Gualterus Anglicus facts for kids
Gualterus Anglicus means Walter the Englishman in Medieval Latin. He was an Anglo-Norman poet and writer. Around the year 1175, he created a very important collection of Aesop's Fables. He wrote these fables as short poems.
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Who Was Walter the Englishman?
For a long time, people did not know the real name of this writer. They called him the Anonymus Neveleti. This name came from a book written in the 1600s by Isaac Nicholas Nevelet.
Later, a scholar named Léopold Hervieux found clues in old handwritten books. He suggested the author's name was Walter. Some people thought he was Walter of the Mill, who became an archbishop of Palermo in 1168. However, many experts now disagree with this idea. So, we know his name was Walter, but his exact identity is still a bit of a mystery!
Walter's Famous Fable Collection
What is the Verse Romulus?
Walter's collection of 62 fables is often called the verse Romulus. It is also known as the elegiac Romulus. This is because he wrote the fables using a special kind of poetry called elegiac couplets. Since we are not completely sure who the author was, scholars use these names for the collection.
There was an older prose (story-like) version of Romulus too. This older version might be from the sixth or tenth century. It was based on the fables of Phaedrus. One famous fable, "The Cock and the Jewel," helps us know which collections came from Phaedrus. Walter changed the "jewel" in this story from a pearl to jasper.
How Walter's Fables Influenced Others
Walter's verse Romulus became the most popular version of Aesop's fables during the Middle Ages. Many important writers used it. For example, it is believed that Dante, a very famous Italian poet, used this version.
Walter's fables also influenced other works. They helped shape the Doligamus by Adolf von Wien. When John Lydgate wrote Isopes Fabules, the first collection of fables in English, Walter's book was a main source. Later, in the 1400s, Robert Henryson used this fable tradition in his clever Morall Fabillis, written in Scots.
Around the year 1500, early printed copies of Walter's fables appeared. They were often titled Aesopus moralisatus.
