Perhaps the most famous rumination on humankind’s co-existence with mice, largely thanks to Steinbeck, is Robert Burns’ ‘To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785’, in which the poet laments his inadvertent destruction of a rodent’s home and recognizes its right to live. While one might imagine that in the Middle Ages the hardships of daily life would inspire a less charitable response to the depredations inflicted by mus musculus, a cheerfully light-hearted perspective on the potentially fraught relationship between mice and men is offered by a little-known Anglo-Norman poem in which the speaker offsets his frustration at the rodent’s nibbling of his clothing and grain by acknowledging, albeit ironically, a certain respect and affection for the creature.1¹ While the poem may not quite rival Burns in terms of poetic genius or pathos, it is of socio-cultural interest for the insights that it offers into medieval attitudes towards a ubiquitous irritant in daily life, and of literary interest not only as one of the relatively few comic lyrics in Anglo-Norman, but also, to the best of my knowledge, as the only medieval encomium—even if ironic—addressed to a mouse.

中文翻译：

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Va，soryte，Deu te maudye！（埃格顿613）：关于中世纪英国与小鼠生活

很大程度上要归功于斯坦贝克，这是关于人类与小鼠共存的最著名的反思，是罗伯特·伯恩斯（Robert Burns）的《致老鼠》，1785年11月，《用犁把她放在巢中》，诗人为此感叹他的无心之过。破坏啮齿动物的家园并承认其生存权。人们可能会想到，在中世纪，日常生活的艰辛会激发对小家鼠造成的贬低的慈善反应，但鲜为人知的是，人们对老鼠和人之间可能充满烦恼的关系表现出轻松愉快的态度。盎格鲁诺曼诗，其中扬声器在啮齿动物抵消他的沮丧由真实啃承认他的衣服和粮食，尽管讽刺的是，对于creature.1一定的尊敬和爱戴¹ 尽管就诗歌天才或悲痛而言，这首诗可能无法与伯恩斯媲美，但它对中世纪对日常生活中无处不在的刺激物的态度所提供的见解具有社会文化意义，而不仅仅是作为其中一种。据盎格鲁·诺曼（Anglo-Norman）而言，漫画歌词相对较少，但据我所知，它是唯一的中世纪公文馆（即使具有讽刺意味的），也指向老鼠。