry Index.[1] The account of a race between unequal partners has attracted conflicting interpretations. It is itself a variant of a common folktale theme in which ingenuity and trickery (rather than doggedness) are employed to overcome a stronger opponent.

The story concerns a Hare who ridicules a slow-moving Tortoise. Tired of the Hare's arrogant behavior, the Tortoise challenges him to a race.[2] The hare soon leaves the tortoise behind and, confident of winning, takes a nap midway through the race. When the Hare awakes however, he finds that his competitor, crawling slowly but steadily, has arrived before him. The later version of the story in La Fontaine's Fables (VI.10), while more long-winded, differs hardly at all from Aesop's.[3]

As in several other fables by Aesop, the lesson it is teaching appears ambiguous. In Classical times it was not the Tortoise’s plucky conduct in taking on a bully that was emphasised but the Hare’s foolish over-confidence. An old Greek source comments that 'many people have good natural abilities which are ruined by idleness; on the other hand, sobriety, zeal and perseverance can prevail over indolence'.[4] When the fable entered the European emblem tradition, the precept to ‘hasten slowly’ (festina lente) was recommended to lovers by Otto van Veen in his Emblemata Amorum (1608), using a relation of the story. There the infant figure of Eros is shown passing through a landscape and pointing to the tortoise as it overtakes the sleeping hare under the motto “perseverance winneth.”[5] Later interpreters too have asserted that the fable's moral is the proverbial 'the more haste, the worse speed' (Samuel Croxall) or have applied to it the biblical observation that 'the race is not to the swift' (Ecclesiastes 9.11).