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Before I introduce what to me is one of the most stupendous humanities discoveries I have encountered in the last six decades, I have to explain briefly why it is so exciting.   Namely, here we get to witness the emergence of a few bits of vernacular English in a religiously imbued medieval Latin matrix.  This is exactly how medieval vernacular Sinitic started to appear in the framework of Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic during the heyday of medieval Buddhism.  Just as in the medieval Christian homilies of Peterhouse MS 255, we see the common (sú 俗) preachers of Dunhuang resorting to vernacular language and popular "memes" in their "transformation texts" (biàn[wén] 變[文]) to keep the attention of their auditors / readers.

I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Geoffrey Chaucer's (d. 1400) Troilus and Criseyde.  That was a long time ago, sixty years, in fact.  Imagine my surprise when I opened the New York Times yesterday and discovered that this medieval romance was back in the news.

900-Year-Old Copyist's Error May Unravel a Chaucer Mystery
The Tale of Wade, twice referred to in Geoffrey Chaucer’s poems, survives only in a tiny fragment. Two academics argue a scribe’s error deepened the confusion around it.
Stephen Castle, NYT (7/15/25)

What's all the fuss about "The Tale of Wade"*?  It seems that two Cambridge scholars at Girton College, Seb Falk and James Wade, after spending three intensive years of research, have solved a thorny textual problem that has bewitched scholars for centuries.

*This Wikipedia article on "Wade (folklore)" contains a rich assemblage of myth and lore stretching back to Old Norse and Old English that reveals the close association of Wade and his boat, with water, sexuality, and fertility.

N.B.:  It is only by coincidence that one of the Cambridge researchers, James Wade, has the same surname as the name of the hero of "The Tale of Wade" dating to a millennium earlier.

Here's a translation of the passage on Wade's boat from Chaucer's "Merchant's Tale":

And bet than old boef is the tendre veel…And eek thise old wydwes, God it woot,They konne so muchel craft on Wades boot, So muchel broken harm, whan that hem leste, That with hem sholde I nevere lyve in reste… —1.209-14

And better than old beef is tender veal…and also these old widows, God knows it,They can play so much craft on Wade's boat,So much harm, when they like it,That with them should I never live in rest….

It is clear that here Wade's boat is being used as a sexual euphemism.

(from the above cited Wikipedia article)

As presented in the NYT article, the abstruse argumentation and dense documentation of the Falk & Wade paper are difficult for the non-specialist to follow, so I will supplement Castle's account with other materials, starting with the official Cambridge announcement of the seminal Falk-Wade discovery.  A simple version of the announcement may be found here:

Lost English legend decoded, solving Chaucerian mystery and revealing a medieval preacher's meme
Edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Andrew Zinin, Phys.org, Science X (2025-07)

Here is the elaborate treatment of the announcement prepared by Tom Almeroth-Williams:

The Song of Wade:  Decoding a lost English legend, solving a Chaucerian mystery, and revealing a medieval preacher’s meme

By Tom Almeroth-Williams, University of Cambridge (7/16/25)

This is a virtuoso demonstration of the achievement of Falk-Wade.  For those who do not have a lot of time to spend on medieval English philology and are not acquainted with its aims and usages, I strongly recommend that you skip to the 4:00 film at the end of Almeroth-Williams' essay.  Here you will hear Seb Falk and James Wade explain lucidly in layman's terms what they have achieved in their technical paper.

Prior to the excellent film, Almeroth-Williams gently guides his reader through the Falk-Wade paper by other means as well, including this introductory summary:

A medieval literary puzzle which has stumped scholars including M.R. James for 130 years has finally been solved.

Cambridge scholars now believe the Song of Wade, a long lost treasure of English culture, was a chivalric romance not a monster-filled epic.

The discovery solves the most famous mystery in Chaucer's writings and provides rare evidence of a medieval preacher referencing pop culture in a sermon.

The breakthrough, detailed in The Review of English Studies, involved working out that the manuscript refers to ‘wolves’ not ‘elves’ [VHM:  this is the "typo" referred to in the title of this post], as scholars previously assumed.

Dr James Wade and Dr Seb Falk, colleagues at Girton College, Cambridge, argue that the precious literary fragment, first discovered by M.R. James at Cambridge in 1896, has been “radically misunderstood” for the last 130 years.

Some choice quotations:

“Here we have a late-12^th-century sermon deploying a meme from the hit romantic story of the day,” Seb Falk says. “This is very early evidence of a preacher weaving pop culture into a sermon to keep his audience hooked.”

“Many church leaders worried about the themes of chivalric romances – adultery, bloodshed, and other scandalous topics – so it’s surprising to see a preacher dropping such 'adult content' into a sermon,” Wade explains.

…

“Lots of very smart people have torn their hair out over the spelling, punctuation, literal translation, meaning, and context of a few lines of text,” says James Wade.

A very attractive feature of Almeroth-Williams' presentation are crystal clear photographs that you can enlarge by gliding over them with your mouse, and then having him (A-W) deftly encircle the critical features of the text with highlighted boxes.  For example, by such means, the names "Wade" and "Hildebrand" (Wade's father) leap off the page.  In another place, we get to see the precise place where the letters "w" and "y" are muddled, so that a word that has been interpreted as "elves" for nearly a thousand years actually was "wolves".

In the next section, "Chaucer and Wade", Almeroth-Williams describes how the authors of the paper on the homily in Peterhouse MS 255 clarify the great medieval poet's invocation of the Song of Wade:

The Song of Wade was hugely popular throughout the Middle Ages. For several centuries, its central character remained a major romance hero, among other famous knights such as Lancelot and Gawain. Chaucer twice evoked Wade in the middle of this period, in the late 1300s, but these references have baffled generations of Chaucer scholars.

At a crucial moment in Troilus and Criseyde, Pandarus tells the ‘tale of Wade’ to Criseyde after supper. Today’s study argues that the Wade legend served Pandarus because he not only needed to keep Criseyde around late, but also to stir her passions. By showing that Wade was a chivalric romance, Chaucer’s reference makes much more sense.

In ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, Chaucer’s main character, January, a 60-year-old knight, refers to Wade’s boat when arguing that it is better to marry young women than old. The fact that his audience would have understood the reference in the context of chivalric romance, rather than folk tales or epics, is significant, the researchers argue.

In the following section, Almeroth-Williams shows how the Cambridge researchers pay more attention to the entirety of the Humiliamini sermon and its usages than previous scholars have.  This is where they identify Alexander Neckam, or one of his acolytes, as the probable author of this homily on humility.

Almeroth-Williams concludes his essay with an extract from the new translation of the sermon referring to Wade:

‘Dear [brothers], as to the fact that he says, ‘humble yourselves’, etc. – it could be considered that humility which is against the mighty hand of God is of a particular kind. For there are three kinds of humility: the humility of guilt; the humility of punishment; and the humility of penance.

Now, by the humility of guilt our first parent [Adam] was so humbled that, although he was made master of the whole world before his sins and ruled over everything that was in the world, after his sin, on the other hand, he could not even defend himself from a worthless worm, that is, from a flea or louse. He who was similar to God before sin, was made dissimilar through sin; since ‘by this poison a rose is sometimes turned into spikenard.’

Thus Adam was, from a human, made as if he was non-human; not only Adam, but almost everyone becomes as if non-humans. Thus they can say, with Wade:

‘Some are wolves and some are adders; Some are sea-snakes that dwell by the water. There is no man at all but Hildebrand.’

Similarly, today some are wolves, such as powerful tyrants, who if they can justly take the things of those subject to them, take them; but if not, [do so] by any means. Some imitate serpents, of which there are three kinds. Others become lions, like the proud ones whom God opposes; enough has been said of pride in the art of preaching. Others are foxes, such as cunning detractors and flatterers who speak with a double heart, who have honey in their mouth but bile in their heart. Others are gluttons like pigs, of whom the prophet says ‘their throats are open graves’; and thus each is judged similarly. Indeed, this humility is bad and perverse.’

Here's the original Latin text, with the tantalizing snippets of Middle English intermixed (in the penultimate paragraph quoted here( :

K[arissimi], hoc quod dicit ‘hu[miliamini] sub po[tenti]’ etc.—potest perpendi quod alia est humilitas que est contra potentem manum Dei. Triplex enim est humilitas: humilitas scilicet culpe; hu[militas] pene; hu[militas] penitentie.

Humilitate autem culpe, in tantum humiliatus est primus parens noster,¹⁰⁶ quod cum dominus tocius mundi efficeretur ante peccata et in omnibus que in mundo erant dominaretur, post peccatum uero, a uili uermiculo, scilicet, a pulice siue pediculo se minime potuit defendere. Qui similis fuit Deo ante peccatum per peccatum factus est dissimilis; quia ‘hac [lue] rosa [non]numquam uertitur in saliuncam’.¹⁰⁷

Adam itaque de homine factus est quasi non homo; nec tantum Adam, sed omnes fere fiunt quasi non homines. Itaque dicere possunt cum Wade: ‘Summe sende [ƿ]lues & summe sende nadderes; sum[m]e sende nikeres the bi den ƿater [ƿ]unien. Nister man nenne bute ildebrand onne.

Similiter, hodie aliqui sunt lupi, utpote potentes tiranni, qui [176va]¹⁰⁸ sibi subditorum res si iuste accipere possunt accipiunt; sin autem quocunque modo. Alii imitantur serpentes, quorum triplex est genus. Alii efficiuntur leones, utpote superbi quibus resistit Deus;¹⁰⁹ satis de superbia dictum est in arte predicandi. Alii sunt wlpes, sicut dolosi detractores adulatores qui loquntur in corde et corde,¹¹⁰ qui habent mel in ore fel autem in corde.¹¹¹ Alii sunt gulosi ut sues, de quibus dicit propheta ‘sepulcrum patens est g[uttur]’;¹¹² et sic de singulis simile habetur iudicium. Hec siquidem humilitas mala est & peruersa.

Now let us turn briefly to the original paper of Falk and Wade:

"The Lost Song of Wade: Peterhouse 255 Revisited"
Seb Falk, James Wade, The Review of English Studies (16 July 2025)

Abstract

Short verses from the Song of Wade survive in an early-thirteenth-century sermon collection found in Cambridge, Peterhouse MS 255. They constitute the only known surviving fragment of a legendary romance that was widely known in medieval and renaissance England but now entirely lost. The fragment was first discovered [VHM:  in 1896] by M. R. James and Israel Gollancz, and since then several scholars have considered the sermon’s English quotation to parse its meaning and speculate on what it says about the ‘Legend of Wade’. Despite such attention, there has been no sustained attempt to situate this fragment in the context of the sermon in which it appears. In this essay we return to Peterhouse MS 255 to re-consider them in light of the sermon in which they are quoted. We offer a new plain-sense meaning of the English fragment and suggest the most likely arrangement of its verse form, both of which animate a fundamental re-thinking of what glimpse these verses can give us into the world of a romance otherwise unknown, and into a lost legend as it was understood by readers and audiences in later medieval England, Geoffrey Chaucer among them. We provide an edition and translation of the full sermon, and analyse the sermon’s contents and composition, suggesting identifications for its sources, origins, and audiences. We also provide fresh analysis of the ways that preachers constructed their sermons, drawing from up-to-date natural philosophy and deploying memes from the world of romance and real-life chivalry.

Conclusion

This essay proposes a new text and translation of the Wade fragment, with all its implications for how we might imagine the world of the lost Song of Wade. It also postulates that the author of this sermon may be none other than Alexander Neckam [1157=1217] himself, and gestures towards an intellectual milieu of creative, even playful experimentation where even English romance, like the flea or the worm, can play a natural role in moral instruction and edification. The richly visual, dramatic descriptions of serpents, lions and wolves, self-abasing knights, and kings in sackcloth, are set in a virtuoso rhetorical performance. It all makes for a captivating effect in an era when sermons served to generate the same depth of emotional response as mass media today.⁹⁹ And in this genre of medieval media broadcast, we find the Wade legend, like the ‘viral’ account of Hugh of Gournay, deployed as a meme, a compact unit of transmission that freights cultural memory, such as tunes or catch-phrases or clothing fashions.¹⁰⁰ If Alexander Neckam, or the Neckam-inspired sermonizer, invokes the Wade legend as a meme, then he is only the first known writer to do so, for it is precisely as a meme that Wade is used in Middle English, from the Bevis-author through Chaucer to Malory.

This new reading of the Wade legend as a chivalric meme has been spurred by an appreciation of its situation in the Humiliamini sermon. By providing an edition and translation of the sermon here, we hope that its intellectual and emotional energy might resonate with other readers in ways that we have not had the time to explore or capacity to understand. (It is, after all, a lesson in humility.) We also hope that this essay goes some way towards illuminating what Jack Bennett considered the best-known crux in Chaucer’s writings. 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. Such a shift turns the crux into a crutch of literary memory; it helps make sense of Chaucer’s evocation of Wade at instances of courtly intrigue, in moments of high tension in the world of fin amour. It may be one of Chaucer’s most brazen anachronisms, to have a performance of a Middle English romance resound within the ancient walls of Bronze-Age Troy, but to see the Wade allusion in the Troilus as a pointedly chivalric allusion is to understand it as part and parcel of a broader ‘medievalizing’ project. When the courtiers of Chaucer’s Troy listened to romance to model their own chivalry and steer their own passions, whose romance did they hear? It was Wade’s.

Here is how Stephen Castle of the NYT nicely explicates some of the key points in the Falk-Wade paper:

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.

That would make it a surprising tale for a romantic go-between to read to a maiden, as happens in Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde,” or to appear as an allusion in one of his “Canterbury Tales” about a wealthy man marrying a younger woman.

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.

…

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.”

…

“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.”

The research took three years, he said, adding that he believed the error occurred because the scribe was chosen for familiarity with Latin.

“One’s suspicion, although we can’t prove this, is that the reason he messes up the Middle English is because he’s never written English before,” said Dr. Wade.  [VHM:  N.B. !!!!]

The mentions of Wade, the two academics argue, show both the sermon’s author and Chaucer deploying contemporary popular culture to appeal to a wider audience in the way that politicians, artists or preachers still do today.

“The way the poem is quoted in the sermon as a meme — something which was widely understood — tells us something about how ubiquitous it was,” said Dr. Falk.

To me, this is all very familiar, because the same sorts of things were happening in medieval Dunhuang as scribes were trying to forge means to record vernacular with characters that theretofore had only been used for writing Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic.  Typos aplenty!

Afterword

In the film, Falk and Wade show pages of the manuscript they studied.  It has drawings, some of them colored, of animals that illustrate attributes of human beings / behavior.  One of these drawings is a quite realistic colored rendition of a bovine munching on a bunch of green grass and, at the other end, emitting a huge balloon of green methane gas.  These drawings of animals remind me very much of the Voynich manuscript, which must have been modeled on medieval bestiaries, that we have discussed numerous times on Language Log

 

Selected readings

• "Five old, white men" (6/24/23)
• "Old, Middle, and Modern English" (9/2/23)
• Victor H. Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular: The Making of National Languages,” Journal of Asian Studies, 53.3 (August, 1994), 707-751
• Victor H. Mair, "Lay Students and the Making of Written Vernacular Narrative: An Inventory of Tun-huang Manuscripts", Chinoperl Papers 10 (1981), 5–96.
• Victor H. Mair, Tun-huang Popular Narratives (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
• Voynich and midfix" (7/3/04)
• "Voynich code cracked?" (5/16/19)
• "The indecipherability of the Voynich manuscript" (9/11/19)
• "The Voynich Manuscript in the undergraduate curriculum" (10/10/19)
• "Once again the Voynich manuscript" (4/21/24)
• "Yet again the Voynich manuscript" (9/11/24)
• "Latin, Hebrew … proto-Romance? New theory on Voynich manuscript:  Researcher claims to have solved mystery of 15th-century text but others are sceptical", Esther Addley, The Guardian (5/15/19)

[Thanks to John J. Tkacik]

July 20, 2025 @ 5:37 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and literature, Language and religion, Memes, Philology, Vernacular

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