Connections: Early Modern Edition

So....this might be a long shot. But I was reading my daily dose of the Bestaria Latina Blog and noted that one of today's proverbs is: Induis me leonis exuvium...you dress me in a lion's skin....

This is from Erasmus' Adagia and he there gives it two interpretations, one from myth, the other on fable. In mythology, Hercules is depicted draped in a lion's skin: the first task of Hercules' 12 was to kill the Nemean lion that had been terrorizing, well, Nemea. Hence the skin....imitated later by Alexander the Great, who stressed Herculean connections among others. But later, Hercules becomes reinterpreted as a type of Christ, and so there come to be Christological associations (sorry, an old Dante paper coming in there, but I digress.) Erasmus doesn't really go into that aspect though....

From fable, Erasmus notes Aesop's fable about the ass dressed as a lion. The donkeys note that they are whipped and treated badly by humans, but that humans fear lions. So they decide that they will go and put on lion's skins, and when people see them, they run away. Alas, the donkeys bray, the people realize when they see their feet that they have donkeys in lions' skins and not lions, and the lot of the donkeys is as bad if not worse than previously.

So....now we come to C. S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. The last book, The Last Battle opens with Shift the ape convincing Puzzle the Donkey that he should wear a lion's skin, improve his and everyone else's lot, and imitate the Narnian Christ figure Aslan. Puzzle, simple though he is, goes along at first and by the time his misgivings come to the fore, it is too late.

I'm sure that others have been here before me, I'm a bit slow like ol' puzzle (hence the name of the blog). Now we have here I think the sources for this part of Lewis' tale. Lewis was familiar with Aesop, Dante, and Erasmus (he quotes them all often enough in his non-fiction that there is no doubt on the question). And Puzzle, like Hercules, is a type of Christ: the falsehood comes in when the type is passed off as the real thing. And of course we have donkeys in lion's skin, just as the fable. And we have both together in the same context just as in Erasmus.

A nice set of connections: a chance reading of a blog entry on a daily Latin fable, brings me to Erasmus who brought me to Greek myth, Christian typology and my beloved Dante (oh, yes, I love my Dante!), and Erasmus, and finally, Lewis. Well done, Jack, well done.