The Lion and the Mouse

I came away from class yesterday mulling over our discussion about Henryson doing more than just translation . It makes sense that he would want to make Aesop's fables accessible to speakers of English (or maybe I should say Middle Scots), but also that there was more to his project than just translating - that he himself was also trying to say something about the world he lived in. I thought the moralitas of The Lion and the Mouse was an interesting place to look for this. According to Wikipedia (sorry), the moral of the original fable was simply "Little friends may prove great friends." Henryson's moral is much more complicated. He writes about the lion as a prince, emperor or king and the mice as his subjects, or "common folk," which seems like a pretty blatant political statement and possibly a critique of (and threat to) nobles who don't appreciate the value of their subjects. It was especially interesting that this fable was part of a dream vision that was part of the larger fable, and that the moralitas came from Aesop himself as he appeared in Henryson's (or the narrator's) vision - maybe this was a way for Henryson to avoid putting himself out there as a critic of powerful members of society?