The Bear and the Fool
A Bear's Love
Masnavi II.2124–2130 · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1926The man fell asleep, and the bear kept driving the flies away, but in spite of him they soon came back again.Several times he drove them from the youth’s face, but soon they came hurrying back once more.The bear was enraged with the flies and went off. He picked up a very big stone from the mountain-side.He fetched the stone, and saw the flies again settled comfortably on the face of the sleeper.He took up that millstone and struck at the flies, in order that they might retire.The stone made powder of the sleeping man’s face, and published to the whole world this adage—.“The love of a fool is for sure the love of a bear: his hate is love and his love is hate.”
- First attested
- 1278No autograph survives. The oldest witness is the Qoniya manuscript (G), “transcribed in A.H. 677-A.D. 1278”, five years after Rūmī's death. Nicholson's 1926 translation of Book II was not made from it; his 1930 Appendix lists where G differs, and within the lines quoted here it differs once, at v. 2124: “Read driving away the flies (which were) on him.” Earlier in the tale, at v. 1970, G has the valiant man “remove” rather than “rescue” the bear. The verse is given as Nicholson printed it in 1926.
- Claimed
- the 1260sasserted by Rūmī's own date at Masnavi II.7, in the proem to Book II: “The date of beginning this gainful (spiritual) traffic was in the year six hundred and sixty-two” — A.H. 662, which ran from November 1263 to October 1264. Book II therefore cannot be earlier, and the proem's first line says the poem had been “delayed for a while” after Book I.
The fool of the tale begins as its hero. The man who saves the bear is introduced at II.1932–1934 as a type of the “valiant (holy) men” who “hear the cry of the oppressed and run in that direction, like the mercy of God”; his folly is not the rescue but the trust that followed it.
Nicholson, The Mathnawí of Jalálu'ddín Rúmí, vol. II (1926), Book II, vv. 1931–1941, and vv. 2010–2035.
A man trusts the bear he saved from a dragon; it strikes at the flies on his sleeping face with a millstone.
Mathnawī II.1932–2130, a tale told in pieces; the lines here are its end, II.2124–2130. A dragon is dragging a bear into its jaws and a valiant man rescues it; the grateful bear follows him like the dog of the Men of the Cave and guards his sleep. A passer-by warns him — “Do not set your heart on a bear, O fool!” — and offers himself as a companion instead, but is suspected of envy and sent away. Rūmī breaks off repeatedly, once for Moses and the worshipper of the golden calf, before the ending: the bear, driving the flies from the sleeper's face, crushes it with a millstone. Nicholson's heading names the theme at the start: trust “in the fawningness and good faith of the bear”.
Light
It names a real danger exactly: not the enemy but the devoted friend without judgement, whose loyalty is sincere and whose help is lethal — “his hate is love and his love is hate”.
Shadow
The fool's error is to prefer a bear to “one of your own kind”, and the moral can harden into distrust of every unlike creature; and the man whose face the millstone crushes is the rescuer Rūmī first held up as a type of the “valiant (holy) men”.
