Henryson's Fox and Hary's Potter

A connection has been noticed between Hary’s Wallace and Henryson’s fox, but its implications have remained unconsidered.1 In his confession to ‘Ane worthie doctour of divinitie, / Freir Wolff Waitskaith’ (Fables, lines 666–7), the fox admits to imperfect contrition over his killing of lambs and hens: ‘For to repent my mynd can not concluid / Bot of this thing, that I haif slane sa few’ (lines 702–3).2 The moment recalls Wallace’s confession, just prior to his execution, to an English clerk: asked whether he asks for ‘Grace off our king’, Wallace utters a memorable rejoinder: Than Wallace smyld a litill at his langage. ‘I grant’, he said, ‘part Inglismen I slew In my quarell—me thocht nocht halff enew.’ (Book XII, lines 1383, 1384–6) Positing a link between Wallace’s slaughter of the Southron and Lowrence the fox’s depredations upon assorted farm animals fuels the conjecture that parody was an available option virtually from the outset of the reception of Hary’s epic.3 The step from Wallace’s exploits to the fox’s tricks need not be as extreme as it at first appears: irony and burlesque are not absent from Hary’s narrative, some of its mock-heroic touches having been noted, as in the use of the simile ‘like fire from flint’ to typify flight rather than fight (Book VII, line 1216, and X, line 52).4 Considering the recurrence of similarly ironic allusions in Henryson’s poems, Denton Fox observes, ‘Not often … can one point to any single poem which Henryson must have known’.5 It may be opportune to point to Wallace, to confirm its editor’s perception of Hary’s characteristic initiative and inventiveness in combining and elaborating materials from multiple sources, and to raise the possibility that Hary plays a decisive role in establishing these qualities at the centre of Scots poetic practice in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.6 Hary has received recognition for his interweaving of diverse sources: Barbour’s Bruce, Wyntoun’s Origynale Cronykil, Bower’s Scotichronicon, English romances such as The Siege of Melayne and Morte Arthure, and, not least, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Squire’s Tale, Troilus and Criseyde, Anelida, and Compleynt of Mars.7 Nicola Royan extols ‘the literary sophistication of Hary’s poem: its form, its intertextuality, and its other cultural allusions’.8 Encouraged by Walter Scheps and Alasdair MacDonald, one might belatedly develop Margaret Muriel Gray’s perception that Wallace plays a decisive role in opening certain kinds of intertextuality to poetic practice in late fifteenth-century Scotland,9 and not least in Henryson’s Fables.

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