The real moral of the story

It’s not the early worm, it’s the horrendously shitfaced worm stumbling in after a night on the tiles. :stuck_out_tongue:

Of course, in the original Aesop fable of the grasshopper and the ant, the ant laughed his ass off while watching the grasshopper die of starvation.

Yeah. The grasshopper playing the fiddle through the winter was the Disney version. And he is at least playing for his supper.

In The Addams Family Morticia tells the story and Grandmama tells the kids the moral: “Kill the tortoise!”

You want the German version for a good moral, only it’s Hare and Hedgehog. How does the Hedgehog win against the Hare?

He cheats: he hides at one end of the field, his wife at the other. His wife pops up as the hare is racing and calls out “I’m already here”, since hedgehogs all look alike, the Hare thinks the male hedgehog beat him. The hare keeps running, trying to win, until in the middle of his 53rd run, he keels over from a heart-attack.

Moral: It’s okay to cheat if you are clever but slow against an only-muscles bragging but honest guy.

I recall they did the Grasshopper and the Ant story on The Muppet Show, with Sam the Eagle lauding the industrious, salt-of-the-earth Ant and tsking at the Grasshopper. “Shocking! Shocking!” But when he turned the page, the end of the story was: “When winter came, the Grasshopper drove his sports car to Florida, and the Ant got stepped on. WHAT?!”

That’s not the German version – it’s the African version of the story. You can find it in collections of African folktales about Hare. It migrated over to the Americas, where it shows up in American Black folklore and eventually in Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus stories. And from there it shows up in Tex Avery’s Bugs Bunny “Tortoise Beats Hare” cartoons.

I found it interesting that there are two distinctly different stories about how the tortoise beats the hare, one depending upon resolute plodding, the other on outright trickery.
I don’t know how the German version you cite got into this, but the roots of it in African folklore are pretty well established. I assume your version got it from one of the versions in the chain cited above. European folklore tends to derive the story ftom Aesop, who had the “slow and steady wins the race” philosophy. But the other story has made inroads through the years. Most recently it showed up in the film

Hot Fuzz

That’s news to me. I always knew it as one of the Grimms fairy-tales, which are considered the ultimate source (though they changed a lot of the fairy-tales during their compilation, to make them more “suitable” for children - apparently, that’s why there are so many step-mothers, so children wouldn’t get a bad impression of their real mothers).

German wikipedia says

Interesting are the comments that in the original version, the Hare is a high lord, who was arrogant, while the hedgehog is a simple farmer content to eat turnips. So the moral is to the high-ranking people “Don’t be arrogant to your inferiors” and for the common people “Take a wife from your own class that looks like you”.

Interesting – I was unaware that this shows up in Grimm. But it’s well-attested in both African folklore and in American Negro folklore (even outside of Harris). See Geoffrey Parrinder’s African Mythology or here:

Or John Mason Brewer’s American Negro Folklore.
I haven’t been able to find any accounts of the African version printed prior to 1840, but it seems extremely unlikely that it can derive from the German version – Hare and Tortoise are both trickster personalities in African folklore, and there are plenty of stories about them. Joel Chandler Harris’ version dates from circa 1880, and was obviously gathered well in advance of that date.

If the African version uses tortoises instead of a hedgehog, then I think the German version comes from a different source.

Hares and hedgehogs don’t appear much outside this fable in Grimm, so there’s no trickster personality there. In German / European folklore, the fox (Meister Reinecke) is generally the trickster. I can’t remember tortoises playing a role in other fables/ fairy-tales off-hand.

The interesting thing is, of course, that the German version developed although Aesops fable of Hare and tortoise would have been known to educated people, due to the reference of the classis and thus classic education studying Greek authors.

It might have been, despite being told in popular Platt dialect, an artifical fable or allegory, though - in the romantic period, people like Goethe or Beckstein wrote Kunstmärchen (artifical fairy-tales), very complicated and full of allusions, metaphors, allegory and so on.