Tigers in literature and popular culture

Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?... William Blake, "The Tyger", Songs of Experience. The most anthologized poem in the English language. The word "tiger" is borrowed from Greek "tigris", itself borrowed from Persian word.American English "Tigress" was first recorded in 1611. Tiger's-eyes "yellowish-brown quartz" is recorded from 1891.

The tiger has certainly managed to appeal to man's imagination. Both Rudyard Kipling in The Jungle Book and William Blake in his Songs of Experience depict the tiger as a ferocious, fearful animal. In The Jungle Book, the tiger Shere Khan is the biggest and most dangerous enemy of Mowgli the uncrowned king of the jungle.

Even in the BillWatterson comic strip,Calvin and Hobbes Hobbes the tiger sometimes escapes his role of cuddly animal. At the other end of the scale there is Tigger the tiger from A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh stories, who is always happy and never induces fear. In the award winning A Tiger for Malgudi, a Yogi befriends a tiger. Rajah, a pet of the character Jasmine of Disney's animated feature film Aladdin, is uncharacteristically dog-like in its behavior, but even more oddly Tony the Tiger is renowned for his Frosted Flakes and may be the only cat, real or fictional, who thrives on a vegetarian diet.A stylized tiger cub was a mascot of the 1988 Summer Olympic Games of Seoul with the name "Hodori", and the tiger is one of the most chosen animals to be a mascot for sports teams, e.g. Major League Baseball team Detroit Tigers and English rugby club Leicester Tigers.

Humble Oil, a division of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (Jersey Standard), used a stylized tiger to promote gasoline and the slogan "Put a Tiger in your Tank". Jersey Standard adopted the use of a real tiger in its advertising when it took the Exxon name company-wide in 1972, and the brand kept the tiger mascot as a part of ExxonMobil when they merged in 1999. Most recently, Yann Martel won the Man Booker Prize in 2002 with his novel Life of Pi about an Indian boy castaway on the Pacific Oceanwith a Royal Bengal Tiger. In the Chinese novel Water Margin tigers appeared numerous times as attacking travellers. In the Wu Song story he became famous when slaying with his bare hands a tiger who had been terrorizing the local towns nearly a decade. In reality, wild tigers, being dwellers of the jungle, have rarely been found in larger human cities in China, where the idea of a tiger on the street can act as a symbol of paranoia or unfounded fear, giving rise to such idioms as three men make a tiger.The Tiger is one of the 12 Chinese Zodiac animals.In the popular children's book series. Animorphs, the Siberian Tiger is the favorite and battle morph of Animorphs leader Jake.

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