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Of the celebrated inventor of the genre, Aesop of Thrace, medieval writers and compilers of fables knew little more than the name, from which derives the appellation Isopets of the French collections. Most medieval fables belong, in fact, in the Latin tradition of Phaedrus, a naturalized Roman of Thracian origin, whose name had been forgotten by the 10th century. The earliest French version of Aesop's fables appears to be Guillaume Tardif's rendering of Lorenzo della Valle's Latin translation of thirty-three Greek fables. Aesop's fables were eclipsed by Aesopic fables of the Phaedrean kind from the 10th to the 14th century. The case of Marie de France's fables illustrates that despite a long history of written transmission, the genre is fundamentally an oral one. It shares with popular songs, proverbs, riddles, and fairy and animal tales the common sources of folklore and has, like them, an essentially didactic purpose.