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In an article published in 1960 in the Teachers’ Monthly, the great Nigerian writer D. O. Fágúnwà describes his novels, and most Nigerian novels of his generation, as “Spenserian.” This essay sets out to unpack what he means, pushing against a critical tradition that sees Bunyan rather than Spenser as Fágúnwà’s main Anglophone intertext. Spenser’s complex, semantically unstable use of allegory unexpectedly dovetails with traditional Yorùbá narrative practices, in which the exegesis and the narration of allegorical stories are both seen as highly creative, open-ended endeavors. Focusing on Fágúnwà’s Igbó Olódùmarè (1949), I show that Fágúnwà’s allegories, like Spenser’s, are richly intertextual—playing with both Western sources and Yorùbá ones—and sophisticatedly attuned to his contemporary politics. I finally argue that Fágúnwà sees his surprising affinity with Spenser as a form of Spenserian doubling, at once a welcome discovery and a warning about the dangers of trusting in the efficacy of transcultural communication.