Sublime

stories?

huge wealth of subordinate stories, each of which has itself a beginning, a middle, and an end, but which do not in the aggregate display any single trend in the world depicted. These can be told for their own sake. They need not, perhaps cannot, be related to the central theological story of the human race.

As a migrant myself, I have always been fascinated by the migration of stories, and these jackal tales traveled almost as far as the Arabian Nights narratives, ending up in both Arabic and Persian versions, in which the jackals’ names have mutated into Kalila and Dimna. They also ended up in Hebrew and Latin and eventually, as The Fables of Bidpai,