Seb Falk and James Wade (no relation) have published an open-access paper in the Review of English Studies, The Lost Song of Wade: Peterhouse 255 Revisited, that is usefully summarized in Stephen Castle’s NY Times article (archived):
Geoffrey Chaucer, often regarded as the first great poet in English, drops references at two points in his works to an older poem or story, the Tale of Wade, that seems to have needed no explanation in his own time but has since all but disappeared. The one surviving fragment — a few lines of verse quoted in a 12th-century sermon and rediscovered in the 1890s — only left scholars more puzzled.
Now, two Cambridge University academics, James Wade (whose family name is coincidentally shared with the tale) and Seb Falk, believe they may have unlocked the riddle by correcting a mishap that remains familiar to publishers almost a millennium later. Call it a medieval typo. The fragment seemed to refer to a man alone among elves and other eerie creatures — something from the story of a mythological giant, or of a heroic character like Beowulf who battled supernatural monsters. […]
The new research, published on Wednesday in Britain in “The Review of English Studies,” suggests that the “elves” sprang from a linguistic error by a scribe, who miscopied a word that should have meant “wolves,” and that Wade in fact belonged to a chivalric world of knights and courtly love — much more relevant to Chaucerian verse. […]
Richard North, a professor of English language and literature at University College London, said the authors’ analysis of the 12th-century verse made a good case about the nature of Wade. “I think they are right that he must be a knight from a lost romance rather than a giant from English folklore,” he said.
Others were more circumspect about the implications of the study. Stephanie Trigg, a professor of English literature at the University of Melbourne, Australia, said she was “persuaded by the reading of wolves (not elves)” and said the analysis contained “lots and lots of fascinating details and contexts,” but said: “I’d be cautious about claiming this is a revolutionary way of understanding Chaucer.”
The verses were discovered in 1896 by M. R. James, author of “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad” (see this LH post, wherein I report my discovery of the word ontography); he put elves and adders into the translated version, but:
The new study concludes that the sermon’s scribe confused a runic letter that was still found in Middle English, and pronounced ‘w,’ with the letter ‘y.’ That, it says, turned “wlves” into “ylves.” The scholars also argue that the word formerly translated as sprites, “nikeres,” refers to sea snakes. Drawing on the Latin text around it, they suggest the passage concerns beastly human behavior, translating it as follows:
Some are wolves and some are adders; some are sea snakes that dwell by the water. There is no man at all but Hildebrand.
“Here were three lines apparently talking about elves and sea monsters which exactly puts you in this world of Beowulf and other Teutonic legends,” said Dr. Wade. “What we realized is that there are no elves in this passage, there are no sea monsters and, in the study of the handwriting, everyone has gotten it wrong until now.”
(We discussed nicors/nixies back in 2014.) Not earthshaking, but I can’t help feeling pleasure at getting rid of the bloody elves.
The Wikipedia article Wade (folklore) says JRR Tolkien explicitly noted “Wade = Earendel”. He was only a half-elf.
Next: Beowulf. No sea-monster after all.
homo homini lupus!
(i also do love the connotational drift in the heroic names from medieval english romances: wade, meet bevis!*)
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* o, you went to highschool together? in barton, vermont? cool!
Already beimg discussed at the LLog.
“one of the most stupendous humanities discoveries I have encountered in the last six decades”: hahahaha
This is one of the most overhyped minor emendations I’ve ever seen. The emendation itself is fairly plausible, though they actually don’t make the strongest point super clear in the article: they should have reproduced the passage in context in the main body of the piece, so you can see up front how the Latin *lupi* seems to pick up on the quoted Middle English. This is the *only* thing that turns the emendation from a “well, could be, but why do it” to a “maybe that actually is right after all” kind of situation. So they rather undersell their case on that point.
They also rather neglect quite a lot of context. They’re rather mocking about the idea of a mermaid mother and Wade being a giant and all that, and you’d be forgiven for getting the impression from this piece that all that is just scholarly fantasy. But it has a source: *Þiðreks saga af Bern*, a collection of legends written in Norse, but based closely on German traditions (this is incredibly obvious from the forms of names, if nothing else). There Vaði is indeed the son of a “sǽ-kona”, and is a “risi”, a giant. Their mentions of the Middle High German poem Kudrun are also a bit enigmatic, and they don’t actually even quite let you know that it explicitly mentions Wade (Wate), and they certainly aren’t very forthcoming about the fact that he sails a boat there. They’re also not too keen to let the reader know how prominent Hildebrand is in German narrative, since that would support the idea that one might want to venture beyond Middle English to understand the legend most fully.
All of this means that their emendation is, frankly, basically inconsequential, as far as Chaucer is concerned. We basically end up just exactly where we were a hundred years ago. There are basically three bodies of references: Old English (pretty much just the name alone), Middle English (where he’s a legendary figure known vaguely for his prowess, his boat, and in one reference, killing a dragon), and German (mostly Kudrun and, indirectly, Þiðreks saga). If you’re interested in the longer history of the legend, it’s not really unreasonable to suppose that Kudrun and the Chaucer reference together suggest a boat was involved somehow. He was clearly also a monster-slayer. That survives into later Middle English, and the new emendation doesn’t change that (and the water-monsters are still present in the sermon).
Their final conclusion about Chaucer is almost silly. They say — accurately but irrelevantly — that “there is no evidence that any of Chaucer’s readers would have known a mid-twelfth-century German epic, or indeed an Old English epic such as Widsith”. This is to bizarrely misrepresent attempts to reconstruct the story as known by Chaucer based on analogues with familiarity with the analogues by Chaucer. You can disagree with any reconstruction, or think the whole process of reconstruction doomed to failure for lack of evidence, but it’s really unfortunate of them to set up such a fanciful strawman as this.
More generally, they say: “The preferred reading of ‘wolves’ for ‘elves’ dramatically shifts the ground, and invites us to re-imagine the known world of Wade from c.1200 on, from one less germane to Germanic epic than congruent with courtly romance, less invested in the mythological sphere of giants and monsters than in the warring of human chivalric adversaries.” First, it’s odd to talk about human adversaries when one of the few Middle English details about Wade is that he killed a dragon, and the emendation their making so much hay from still involves a reference to non-human entities (the sermon probably means the wolves allegorically, but there’s no hint that this would apply to the fragment, and the few lines we have suggest actual wolves are meant). More importantly, this is like saying that because Middle English traditions about Troy are “chivalric”, this makes them less “congruent” with the Homeric sphere. If you’re interested in the synchronic state of the tale in Chaucer’s day, then both the vernacular forms of the Troy story and, presumably, Wade’s tale reflect the cultural norms of late Middle English narrative (surely no one was thinking before this article that Beowulf-style verse was still current in the 14th century!). If you’re interested in the history of the story, then you’ll end up leaving the late Middle English cultural sphere either way, whether you go back to Homer or to Middle High German. At best, they might be arguing that the shift to a “chivalric” style story took place in the 13th century rather than the 14th. That’s hardly a very dramatic conclusion, even if right — and in any case, even that much more modest conclusion doesn’t really follow from their emendation. I mean, Laȝamon’s *Brut* mentions elves, but is still a story whose style and cultural norms are solidly of the late 12th century. In this case, a wild place filled with elves, serpents, and water-monsters isn’t all that different in atmosphere from one filled with wolves, serpents, and water-monsters. Presumably it’s the desolation of the place that’s in focus, and that’s a pretty generic kind of thing — you could link it equally to the horror of Grendel’s mere or to the wilderness that Sir Gawain passes through (with its *wodwos* — by the terms of their argument, the use of that rather romantic word should mean that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight isn’t part of the chivalric world of Middle English!).
The article does have its good points. It’s a nice collection of the Middle English references to Wade, and their emendation is fundamentally plausible (even if the argument for it isn’t presented to fullest advantage). But still, the authors have gone to some pains to sell the impact of their piece in the strongest terms possible, and this has meant overselling the (honestly minimal) implications of this to a really astonishing degree.
@ng
I was also surprised at the distancing of chivalric romance from fantastic elements. Don Quixote would be an absurdist parody if Amadis of Gaul, et. al. had not frequently encountered dragons, giants, shape-shifting sorcerers etc. In fact, I would say the West European mediaevals were more into these themes than the late Roman chroniclers, you just have to compare Arthur with Belisarius.
The framing assumes that the verse of which we have three lines was the canonical work about Wade that later ME writers (and their readers) had in mind when referencing Wade. It was presumably well enough known at the time Alexander Neckam (or whoever) wrote the Humiliamini sermon for the author to be confident it would make sense to his readers/listeners. But perhaps there were other tales/songs/poems, known to Chaucer, of which zero lines remain now.
The earliest piece I know of which features Arthur as an actual character is Culhwch ac Olwen, which is probably eleventh-century. A giant figures very prominently in the action.
(Mind you, this Arthur is definitely pre-chivalric …)
Incidentally “Geoffrey Chaucer, often regarded as the first great poet in English” strikes me as out of the same box as the journalistic “in living memory”, which means “I can’t think of another example on the spur of the moment.”
I also just remembered that Chaucer himself has the Wife of Bath talk of Arthur and elves in the same breath, opening her Prologue with:
“In tholde dayes of the king Arthour,
Of which that Britons speken greet honour,
All was this land fulfild of fayerye.
The elf-queen, with hir Ioly companye,
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede;
This was the olde opinion, as I rede.
I speke of manye hundre yeres ago;
But now can no man see none elves mo.”
Does this mean that for Chaucer, Arthur was part of a non-chivalric world?
(Sorry, I really should leave off with this!)
No, no, I’m enjoying it!
Sir Palomides (easily the most relatable character in the Morte Darthur) has his Questing Beast, which does not seem all that in accord with all this supposed chivalric Socialist Realism. Come to that, neither does Morgan le Fay.
I feel that the eponymous Green Knight whom Sir Gawain encounters also shows some features not strictly in accord with what is currently believed regarding human physiology. Perhaps things were different in the fourteenth century.
No, no, I’m enjoying it!
Seconded. Can we not entertain elves and wolves and chivalry? The Hattery is a broad church.