The Trickster of Two Continents

The fox as a figure of self-serving cleverness is old in Europe: Aesop's fox is the standard emblem of cunning, and Reynard the Fox is a cycle of satirical beast-tales circulating from the twelfth century, in which the fox outwits the powerful and exposes their hypocrisy. Judges 15 has Samson tie torches to the tails of three hundred foxes to burn the Philistines' fields. The European fox is a schemer but a worldly, this-worldly one, without the supernatural dimension the animal takes on further east.

Finnish folk tradition gives the fox a role in explaining a natural phenomenon far from its usual cunning: the Finnish name for the aurora borealis, revontulet, means fox fires, from an old belief that a fox running across the snowy fells threw up sparks with its tail, or in some tellings that its brush swept snow into the sky where it caught the moonlight, a folk etymology now embedded permanently in the modern Finnish word for the northern lights. The European red fox has become the world's most widely distributed wild land carnivore, helped by humans rather than by any cleverness of its own: settlers introduced it to Australia in the 1850s for recreational hunting, and within thirty years it had spread across every mainland state, a modern ecological success story entirely apart from the fox's old reputation as a schemer in fable.