Abstract A Middle English poetic fragment preserved in an early thirteenth-century Latin sermon was construed by its discoverers and by recent scholars as an excerpt from the lost Song of Wade, a work dealing with the Wade narrative to which Geoffrey Chaucer alluded centuries later. The present article reassesses this fragment and argues that it derives not from a chivalric romance featuring Wade as its protagonist, but from the Middle English equivalent of one of the Middle High German epics dealing with the adventures of Dietrich von Bern and his retainers. Consideration of the medieval German works that mention Wade and Hildebrand illuminates the genre and narrative of the Middle English fragment, in which the elderly retainer Wade informs other heroes of the dangers awaiting those who dare to rescue Hildebrand from captivity. This interpretation is supported by analogous passages in Beowulf, where the hoary Hrothgar warns the hero of dangers ahead, and in Waldere, where unambiguous allusion is made to the narrative tradition in which Dietrich was captured by monstrous adversaries and released by his famous retainers. Although its language is Middle English, the text here christened the Wade and Hildebrand fragment is not a forerunner of the later Middle English treatment of Wade as a chivalric meme. It is, rather, a precious witness to the continued circulation of Old English narratives concerning Dietrich and his retainers, narratives most fully preserved in the Middle High German Dietrich-epics.
Neidorf et al. (Thu,) studied this question.