‘Once upon a Time When Animals Spoke’: Theories of the Beast Fable

The beast fable evokes the bygone days in which animals spoke and conversed with humans. In the nineteenth century, this ancient literary genre attracted scholarly attention as an important anthropological key to the origins of humanity. This chapter discusses some of the principal theorists of the beast fable: F. Max Muller, Jakob Grimm, Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm Bleek, Edward B. Tylor and Richard F. Burton. The beast fable demarcated a hypothetical space in which one could dream of human-animal kinship, and even the possibility of animal language. At the same time, it came to embody the borders and intersections between species, races and languages, as its theorists drew much of their material from the contact zones of the British Empire.