Waldere

"Waldere" or "Waldhere" is the conventional title given to two Old English fragments from a lost epic poem, discovered in 1860 by E. C. Werlauff, Librarian, in the Danish Royal Library at Copenhagen, where it is still preserved. The parchment pages had been reused as stiffening in the binding of an Elizabethan prayer book, which had presumably come to Europe following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in England in the 16th century. The portion that was found was a part of a much bigger work. What remains of the poem comes in two parts, written on two separate single leaves, usually called "fragment I" and "fragment II", and generally dated about 1000. The fragments can be situated in the epic of which they formed part because the subject, adventures surrounding the hero Walter of Aquitaine, is known in other texts: a Latin epic poem "Waltharius" by Ekkehard of Abbey of St. Gall, dating from the first half of the 10th century; fragments of a Bavarian poem dating from the first half of the 13th century; and two episodes in the Norwegian "Þiðrikssaga". In this edition of "Waldere" an attempt is made to sift the mass of literature which has sprung up around the poem and to sort out the material of its ancient continental parallels. The literary history of the text is thus treated on much broader lines than hitherto, and the problem is discussed the more fully as it has not before been presented at length in English. The views here advanced are new in many points, notably in assigning the opening lines of Fragment II to "Waldere", in establishing the original foliation of the manuscript, and in the discussion of the dialect.