Wade

Nine ells of cold grey water lay between the shore and the far side of Grœnasund, and no ship was going out. So the giant hoisted his nine-year-old son onto his shoulder and walked in. The boy rode above the swell with both hands knotted in his father’s hair while the man beneath him found the bottom with each step, sand giving, then holding, the current dragging at his thighs. That crossing is close to the only thing still known about Wade with any confidence, and it survives in a Norse saga written down centuries after the English had already forgotten why they loved him.

He arrives in English first, and he arrives in five words. *Widsith*, the roll-call of rulers copied into the Exeter Book, gallops through the kings of the Germanic world one half-line at a time: Witta ruled the Swæfe, Wada the Hælsingas, Meaca the Myrgingas. That is the whole notice. No deeds, no ancestry, no death, no explanation. A name dropped among real and half-real dynasts as though every listener in the hall already knew exactly whose name it was.

They did. For the next six hundred years Wade stayed a household word in England while the story attached to him quietly drained away. Writers gesture at him the way people gesture at something too well known to bother summarising, and every one of those gestures is now a locked door.

The fullest surviving account is not English at all. *Þiðreks saga*, compiled in thirteenth-century Norway out of North German material, calls him Vaði, a giant, son of King Vilkinus and a *sjókona*, a sea woman, whom the German tradition names Wachilt. He lives in Sjóland, and his son is Velent, the smith the English called Wayland. Wade places the boy first with Mimir for three years, then walks him to two dwarfs living inside Mount Kallava, and it is that walk that takes him into Grœnasund with the child on his shoulder and the water nine ells deep.

When the second twelve-month term ended he came back for his son. The dwarfs did not want to give him up. The saga tells what happened next in a handful of lines: an earthquake shook the mountain, and the slope above him came down. The giant who could not be drowned was buried in dirt. Velent killed the dwarfs, hollowed out a tree into a boat, fitted it with glass, and sailed away to the land of King Nidung, and the saga follows the son from there and never looks back.

Nobody describes him. The saga calls him a giant and moves on; the English texts do not manage even that. There is no face in the record, no beard, no cloak, no weapon, only scale, and the scale arrives sideways, in the depth of water he thought nothing of walking through. What he looked like has to be reconstructed from the size of the holes he left in the landscape.

Which is what England did with him. Chaucer, writing in the late 1300s, uses him twice and explains him neither time. In *Troilus and Criseyde*, Pandarus keeps Criseyde at the table after supper and “tolde tale of Wade”, and the tale does its work on her, so it was evidently a story that warmed a listener rather than frightened one. In the *Merchant’s Tale*, old January argues for marrying a young wife on the grounds that widows “konne so muchel craft on Wades boot”. Wade’s boat had become a proverb by then, and the proverb was faintly filthy.

Two centuries later Thomas Speght, editing Chaucer in 1598, reached that line and wrote what may be the most exasperating sentence in English letters: “Concerning Wade and his bote called Guingelot, and also his strange exploits in the same, because the matter is long and fabulous, I pass it over.” He knew the story. He had it in front of him. He could not be bothered. Scholars have been reaching back through four centuries to shake him ever since.

One scrap escaped. In 1896 M. R. James, working through the Latin sermons of Peterhouse MS 255 in Cambridge, found three lines of English sitting inside a homily on humility, quoted the way a modern preacher might quote a song lyric to keep a congregation awake. The sermon is late twelfth century and probably the work of Alexander Neckam. For a hundred and thirty years those lines were read as a parade of monsters: some are elves, some adders, some sprites that dwell by the water. In 2025 Seb Falk and James Wade went back to the handwriting and found that the scribe had muddled his w and his y. The elves are wolves. The sprites are sea-snakes. Corrected, the passage is about men behaving like animals, tyrants who take what is not theirs, and it reads: some are wolves and some are adders; some are sea-snakes that dwell by the water; there is no man at all but Hildebrand.

One letter moved Wade out of the world of Beowulf and into the world of Lancelot. He was not a monster epic. He was a chivalric romance, a hit of its day, which is why a preacher could drop him into a sermon and expect the reference to land, and why Pandarus could deploy him on a woman after dinner. A manuscript of *Bevis of Hampton* from around 1330 lists Wade among the knights who killed a fire-breathing dragon, and that fits the shape of it.

He kept a second life in Yorkshire, where nobody had told him he was a knight. On the North York Moors, Wade and his wife Bell are giants who owned a single hammer between them and built Mulgrave and Pickering castles by hurling it back and forth across the hills, each shouting a warning as it came. The paved track over Wheeldale Moor is Wade’s Causeway, laid, the story runs, so Bell could drive her cows out to milk them; archaeologists call it Roman and argue about whether it is older than that. The Hole of Horcum is where he scooped up a fistful of earth to throw at her during a quarrel. Two standing stones near Mulgrave were shown to visitors for generations as his grave.

His powers were never subtle. He was strong enough to rearrange terrain and tall enough to treat a sea channel as a puddle, and he had Guingelot, a boat whose exploits were proverbial and are now entirely gone. Nineteenth-century mythologists, Jacob Grimm among them, liked to promote him from giant to sea-god on the strength of his mother and his fondness for water, but no medieval text calls him a god, and the promotion says more about Victorian appetites than about Anglo-Saxon belief. His limits turned out to be ordinary ones. He could be crushed, and he was, by a hillside rather than by any enemy worth the name. The stranger weakness belongs to the tradition that carried him: Tolkien, who noticed everything, named Eärendil’s ship Vingilot and wrote in his private papers that Wade was Eärendel, salvaging the sound of the thing if not the substance. A story can be too well known to write down.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Wade in English legend?

Wade is a giant and hero of English and Germanic legend, known in Old English as Wada, in Old Norse as Vaði and in Middle High German as Wate. He first appears in the Old English poem *Widsith* as the ruler of a people called the Hælsingas. A full romance about him circulated in medieval England for centuries, but it has been lost, and only three quoted lines of it survive.

Who was Wade’s son?

Wade’s son was Wayland the Smith, called Velent in *Þiðreks saga* and Völundr in Norse tradition. Wade apprenticed him first to Mimir and then to two dwarfs living inside Mount Kallava, carrying the boy across the sound of Grœnasund on his shoulder to get him there. Wade was killed by a landslide when he returned to collect his son.

What was Wade’s boat called?

Wade’s boat was called Guingelot, a name recorded by Thomas Speght in his 1598 edition of Chaucer. Speght declined to explain the boat’s adventures because the matter was “long and fabulous”, and no other source preserves them. The name closely resembles Gringolet, the horse of Sir Gawain, and scholars have argued for centuries over which came first.

Why did Chaucer mention Wade?

Chaucer refers to Wade twice, assuming his readers already knew the story. In *Troilus and Criseyde*, Pandarus tells the “tale of Wade” to keep Criseyde at the table and stir her feelings, and in the *Merchant’s Tale* the phrase “Wade’s boat” is used as a bawdy euphemism for a widow’s cunning. Both references only make full sense if the Wade legend was a chivalric romance rather than a monster story.

Was Wade a giant or a knight?

Both traditions exist. The Norse *Þiðreks saga* and the folklore of the North York Moors make him a giant, while the lost English romance appears to have made him a knight of the same class as Lancelot and Gawain. A 2025 study by Seb Falk and James Wade re-read the surviving fragment of the *Song of Wade* and found the word “wolves” where scholars had long read “elves”, which shifts the English legend firmly toward chivalric romance.

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Aglaeca, Beowulf, Grendel, Grendel’s mother, Giant, Ettin, Jötunn, Knucker, Grindylow, Nix, Mermaid, Melusine