A 900-Year-Old Typo May Unravel a Chaucer Mystery

New York Times

15-07-2025

In the 14th century, you would have known exactly what he meant.
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.
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.
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