“Think on the Bludy Serk:” Allegory and Figura in Henryson’s Minor Poem

Abstract

This essay analyzes the allegorical mode of the previously understudied poem by Robert Henryson, The Bludy Serk. In Serk, a knight saves a lady whom he loves from an evil giant, dying in the process. This story is then compared to the story of Christ's Passion, and the poem concludes by identifying the two stories as, in some sense, the same story. This narrative mode is best described using the concept of figura as understood by Erich Auerbach in his essay on the subject. Serk is the only poem in Henryson's corpus which seems to employ this manner of constructing its narrative(s) and is relatively unique among lyrical poems about Christ's Passion in the later Middle Ages. In this regard, it seems to be innovative, and merits future study by Henryson scholars and students of allegory alike.

Over the past three decades, many scholars have observed contradictions of sacred and secular content in medieval literature.¹ The interaction (and apparent incongruity) between themes, characters, and objects that are of this world, and those that are not, has been found “not simply arbitrary or odd, but instead a highly significant field of meaning” (Bolduc, 2006, p. 3). In her 2013 study, Barbara Newman reminds readers of medieval literature that “for us, the secular is the normative, unmarked default category, while the sacred is the marked, asymmetrical Other. In the Middle Ages, it was the reverse” (p. viii). She sees this attitude everywhere in medieval literature, arguing that it results sometimes in discomfiting clashes between what we would call incompatible sacred and secular meanings or genres:

If we wanted to give this rule a medieval name, we would call it the “sic et non principle.” Sometimes incompatible meanings simply collide—though the apparent necessity to choose between them may have been meant as a conscious device to provoke discussion (p. 8).

Studies like Newman’s have focused primarily on texts we call “secular,” acknowledging their admittedly deep, complex, and at times perplexing engagement with sacred content juxtaposed to the secular. This has been productive, but if the sacred really holds pride of place in the medieval literary imagination, then studying contradictions between sacred and secular in “sacred” texts is the logical next scholarly step. Nor must all studies of such “contraries” between secular and sacred conclude that they are only contrary.² In this paper, I propose a reading of reconciliation between secular and sacred that nevertheless does justice the tension between them, even in a text usually seen as “sacred” in function.

Robert Henryson’s corpus is an apt place put this method to the test. Most of his poetry is explicitly “moralizing,” and the morals he proposes are often directly concomitant with spiritualized ethics or theology. But this makes the interaction between secular and sacred no less marked at times to the modern reader of his poetic corpus. And, whereas his sometimes-puzzling juxtaposition of secular story and Christian/sacred moral in the Morall Fabillis has been studied at length, the rest of Henryson’s poetic corpus, especially his “minor poems,” have been infrequently discussed.³The Bludy Serk has been mentioned only a few times in Henryson scholarship, and fewer than half a dozen journal-length studies make it their focus.⁴ Most acknowledge the basic structure of The Bludy Serk as akin to Henryson’s other poems containing a moralitas. It is, interestingly, the only “minor” poem of Henryson’s to contain a moralitas.

Serk is classed as a passable attempt at devotional lyric, and little more has been said than that. But, though the genre of the fable⁵ is well discussed in Henryson scholarship, there remain other allegorical and adjacent forms that merit a more prolonged discussion. Henryson’s allegorical mode, or rather modes, are far from monolithic, and his minor texts often adopt unique and interesting structural means of reconciling contradictions between secular and sacred.

For my purposes, unless otherwise specified, I will use the term allegory in its broadest rhetorical sense, that of saying allos, expressing something more or different than what appears to be said.⁶ There is an abundance of scholarship focusing on the distinctions between the different particular shapes of allegory in popular works like The Faerie Queene or Piers Plowman.⁷ In Henryson studies most scholarship of allegory is directed at the Morall Fabillis, which exhibit a very particular kind of “allegory” that many scholars consider in a class of its own.⁸ But a similar variety in allegorical experimentation can certainly be found in Henryson’s broader poetic corpus, and the methodological distinctions between Henryson’s allegorical poems produces in each its own particular coloring. The inflamed zeal for religion that ends The Bludy Serk has a force altogether unlike the rather precise, yet confusing, moralitas attached to Orpheus and Eurydice without continuity in meter or diction. The Morall Fabillis are equally distinct from Serk, the Fabillis being a project to which many of Henryson’s minor poems are totally tangential.⁹

Here I identify The Bludy Serk as both unique in Henryson’s corpus, and unusual among Passion or Christ-as-lover-knight lyrics similar to it in theme. In both of these corpora, Serk’s difference is derived from using an allegorical mode akin to what Erich Auerbach calls figura in his famous essay on the subject. Serk is distinct in two ways from the other poems of Henryson’s corpus structured with an identifying moralitas (i.e., Orpheus and Eurydice and The Morall Fabillis). This narrative and the moralitas do not contain a basic story and an abstract moralizing sentence respectively, but rather two non-abstract grou**s of persons and events. Neither is the allegorical significance of the poem primarily linguistic: determined by a relationship between the language of the narrative and moralitas in the manner of metaphor and pun. Rather, the poem establishes a symbolic relationship between the things or quasi-historical events described by each half of the poem. These features show that the poem moves more toward figural signification than toward other varieties of allegory. Serk is distinct from other Passion or Christ- as-lover-knight lyrics because of the heavy narrative and quasi-historical weight of the story of the knight himself. This feature, again, is characteristic of figura. The story of the Passion of Christ recalled in the second half of the poem is enhanced not so much by abstractions or puns, but by a kind of secular history that has weight of its own and could exist almost in total independence from or contradiction to the Passion story. Indeed, it is deliberately kept separate through the barrier of the poem’s moralitas. This is unlike the more common pattern of fusing the story of the Passion and metaphors for the Passion consistently throughout a narrative. These observations will lend additional perspective to the many excellent studies of Henryson’s allegorical technique(s), and hopefully prompt further study of The Bludy Serk and other minor poems in Henryson’s corpus.

I

Serk begins like a popular romance or ballad, with a bard remembering (“I hard be tald” 1) a faraway kingdom with a great and ancient king.¹⁰ He has riches and retinue, and a beautiful daughter (1–8). No one surpasses the daughter in beauty; she bears herself unmistakably like her great father and is universally loved by princes in far-off lands (9–16). In a neighboring country, the king is an evil giant who kidnaps the daughter, casting her into his dungeon far from the light, where she hungers, thirsts, and freezes (17–24). The giant is uglier than any other creature and has nails like hell-crooks. He would destroy with abandon anyone he overtook (25–32). The giant holds the daughter captive, accepting no ransom. He insists that he will release her only if a worthy challenger fight him to the death (33–40). The king searches everywhere and finds a willing prince who, for the love of the lady, will fight as hard as he can (41–48). The prince proudly arrives in the town, fights the giant himself, and casts him into his own dungeon. He does so alone and fearlessly (49–56). He breaks open the lady’s chamber and restores her to her father, but the prince is woefully wounded. His shirt is bloody, and his body is a horrible sight (57–64). The lady is overwrought, crying and moaning. She would rather die than see how horribly wounded the knight is, for there is no one she loved like him (65–72). The knight says to her that he will surely die, and gives her his shirt for her to look upon should she ever be tempted to love another. She swears by Mary that she will do as he asks (73–80). The lady keeps the shirt, which reminds her always of him, especially when she is in health. She remembers how horribly the giant imprisoned her (81–88). The lady, the narrator interjects, loved her knight so well that she never took another man. This is how we should treat our own God and pray to him often (89– 96).

The moralitas then proceeds in three stanzas. The king is said to be like the Trinity, the lady is man’s soul, the giant is Lucifer. Christ is the lover knight, the dungeon is Hell, and sins against God are the potential wooers of the lady (97–104). The narrator reminds us that the lady was wooed but rejected her wooers; he then prays that we should do likewise with our sins, so that Christ will be our helper on doomsday (105–112). The narrator then recapitulates. The soul is God’s daughter and the work of his own hands. The soul was betrayed by Lucifer, who sits in Hell for his own sins. She was ransomed by God’s own “angell cleir,” that is, Christ. The narrator then ends with an injunction. For Christ’s love which paid dearly for us, we must look to the bloody shirt (113–120).

The narrative of the poem is in many ways quite straightforward. Affect towards the sacred is enhanced by bringing Christ’s Passion into an allegorical relationship to popular chivalric narrative tropes, i.e., secular subject matter.¹¹ This is certainly not unique, but the allegorical means by which Serk’s narrative accomplishes this end is unique in Henryson’s corpus, and atypical in the broader corpus of Passion lyrics. The Bludy Serk, unlike most Passion lyrics, and unlike the rest of Henryson’s corpus, seems to take advantage of certain narrative moves described by Auerbach in his famous essay, “Figura” (Auerbach 1984). For Auerbach, the modern literary term, figura arrives at its modern definition in the early Christian centuries, during which Old Testament histories begin to be regarded both as historically true, but also as signifying higher truths to be revealed in the Gospels and in the orthodox teachings of the Church (pp. 30–49). Thus, there are two necessary halves of figural allegory: the two apparently distinct, or even contradictory, narrative components are figure and fulfillment. Adam really did exist, but he also operates in a symbolic fashion as a figure for which Christ is the fulfillment.

Adam dies because of sin, but Christ dies to sin, and in rejection of it, contradicting and redeeming Adam’s first fall.¹² Auerbach is careful to distinguish figura from other “allegorical” modes. He argues that figura “differs from most of the allegorical forms known to us by the historicity both of the sign and what it signifies” (p. 54). This historical quality lends figura a certain kind of weightiness when imitated by medieval poets in quasi-historical forms. In the Divine Comedy, it is spiritually fruitful, making Dante’s Beatrice “a miracle sent from heaven, an incarnation of divine truth” (p. 74).

I propose that Serk ought to be read by using Auerbach’s theory of figura, which seems to aptly describe many aspects of the poem. For example, unlike all the other moralitates in Henryson’s corpus, the very first likenesses drawn in The Bludy Serk are entirely concrete and even personal. They are real beyond the poem and not treated as text-internal abstractions:

The king is lyk the Trinitie,

Baith in hevin and heir,

The manis saule to the lady,

The gyane to Lucifeir,

The knycht to Chryst that deit on tre

And coft our synnis deir,

The pit to hell with panis fell,

The syn to the woweir (97–104).

In all these cases, with the exception of the last, each likeness is a likeness of kind: the king and the Trinity are both persons (One or Three depending on perspective). Any or every man’s soul is the lady. The giant is Lucifer, and so on. What follows in the moralitas is not merely more names, but a new story that develops, with new personages whose deeds and characteristics are likened and compared to those of the characters in the first narrative of the poem. In the next stanza, the narrative of the lady (man’s soul) blends seamlessly into an invocation of Christ (the lover knight):

The lady was wowd, bot scho said nay

With men that wald hir wed;

Sa suld we wryth all syn away

That in our breist is bred.

I pray to Iesu Chryst verrey,

For us his blud that bled,

To be our help on domysday.

Quair lawis ar straitly led (105–112).

The simplicity of Henryson’s style has been named an indicator of “crude sketching of character” (Kinghorn, 1965, p. 32). But, of course, the careful equivocations made between the persons of the first narrative of the poem and the poem of the moralitas allow even the simple person of the lover knight to be implicitly enriched by all the theological and devotional complexities of Christ and the salvation that comes through his death on the cross.¹³

When compared to Orpheus and Eurydice,¹⁴ the peculiarity of Serk’s mode becomes clearer. Orpheus recounts the traditional story of the musician and Eurydice, directing attention to Orpheus’ genealogy and journey through the celestial spheres while learning their musical modes. His subsequent encounter with Pluto and bargaining for the return of his wife follow classical models. In the long moralitas that follows, the narrative is revealed to be a story useful for describing the abstract concept of the human soul. The very first characters of Orpheus’ first narrative become abstractions of the parts of the mind:

… Orpheus …

… callit is the part intellectiue.

Of mannis saule and vnder-standing,

Free and separate fra sensualitee.

Erudices is oure affection,

Be fantasy oft movit vp and doun … (427–432).

The action that then proceeds is always a mere summary of the action of the first narrative, not a new narrative mapped onto another narrative. The persons of the moralitas in Orpheus are replaced by psychological abstractions that are applied by careful substitution. Not unlike the mode of a psychomachia, the abstractions have clear, discursive, and perhaps reductive function.¹⁵ There is no obvious direct or universal correspondence between the characters of Orpheus and the moralitas that concludes the poem—a feature that has been frowned upon by critics.¹⁶ Though there is a tradition of reading the Orpheus myth in such a way, the allegory of Aristaeus the rapist as human reason remains to most commentators arrestingly strange.¹⁷ In Serk, each aspect of a character or action in the main narrative tends to correspond neatly with part of the moralitas. Henderson (2009, p. 81) observes a narrative move in the Fabillis which could also be aptly applied to Orpheus:

Henryson neither ignores the ironic clash he so often sets up between narrative and moralization, nor does he notice it and revise it away. Instead, he enjoys it. He heightens it. He prepares for it. He weights his narrative text one way, then snaps us back in the moralization.

Serk does not produce or enjoy this tension, it seems. Its effect is gradual and cumulative, creating tension perhaps by delaying the Passion narrative (which I will discuss later), but not by resisting harmony between the Passion and lover knight narratives.

More alike to Orpheus and Eurydice than The Bludy Serk is the moral structure of The Morall Fabillis. The Fabillis differ from Orpheus in being beast fables, but they form the locus in scholarship for studies of this same kind of selective signification. In fact, Mann (2009, p. 4) argues that “it is misleading to classify beast fable as allegory” at all. This is because fable “is not in itself metaphorical; its meaning is not arrived at by correlating the features of the narrative with some other area of experience, but by marking the conclusion of the action and the terse generalizations that sum up its (non-metaphorical) ‘moral”.’

Henryson’s fables and moralities, contrary to their appearance,¹⁸ are not analogies in the sense of being two propositions each with obvious essential similarities to the other that reinforce their relationship. They are non-metaphorical—to use Mann’s terms. Rather, the moral of a fable is given poignancy by being drawn from a narrative that sets up expectations for a moral, or a more straightforward allegory, which is very different from what Henryson provides. This mode of signification has its merits,¹⁹ but is quite distinct from the figurative allegory of The Bludy Serk.

If we were to create a spectrum of Henryson’s moralitates, those of the Fabillis would be most distant from the moralitas of Serk. Unlike the two full and potentially self-subsistent narratives²⁰ of Serk, the moralitates of the Fabillis are both dependent on the narratives that each precede them and are also interpreted incorrectly if we “depend on making a direct connection between moral evaluation and animal behaviour” (Mann, 2009, p. 5). The morals of the Fabillis (which are themselves abstracted from narrative-independent realities) make the story, not the other way around. The moral of Orpheus needs a story from which to abstract and derive its value, but its story’s own internal unity is displaced to serve the moral when necessary. It does not matter that Aristaeus is a rapist—this unpleasant reality is sublimated into the more important moral abstracted from it. The moral of The Bludy Serk is, in a sense, not even moralizing (though very moral), because its function is not to present us with philosophical abstractions, but rather to show kinship (and at times an exact identity) between two stories.

Serk shows deference to its first story and does not exaggerate its incongruities with the moral. Rather, it smooths them and deliberately focuses on reconciling two very distinct stories. This interpretive move seems unmistakably and deliberately similar to figural interpretations of scripture.²¹ Mann notes in the quotation above that beast fable lacks the power to analogize, to be “metaphorical” (2009, p. 4). This ability to identify (or create) analogy is one important function of figura, as Auerbach understands it. A figure and its fulfillment are ontologically united even before language: they are “copy and archetype” (1984, p. 49). His view is of course quite akin to important scholastic treatments of this kind of allegory, including Thomas Aquinas’s:

The author of [all] things can not only make use of words to signify something, but can also arrange for things to be figures of other things. Because of this the truth is made plain in sacred Scripture in two ways. In one way insofar as things are signified by the words: and this is the literal sense. In another way, by virtue of the fact that things and events [res] are figures of other things: and this is what the spiritual sense consists in (Turner, 1995, p. 344).²²

Denys Turner elucidates the distinction thus: “Allegory, [St. Thomas] says, is not strictly speaking, as metaphor strictly speaking is, a layer of textual meaning at all” (2011, p. 80). This is a distinction of some importance, because many modern definitions of allegory rest to some degree on an assumption that there is a textual or “literal” relationship between the senses of an allegory, and that this is the primary one.²³

Allegory in this school of thought is textual and dependent partly on textual or linguistic analogy or abstraction rather than the actual analogous relationship between res. Quilligan (1979, p. 42) explains the allegorical phenomenon as a kind of “literalism,” indebted to play on the existing senses of words and phrases:

“Mimicking not life but the life of the mind, the poet has less recourse to models of action in the phenomenal world; he will therefore need that system of signs which retrieves for us the process of intellection … language itself becomes the focus of attention, rather than the action language describes”.

In other words, the kind of allegory described by Quilligan is not metaphor as Mann (2009) describes it. Rather, it is part of the literal meaning of a text, part of the natural semantic scope of the words used and their manipulation by an author. It is an analogy between words, not things. The Bludy Serk, like Sacred Scripture, relies not on the use and juxtaposition of words primarily, but rather the use and juxtaposition of the res, the things and events they signify, to create allegorical meaning. To have this kind of allegory, there must be something different than clever play with words: there must be two sets of things or events that contribute to each other’s meaning. Serk provides these, using the language of the text to point to realities that hypothetically exist prior to and outside the text. The usual onomastic allegories sometimes found in preaching and popular theology²⁴ are missing here, as are puns and aureate diction, though numerous theological points are present.

The fox of “The Fox and the Wolf” in The Morall Fabillis is an example of linguistic allegory. He relies on a play on words to baptize a kid-goat as his food (747–752).²⁵ He has previously gone to confession for eating meat and is asked to eat none till Easter as his penance (691–697). He is absolved, but clearly was not contrite, and goes on to dunk an abducted kid in a river, using a parody of the baptismal formula to “change” him to a salmon (751). The fox relies on language to effect a change that he wishes, which is of course not ratified by God, but does allegorize his desire to change the delicious kid into a fish as a kind of baptism. There is no real or substantial analogy between his desire to eat the kid and the baptismal desire of a Christian, but his language and accompanying dunking of the lamb brings the lamb into a new symbolic order on the level of a pun or (linguistic) metaphor. He imitates sacramental or scriptural language, but he is only enacting the transformation at the level of wordplay.²⁶Serk rather explores analogies like that between God the Father and a human king and father because it suggests a real analogy in the res of God the Father and human fathers and kings, regardless of linguistic relationships between the two.

The mode of Orpheus and Eurydice’s moral is in, again, a bit of a middle ground. Though there are not two sets of persons and events placed side-by-side, the Orpheus moral attempts to apply abstractions to actual events in a more-or-less systematic fashion. Nonetheless, the abstractions remain abstractions, and they are of dubious value. This leads some to conclude that the structure of Orpheus “does not necessarily imply that Henryson was particularly interested in the ‘moral,’ [though] it does add to the impression that he did not especially care for the story” (Giaccherini, 2002, p. 6). Some have even doubted the authenticity of the whole text, with one scholar claiming that “the Moralitas of ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ was not, or at least not in its major parts, written by Henryson” (Strauss, 2001, p. 10). At any rate, the difficulty in interpreting the moralitas of Henryson’s Orpheus is clear: it does not match the story well at first blush. Like a fable, it has no full and direct connection between the moral and all the aspects of the narrative preceding it. There is no obvious attempt to provide such a connection. In a certain sense, the meaning of the moral is destructive, resisting moral evaluation of some parts of the prior narrative, and only enriching a portion of what remains. This is again quite unlike the mutually enriching story and moral of The Bludy Serk.

II

As I have shown, The Bludy Serk is quite distinct from the other poems with a moralitas in Henryson’s corpus. But how, one might wonder, does the idea of “contraries” fit into this argument? Are these two stories distinct enough to merit the use of the term “contrary?” The two stories certainly seem to “[exist] between two spiritual poles,” i.e., the sacred and secular, and therefore produce a kind of “generic hybridity,” to use Bolduc’s terms (2006, p. 2). In addition, Brittain-Bouchard argues that much of the medieval interest in contraries seems to involve making a unity from this hybridity: “‘things that are in opposition,’ may still find ‘agreement’ even while maintaining their separate status” (2003, p. 12).²⁷Serk must maintain this separate status in its two stories—just as The Morall Fabillis so obviously exhibit this separation—for Serk’s structure to be truly akin to Auerbach’s figura. Its story and moralitas must be truly distinct, even if they find agreement. The pair of figure and fulfillment implies that the two stories are separable, not simply descriptions of each other. To use my earlier scriptural example: Adam cannot be a prefiguration of Christ if his story is merely a clever transposition of the language of Christ’s story. There must also be a difference, a contrariety between the two stories, for there to be figura.

I argue that there is figura in The Bludy Serk. The poem’s narrative exerts prolonged effort to make the story of the lover-knight robust and potentially separable from the story of Christ and his Passion. It is the only short-form poem by Henryson that contains a distinct moralitas, establishing a firm boundary between the stories it intends to compare. And, indeed, the story of the lover knight seems the primary story under consideration in the poem, though the moralitas still has its own narrative contours. Serk can claim to be using figural allegory because of the separation of its first and second stories, rather than being an allegory of abstractions or “obscure illustrations of philosophical doctrines” (Auerbach, 1984, p. 54). This quality also distinguishes Serk from other lyrics with similar aims to increase devotion to Christ’s Passion. Most Passion poetry (usually lyrical) in the late medieval British Isles is more akin in its structure to the metaphors used by St. Paul, as in his letter to the Ephesians:

Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God (Eph 6: 14–17).²⁸

Woolf acknowledges the predominance of metaphors like these (Woolf 1962, p. 5). when assessing stories of Christ as a knight wooing a lady who signifies the corporate Church or an individual soul, Woolf observes:

Since the point of the exemplum was the lady’s response to the knight, stress naturally fell either upon the prelude to the battle or upon the subsequent events. Narratives of the first kind are by far the rarer.

Woolf finds narratives of the first kind in the Ancrene Riwle, which contains a prelude narrative to the Passion itself,²⁹ and a lesser-known sermon in Harley 7322. She claims these are “unique amongst known texts in putting the stress upon the knight’s wooing before the battle” (1962, p. 6). Though the passage in the Ancrene Riwle does begin with separated stories, both it and the sermon primarily use metaphorical descriptions of certain events or characteristics within the Passion story. A popular and more narratively sustained example of this metaphorical method is the well-known Passion narrative in Passus XVIII of Piers Plowman:

Oon semblable to the Samaritan, and somdeel to Piers the Plowman,

Barefoot on an asse bak bootless cam prikye,

Withouten spores other spere; sprakliche he loked,

As is the kynde of a knight that cometh to be dubbed,

To geten hym gylte spores on galouches ycouped.

Thanne was Feith in a fenestre, and cryde ‘A! Fili David!’ (Schmidt, 2003, 306. XVIII.10–15).

There is no attempt to make this knight a distinct character. He and Christ are one, simpliciter. The language of chivalry is merely a means to look with a secular eye at Christ as he approaches his Passion, providing that “familiarity” Woolf observes in religious lyrics in her monograph on the same subject (1968, p. 24). This is the standard allegorical method for the few examples of long passion preludes, as in the Ancrene Riwle and the Harley 7322 sermon.

Serk, rather, works primarily by providing information in the story that is analogous to, but not a simple stand-in for, the Passion story to come in the moralitas. The existence of the moralitas itself suggests separation. The lover-knight narrative is not self-interpreting: it must be attached to its fulfillment story to make its entire intended meaning clear. The king of the first narrative is not the Trinity, but “lyk the Trinitie, / Baith in hevin and in heir” (97–98, my emphasis). All the same, this simple likening of persons does much to point to the analogy between the two narratives. It is unsurprising that the king had at his bidding “Dukis, erlis, and barronis bald” (3) and was a lord “anceane and ald” (5). The heavenly hosts of the Ancient of Days would be the higher kind of such an entourage. The next stanza, about the king’s daughter, is a bit more obscure:

Off all fairheid scho bur the flour,

And eik hir faderis air,

Off lusty laitis and he honour,

Meik bot and debonair;

Scho wynnit in a bigly bour,

On fold wes none so fair,

Princis luvit hir paramour,

In cuntries our-allquhair (9–16).

This description would not strike any overt theological notes in a mere romance, but it is carefully linked to a theology of the human soul in the moralitas. The lady/soul is “Godis dochtir deir, / And eik his handewerk” (113–114). The soul has “he [high] honour” and is the “heir” of her father because she is the imago dei and is the inheritor to both God’s creation before the Fall, and his redemption and shared heavenly life after the Resurrection. The femininity of the daughter, while kee** its straightforward biological role in the first narrative, grows in its sense in the second: female not only by birth, but by creation, because she is created by the Father (like Eve from Adam). Now the soul can be both the “paramour” saved by the knight and the created soul that Christ saves. This juxtaposition also reminds us that Christ is married: not to a woman, but to the Church, which contains all Christian souls.³⁰

Constantly, then, the stories are placed in apparent isolation, and then reconciled to each other. Christ as a lover-knight is a well-developed trope by Henryson’s time, so there was ample theological material to support such comparisons (Gray, 1972, pp. 122–145). But Serk resists the easy course of ever fully reducing one story into the other and totally dissolving the tension, for example, within the near identity of the daughter and the soul, and their ultimate distinctness from each other. Peek (1972, p. 200) even argues that in Serk, “Henryson has really created two separate and distinct stories.” This is nearly the case. Nevertheless, the first story, the figure, frequently implies or points toward its fulfillment. After the first three stanzas present the daughter of the king and later human soul, the fourth stanza, already, makes a reference to salvation history. The giant who kidnaps the king’s daughter,

wes laithliest on to luk.

That on the grund mycht gang,

His nailis lyk ane hellis cruk,

Thairwith fyve quarteris lang (25–28).

The mention not merely of Hell, but of a crook of hell, as if an evil parody of shepherd’s crook, has forced into our mind the possible giant’s analogy to the demonic: he can be read as a satanic persona and a figure of Christian Hell. Already, a Christian sub- or super-narrative begins to break out of the ostensibly secular opening narrative.

Three stanzas later, with the prince set forth and in the throes of combat, we find another Christian reference, this time Christological:

That prince come prowdly to the toun,

Of that gyane to heir,

And fawcht with him his awin person

And tuke him presoneir (49–52).

Though the knight’s narrative is sufficient on its own, this diction suggests these lines can be read also as figural, with a sacred fulfillment. Schweitzer (1980, p. 169) observes that:

Henryson’s narrative thus reveals that this is no ordinary combat … by pointing to its underlying meaning as it shows captivity led captive in the detail of the giant cast into his own dungeon and made to suffer what the lady has suffered (my emphasis).

Schweitzer is paraphrasing from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, itself quoting the Psalmist: “When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men” (Ephesians 4:8). This Christological sense is brought about by the poem’s diction and placement of narrative events.

A much more obvious sacred significance in the first narrative is the oath of the lady when the knight begs her to look always at his shirt any time she is wooed: “The lady said, ‘Be Mary fre,/ Thairto I mak a wow!’” (79–80) Even in its religious sense, this vow seems commonplace and clumsy compared to the very well-integrated religious allusions discussed earlier. But this is in fact a more perfect integration of two senses. The first is simply a banal oath that must have been used throughout medieval Scotland with little consequence (though perhaps with some sense of blasphemy). But there is a second sense articulated by this vow: it references the role of intercessor and mediatrix that Mary assumes in Christian theology.³¹ As commonly as meaningless oaths to Mary were being made in the streets, there were likely exhortations made from all the pulpits in Scotland to make good prayer to the Lord “be Mary fre.”

This vow in Mary’s name increases the slippage between the first and second narrative by this point. It is still possible to ignore the theological interpretation of previous passing references to the sacred as commonplace or unintentional, until just before the moralitas of Serk begins. Just before the moralitas, some of the sacred significances of the first secular narrative are elucidated. This elucidation begins not with proposing a total identity, but rather a deep harmony between secular and sacred history:

Sa weill the lady luvit the knycht

That no man wald scho tak;

Sa suld we do our God of micht

That did all for ws mak,

Quilk fulley to deid was dicht

For sinfull mannis saik;

Sa suld we do both day and nycht,

And prayaris to him mak (89–96).

The likeness is not yet as deliberately explained as it will be in the moralitas in the next stanza, but we are exhorted to do to God as the lady does to her knight. Though they are not declared equivalent stories, the two are structurally united in this transitional stanza.

In the first two stanzas of the moralitas, the identity and qualities of the lady lover become not merely decorative, but necessary. The lover’s success against the giant becomes the destruction of the Destroyer and the agéd king from the very beginning is revealed not as only one king, but Three in One. The final stanza of the poem is the “final proof of Henryson’s intertwining of the story and moralitas” (Schweitzer, 1980, p. 171):

The saule is Godis dochtir deir,

And eik his handewerk,

That was betrasit with Lucifeir

Quha sittis in hell full merk,

Borrowit with Chrystis angell cleir;

Hend men, will ʒe nocht herk?

For his lufe that bocht ws deir,

Think on the bludy serk (113–120).

This stanza begins with a descriptive analogy. The soul is God’s daughter, identified with the daughter of the king. The giant is Lucifer in Hell. Christ redeems the soul by his blood. The final two stanzas put the analogous terms into a relationship of exact identity. The knight bestows on his lady a shirt as his token of love; here he is Christ bestowing a cross. The two narratives are now inseparable, even though they are distinct. If we love the Savior, we must look to the bludy serk. This language of identity is, if not the whole picture for figura, an important component of it: the fulfillment, while being distinct from its figure, must have an ontological relationship and priority to it. A portrait may be distinct from its subject, but it can, in an important way, still be identified as the subject. If the language of identity had been used throughout the poem without any separation, the poem could not be a figura. The poem keeps the two stories in tension: they entail very different events, but also are the same. This itself is a defining feature of figura. The bloody shirt represents both figure and fulfillment: it is equally the token of a lover’s suffering, and the cross of the archetypical Lover’s suffering.

III

Henryson’s methods have been called “various, though unobtrusively so” (Fox, 1987, p. x). This reflects a common consensus—and seems to demand, as Fox himself says, that Henryson’s poems be “read with care” (Fox, 1987, p. xi). Continued careful scholarship on the Fabillis has proved this advice rewarding, finding Henryson’s formal experimentations to be manifold and strange (Moses, 2021; Schrock, 2017; Mann, 2009). But this singularity can be seen well beyond the Fabillis, even beyond Henryson’s “major” poems, after deeper investigation.

The Bludy Serk, though it remains understudied, attempts similarly subtle play with the traditions of allegorical representation. Within Henryson’s corpus alone it is unique in its use of a moralitas, otherwise reserved to Henryson’s much longer, non-lyrical poems. This moralitas immediately bifurcates the poem’s functions, separating and defining secular and sacred halves of the poem. But the allegorical function of the moralitas also unites these two distinct and contradictory halves. It is unique in its use of figura, placing a secular figure before a sacred fulfillment, which complements, identifies with, but does not destroy, the secular narrative preceding it.

Though it is certainly not exceptional for depicting Christ as a lover knight (Woolf, 1968, p. 195), The Bludy Serk is nonetheless rare among poems on this theme. It is unusual among extant Passion poems, first, because its narrative focuses on the backstory of the Passion. More importantly, it is nearly unique among Passion poems for its stark separation of figure and fulfillment. The first narrative, of course, is not historical, but it is treated as if it were, and finds its fulfillment in the Passion. Serk very discernibly sustains a division between its secular and sacred stories, rather than simply embellishing the Passion with secular metaphors.

This unusual structure presents a novel means of incorporating secular and sacred as both contradictory and ultimately resolvable. The resolution comes not through the elision of difference in genre or aims: Serk’s secular knight is as romantic as the moralitas’s call for prayer at the end of the poem is pious and emotive. Rather, analogy is created within a paradigm of difference, heightening the tension between secular and sacred genres, while also suggesting the deep analogy between events in the saeculum and life of prayer in communion with the Trinity.

In Serk, secular and sacred collide as figure and fulfillment, not in formless contradiction, but, as it were, in the shape of the cross. Such simplicity in style, combined with such subtlety in figuration, distinguishes Serk, and merits further study of Hernyson’s minor poems.