Overview

• James Wade and Seb Falk demonstrate that a medieval scribe’s confusion of the letters ’y’ and ’w’ led to the fragment being misread as ’elves’ for over a century.
• Correcting this error transforms the Song of Wade from a mythic epic into a 12th-century chivalric romance and resolves longstanding Chaucerian allusions.
• The only surviving excerpt appears in the Humiliamini sermon of Peterhouse MS 255, which the researchers now attribute to late-medieval scholar Alexander Neckam.
• Chaucer’s mentions of Wade in Troilus and Criseyde and The Merchant’s Tale align coherently once the work is viewed as courtly romance rather than a monster story.
• Since its publication in ish Studies, tEnglish Studies, the reinterpretation has won wide scholarly support and prompted new inquiries into Neckam’s corpus and medieval narrative memes.