# The Oak and the Reeds

_Aesop_ · 2 min read · ages 4-9

A gale throws a great oak clean across the stream in the night, and the reeds on the bank beside him stand unbroken. The oak asks the reeds how they came through the storm, and they tell him they never fight: whenever a breeze comes, however small, they bow down and let it by, so the gale goes over their heads.

---

On the bank of a river grew an oak, broad and heavy and very old. For as long as anyone could remember he had stood in that one place, and nothing had ever moved him.

Then a gale came down the valley in the night, the kind of wind that comes once in a lifetime. It caught hold of the oak, tore him up by the roots, and flung him clean across the stream.

In the morning he lay there with his branches trailing in the water. All along the bank beside him stood the reeds, as thin as they had always been, and not one of them was broken.

The oak looked at them for a long time.

“I do not understand it,” he said at last. “You are so frail and so slender that a child could snap you between two fingers. How did you come through that storm, when I, with all my strength, have been torn up by the roots and thrown into the river?”

The reeds bent their heads toward him.

“You were stubborn,” they said. “You stood where you were and fought the storm, and the storm turned out to be stronger than you.”

They swayed a little as they spoke, the way reeds do.

“We never fight. Whenever a breeze comes, however small it is, we bow down and let it by. So last night we lay down flat, and the gale went over our heads and did us no harm at all.”

**Moral:** Knowing when to give way will save you where strength on its own will not.

---

- Read online: https://talerie.com/en/tales/the-oak-and-the-reeds
- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q17066408
- Tale type: ATU 298C*, Perry 70 (per Wikidata)
- Source: Aesop's Fables: a new translation, tr. V. S. Vernon Jones (1912) (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11339)
- Public-domain basis: Talerie contemporary retelling (CC0 2026), based on: Aesop's Fables: a new translation, tr. V. S. Vernon Jones (1912) — translation: author died 564 BC (+70 passed); translator V. S. Vernon Jones died 1955 (+70 passed)
- License: CC0-1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)