THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORY35allegory comes in no small part through the association of the wolf with
actual wolves, which in medieval Europe were reviled and exterminated
as slaughterers of livestock. The tale thus reflects the very real behavior
of wolves in capturing and devouring prey, and that lambs have always
been easy pickings. This natural act of predation also produces genuine
horror on the part of people familiar with the actual animals, which the
tale also reflects.
Rather than being a straightforward allegory in which the wolf stands
in for human tyrants, the poem presents conflicting realms of natural,
human, and holy law. The conflict is most clearly suggested when the
wolf gives up on his attempt to debate with the lamb and instead insists
upon his right to “wrang” and “reif ” (that is, to wrong and plunder),
asserting both his natural right and his awareness that it violates the kind
of law that the lamb argues for. The wolf ’s final reply to the lamb is that
“thow wald Intruse ressoun / Quhair wrang and reif suld dwell in
propertie” (2693–94; you would be inserting reason where villainy and
ill-doing should rightly rule). The wolf accuses the lamb of “fals tress-
oun” (2695) for appealing to laws that are merely the current custom of
the land, as though violating a basic right of wolves to kill lambs. The
wolf ’s insistence implies that the laws of (human) culture are temporary
and superficial in contrast to laws of the natural world. This break in
the allegory allows readers to remember that these characters are ani-
mals and not the human or holy characters they are also playing, that
wolves do actually kill lambs. While the narrator, in offering his extended
interpretation of what the lamb and wolf “may signifie,” insists on list-
ing the kinds of abusive masters the wolf represents, he also collapses
the hierarchy of the allegory in speaking directly to “thow grit Lord” to
“be nocht ane wolf, thus to devoir the pure,” (2763–64) and then imme-
diately to God to “keip the Lamb” (2765). Here the “Lord” may be
tyrant, king, God, reader, and wolf. The “Lamb” may refer to Jesus,
reader, the poor, and the actual lamb. Thus, while this animal-fable
poem at first seems rigidly categorical, a closer examination reveals
how closely and complexly these categories are tied together, and that
they collapse into each other. Its most obvious meanings have to do with
relations between the powerful and the weak in the human world, but it