SOURCE: Henderson, Arnold Clayton. “Having Fun with the Moralities: Henryson's Fables and Late-Medieval Fable Innovation.” Studies in Scottish Literature 32 (2001): 67-87.

In the essay below, Henderson examines the Henryson's equally fresh and inventive animal fable plots and their attendant moralization.

Fable and moral; entertainment and teaching. That dichotomous structure is so traditional for animal fables that when we look at so entertaining a fabulist as Robert Henryson we too easily assume that he put his creativity into the fable part, and that the moralizations are there because they are expected to be there. We might call them traditional, or pedantic, or even boring.

Not so. When you follow animal fables through the whole earlier Middle Ages (well beyond the one collection by Walter of England to whom Henryson is sometimes contrasted), you find that Henryson's moralizations are just as freshly treated as his plots. For him entertainment and instruction...