4. The Mookse and the Gripes This tale, told by Shaun, is based on the fable of The Fox and the Grapes. The Mookse is represented by Pope Adrian IV (Nicholas Brakespear, or ‘Bragspear’), the only English Pope. He is sitting on a stone, ‘pompifically’. He finds the overripe gripes (grapes) wrapped around a tree by the edge of a ‘boggylooking stream’. Above them is Nuvoletta, as a cloud on a balcony, spraying mist: ‘Nuvoletta in her lightdress, spunn of sisteen shimmers, was looking down on them, leaning over the bannistars and listening all she childishly could’. The fable is essentially about the conflict between Catholic and non-Catholic churches, with the Mookse as Pope and the Gripes as anybody who will not submit to the Pope. The Gripes is also a representation of Shem, with Shaun as the Mookse. Their arguments descend into insults, and the two arguers eventually metamorphose into an apron and a handkerchief on the bank of the river Liffey.© John Vernon Lord/ The Folio Society