traditional fi gures for reading as a morally edifying
activity. First, he compares the diligent reader who can
glean “ane morall sweit sentence” (one pleasant, instruc-
tive moral; l. 11) from a fable to a gardener laboring to
grow fl owers and corn. Second, he invokes the com-
mon metaphor of the text as a nut waiting to be cracked
to reveal the kernel of meaning within. Finally, he justi-
fi es the pleasure one obtains from reading fables by
reminding his readers that a bow that is always bent
soon becomes warped and useless. Like the proverbial
bow, readers need relaxation, and fables can provide it,
while not losing sight of their moral teaching. These
repeated meditations on the fable as a genre suggest
that along with moral instruction, Henryson uses the
collection to explore the subject of poetics.
The fables of Morall Fabillis are themselves quite
diverse in their register, encompassing both the comic
and the tragic, the realistic and the fanciful. In their
diversity, Henryson’s fables have been compared to
GEOFFREY CHAUCER’s The CANTERBURY TALES, and there is
a note of a typically Chaucerian humor at the expense
of the animals’ pretensions. This connection between
the two works is reinforced by Henryson’s condensed
retelling of the same fable that is recounted in “The
NUN’S PRIEST’S TALE.” However, because of the limita-
tions of the fable genre, none of the animals in any of
the fables reaches the level of detailed characterization
of the Canterbury pilgrims.
In a similar vein, the narrator of the Morall Fabillis is
not nearly as clearly defi ned a character as the narrator
of The Canterbury Tales, but he is a presence through-
out the text, describing how he learned certain fables
by eavesdropping on the animals, or even, in the case
of “The Lion and the Mouse,” meeting Aesop and ask-
ing the master to teach him. Critics have focused on
the narrator’s developing character as key to under-
standing the didactic strategy behind the tales. Some
have argued that as the fables progress, the narrator
(and by extension the reader) learns different lessons.
This line of reasoning, however, is complicated by the
lack of agreement among the witnesses as to the cor-
rect order of the fables. Only three fables, “The Cock
and the Fox,” “The Fox and the Wolf,” and “The Trial
of the Fox,” demonstrate explicit internal links. Beyond
these three, the narrative thread linking individual
fables is quite thin, a situation that has led some critics
to posit that the tales of the Morall Fabillis should be
read less as a unifi ed collection that as a series of inde-
pendent poems.
The issue that has most engaged critics is the degree
to which the fables are connected to their morals. To a
modern reader, these allegorical explanations often
seem quite farfetched, suggesting that the moral is a
vestigial appendage that can be ignored. Perhaps the
most startling example of this apparent gap between
fable and moral comes in the fi rst fable, “The Cock and
the Jasp.” The fable recounts the story of a cock who,
while scratching for food, comes across a jasp (a jasper,
a semiprecious stone) and ignores the jewel since, he
sensibly points out, he cannot eat it, and therefore, it is
of no use to him. The moral roundly condemns the
cock for ignoring the stone since, the narrator explains,
the jewel represents wisdom and in rejecting it in favor
of worms and snails, the cock represents those humans
who reject the spiritual in favor of more immediate
pleasures. The idea that the cock is simply trying to
survive is not even broached. Other fables suggest a
similar disconnect between the story and its explana-
tion, although perhaps not to this degree. Critics have
approached this problem in several ways. One strategy
treats the perceived distance between fable and inter-
pretation as part of the author’s didactic strategy; that
is, in making the path between fable and meaning
somewhat convoluted, Henryson forces his readers to
examine their own reasoning on these moral issues. A
second strategy maintains that for a medieval audience,
there would be no disconnect between fable and mor-
als, arguing that such allegorical interpretations were a
common feature of both scholastic discourse and fra-
ternal sermons and thus would have been familiar to
the educated and uneducated alike.
The most promising recent readings of the Morall
Fabillis focus on this last approach and place the text in
a larger cultural context. In doing so, these critics seem
to be returning to an older mode of criticism that also
examined the text in its historical context. However,
where the older criticism mined the poems for bio-
graphical or political allusions, current contextual
readings recognize that the allegorical method Hen-
ryson employs in the Morall Fabillis precludes drawingMORALL FABILLIS OF ESOPE THE PHRYGIAN, THE 279