A Tiny Typo May Explain Centuries-Old Mystery Bout Chaucer's 'canterbury Tales'

The guy’s name is Wade and he’s studying the ancient Song of Wade closely

> “Here we have a late-12th-century sermon deploying a meme from the hit romantic story of the day,” Seb Falk, a historian at the University of Cambridge, says in a statement. “This is very early evidence of a preacher weaving pop culture into a sermon to keep his audience hooked.”

One of the oldest pieces of writing I have from my ancestors is a dedication in a family bible, to my great-grandfather from his parents. It quotes a popular hymn. But when I looked it up, that was a quite recently written text at the time they quoted it, and it wasn't technically even a hymn, but a song from a play (Christian Richardt's version of the fairy tale sleeping beauty). Looks at first glance like they're quoting an old hymn, but it's more like me quoting a Disney film from 20 years ago.

The paper is very approachable too: https://academic.oup.com/res/article/76/326/339/8198901

Includes mention of M.R.James whom I know mostly as an author of ghost stories!

Wouldn't it technically be a scribal error since it predates typesetting?

Off-detail/on-topic: After 10 months of reading Pratchett's Discworld novels, I'm now reading the Cantebury Tales. And by golly, the tales are surprisingly accessible, entertaining and fun to read.

The Smithsonian article doesn't actually say why Falk and Wade believe the relevant words are a scribal error. It just says the scribe had an "unsteady calligraphy", though looking at the manuscript I disagree with that assessment (the hand is steady and clear). And in any case, Falk and Wade don't argue that the issue is a sloppy hand, but rather that the scribe was unfamiliar with non-Latin letterforms, namely wyn and thorne. They identify two errors the scribe made, and also support their new reading by looking more thoroughly at the surrounding sermon (e.g., it talks about wolves and sets up a comparison just before the quote from Wade).

> Falk and Wade suggest the scribe incorrectly transcribed two key words

A typo is a typographic error. This is a scribe incorrectly transcribing from one manuscript to another.

Searching "song of the wade" and trying to find a resource thay isn't dated less than a month ago is surprisingly frustrating