Esop Thornpaw – Aesop’s Fables (Specifically The Lion with a Thorn In Its Paw)
https://www.wizard101central.com/wiki/NPC:Esop_Thornpaw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesop%27s_Fables
Esop Thornpaw lives on the edge of the Yundland Gulch in the Savannah. Wizards seek his help in lifting the evil curse on King Mansa. He also possesses a crucial piece of hardware needed to travel to Stone Town.
Aesop’s Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. Of diverse origins, the stories associated with his name have descended to modern times through a number of sources and continue to be reinterpreted in different verbal registers and in popular as well as artistic media. Some of the more popular fables are “The Goose Who Laid the Golden Eggs,” “The Mouse and the Frog,” and the one and only “The Tortoise and the Hare.”
The fables originally belonged to oral tradition and were not collected for some three centuries after Aesop’s death. By that time, a variety of other stories, jokes and proverbs were being ascribed to him, although some of that material was from sources earlier than him or came from beyond the Greek cultural sphere. The process of inclusion has continued until the present, with some of the fables unrecorded before the Late Middle Ages and others arriving from outside Europe. The process is continuous and new stories are still being added to the Aesop corpus, even when they are demonstrably more recent work and sometimes from known authors.
The US Library of Congress lists 146 of Aesop’s Fables along with interactive reading at this website.
https://read.gov/aesop/001.html
The current list of all the (known) Zafaria references are located here.
Although I am well versed in Pop Culture references, I do not claim to have caught them all. Let me know your favorites in the comments and if I’ve missed one you caught, let me know so I can add it to the list.
Text for this article is excerpted from the linked wiki pages
Esop Thornpaw image is from Wizard101, and is copyright of KingsIsle Entertainment.
Aesopus Moralisatus image is borrowed from Wikipedia and is in the public domain.
Image usage qualifies as fair use under US copyright law.
The cover of Aesop’s Fables The Classic Edition by The New York Times Bestselling Illustrator, Charles Santore published by Cider Mill Press is available from Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Aesops-Fables-Classic-Charles-Santore/dp/1604338105
Vulcan Stev’s Database make no money off of Amazon sales.
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