AILSA CHANG, HOST:
And now for a tale of mistaken identity which goes back more than 800 years. Two scholars have reanalyzed a sermon from the late 12th century and cleared up some confusing references made by the 14th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer.
JAMES WADE: And it's puzzled writers and puzzled scholars for a long time, in fact, since - well, since the late Renaissance.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
That is James Wade, a fellow in English at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. He explains that in Chaucer's writings, he makes multiple references to a story called the "Song Of Wade."
WADE: We know this was a hugely popular tale. But really, by the, you know, middle of the 18th century, no one knows anything about it anymore. It's as if, you know, for hundreds of years there are all these stories of Sir Lancelot, and then suddenly, no one knew who Sir Lancelot was anymore.
SUMMERS: And by the way, this "Song Of Wade," no relation - that we know of, at least - to the scholar James Wade.
CHANG: Wade and his colleague Seb Falk, also at Cambridge, just reexamined the origins of this mysterious lost tale. And they began with that 12th-century sermon that we mentioned, which quotes three lines of the story - the sole surviving evidence of the "Song Of Wade."
WADE: (Reading in Middle English).
"Some are wolves and some are adders. Some are sea snakes that dwell by the water. There is no man at all but Hildebrand."
SUMMERS: But here's where the mystery comes in. Wade and Falk believe the scribe who wrote down that sermon may not have been well-versed in Middle English. He was more of a Latin guy, and he may have confused a few letters and written a word which, for more than a century, has been interpreted as elves.
CHANG: Wade and Falk's reanalysis of the text suggests that what he meant to write was wolves, not elves. And changing from magical (laughter) elves to wolves changes the "Song Of Wade" from a fantasy story to the tale of a sort of romantic hero.
WADE: Scholars have thought that Wade was a hero of Germanic legend - a kind of Beowulf-like figure. And what Seb Falk and I have discovered in reinterpreting the fragment that survives in this sermon is that he's more like a chivalric hero, like Sir Lancelot or Sir Gawain.
CHANG: Their findings appear this week in The Review of English Studies.
WADE: And the reference to wolves, when you read it in the context of the Latin sermon, isn't really a reference to the animal the wolf, but rather a kind of allegory or a metaphor for humans who behave like wolves. They're tyrants, or they're kind of rapacious plunderers.
SUMMERS: A story about a human dispute, in other words, which brings us back to Chaucer. Wade says scholars had long puzzled over why a mythological tale would come up in his stories of courtly intrigue. But thinking of Wade as a knight in shining armor - it fits right in.
CHANG: And who knows? Maybe 800 years from now there will be a typo in my name. Somebody will spell Ailsa wrong, and scholars will one day think the Disney ice princess hosted ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
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