A Chaucerian Riddle Solved

Also: Book-eating beetles, a sunken Italian village, the merger of two massive black holes, the fat decades at Condé Nast, and more.

Edward Burne-Jones, Geoffrey Chaucer (1864). Source: Victoria and Albert Museum.

Geoffrey Chaucer makes two references to the lost “Song of Wade,” as scholars call it, in his work. The first is in book three of Troilus and Criseyde. Pandarus tells the “tale of Wade” to his niece Criseyde with Troilus—who is infatuated with Criseyde—looking on:

He song; she pleyde; he tolde tale of Wade.

But at the laste, as every thing hath ende,

She took hir leve, and nedes wolde wende.

The second is a reference to “Wade’s boat” in “The Merchant’s Tale”:

“But one thing warn I you, my friends dear,

I will no old wife have in any way.

She shall not pass twenty years, certainly;

Old fish and young flesh would I gladly have.

Better is,” said he, “a pike than a pickerel [young pike],

And better than old beef is the tender veal.

I want no woman thirty years of age;

It is but dry bean-stalks and coarse fodder.

And also these old widows, God it knows,

They know so much trickery on Wade’s boat,

Do so much harm, when they please,

That with them should I never live in rest.

Both passages treat the relationship between men and women. Yet, the only fragment we have from the “Song of Wade,” the New York Times notes, refers “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.”

More:

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.

“This Chaucer mystery has been plaguing and puzzling scholars for centuries,” said Dr. Falk, a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. Editors raised the question of Wade as early as 1598, he said.

Dr. Wade, also a fellow of Girton, said the findings resolved what one scholar described in 1936 as the best known Chaucerian “crux,” or textual problem.

“If the puzzle is why Chaucer was quoting this figure from Teutonic myth in these crucial moments,” Dr. Wade said, “the answer is: He wasn’t.”

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In other news, beetles are eating books in a Hungarian abbey:

The 1,000-year-old Pannonhalma Archabbey is a sprawling Benedictine monastery that is one of Hungary’s oldest centers of learning and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Restoration workers are removing about 100,000 handbound books from their shelves and carefully placing them in crates, the start of a disinfection process that aims to kill the tiny beetles burrowed into them.

The drugstore beetle, also known as the bread beetle, is often found among dried foodstuffs like grains, flour and spices. But they also are attracted to the gelatin and starch-based adhesives found in books. They have been found in a section of the library housing around a quarter of the abbey’s 400,000 volumes.

Roman dodecahedrons continue to baffle archeologists: “There are more than 50 theories for the function of this 12-sided, pentagonal-faced bronze object.”

Philadelphia’s newest and smallest art museum is now open:

There’s no sign outside of Philadelphia’s newest and smallest art museum. You find it by walking west on Locust Street from Broad. Go past the four antique gas lamps and duck into the back entrance. There you’ll find a choice selection of paintings by beloved Philadelphia artist Violet Oakley and others.

The green room of the Academy of Music has long been a dowdy and utilitarian space — a prosaic pass-through on your way to the opulent red-velvet poetry of the main event. That’s how John McFadden found it in 2023 before concluding that one of the oldest and most storied concert halls in the world could do better.

You have read, both here and elsewhere, about those Italian villages selling houses for €1. Is anybody buying them, and is it saving these villages from depopulation? Lauren Markham investigates:

There is a town in northern Sardinia called Sedini that was, according to Liliana Forina, a woman I got in touch with online, about to launch a €1 house initiative of its own. A stylish woman in her 60s from Milan, she had recently moved to Sedini from the mainland. The town wasn’t far from the beach and, judging by the pictures and Forina’s descriptions, seemed beautiful.

I arranged a meeting with her over Zoom. She appeared on-screen from her office, a Sardinian valley stretching behind her. A few years ago, she explained, she and her new husband began scouring Italy for the perfect place to live. Each weekend, they would visit a new region, feeling out the vibe in remote villages and golden-lit coastal towns speckled with beaches, in each place trying to imagine a life. It was relatively easy to cross options off their list: this town was too expensive; this one too was full of tourists; this one lacked trees. They wanted easy access to basic services such as a hospital, a pharmacy, a police station. They also wanted a view. But above all, they were looking for what Forina called their dolce vita, their sweet life. Eventually, they found it in Sedini, this breezy, hilltop town in northern Sardinia where the bells of several churches rang at noon, and, from a distance, the white-stone houses appeared stacked like antique toys on a rickety shelf. A local estate agent had found them a three-storey house right in the historic town centre with a view of the great green valley below. The house was livable but rather run-down and not to Forina’s taste, so the couple got to work renovating it, adding an upstairs terrace, exposing old beams, bringing antique tiles to a new gleam and knocking down walls to allow in more light.

Their dream life was indeed becoming a reality. Mostly. As beautiful as their home was, Forina noted early on that many of the other houses in Sedini were in a state of complete dilapidation. This left the otherwise picturesque old-world town with a ghostly quality. The town was stunning, but it needed more people – ideally people from outside Sardinia. She dreamed of more cosmopolitan neighbours, people more like her. Might I be one of them?

Depopulation is a primary struggle for many places throughout Italy’s interior. Young people, especially, are leaving towns such as Sedini, moving elsewhere for educational opportunities or for work. These historic settlements are littered with buildings that now sit empty.

Forina began researching the €1 house scheme and brought the idea to Sedini’s town government. The mayor and his staff – all longtime residents whose families had lived there for generations – were easily convinced. That summer, they were going to introduce the idea to the rest of the locals.

“Come visit us in Sedini!” she told me on our call. “Stay in my home. You will love it here.”

Speaking of Italian towns, Eva Sandoval visits the sunken village of Aenaria:

I am on the Italian island of Ischia, where sometime around AD180, the Cretaio volcano erupted, and the ensuing shockwaves sank the Roman port city of Aenaria beneath the sea.

At least, that's what archaeologists think happened. Unlike the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 – documented by Pliny the Younger in the hours before it devastated Pompeii – there are no records of the explosion, and very little written about the settlement itself.

For nearly 2,000 years, there was no physical trace of it either. The ruins lay submerged in the Bay of Cartaromana hidden for centuries beneath layers of sediment and volcanic material.

First royal tomb discovered in an ancient Maya city in Belize: “After more than four decades of work on the site, a husband-and-wife team of archaeologists with the University of Houston has uncovered remains of the first royal tomb at Caracol . . . The tomb is the final resting place of Te K’ab Chaak, the first ruler of this ancient Maya city and the founder of its royal dynasty. He ascended the throne in 331 C.E. and was interred in a royal family shrine along with items including pottery vessels, jadeite jewelry, and a mosaic jadeite mask.”