Erle of Tolous, The

A tail-rhyme narrative from the late fourteenth century that claims affinity with both the romance and Breton lay traditions, The Erle of Tolous interlaces the stories of a wronged hero, a courtly lover, and a calumniated heroine. This entry considers the relation of The Erle to similar narrative poems, discusses approaches that stress either its underlying structural coherence or its heterogeneity, surveys historicist and textual materialist scholarship on The Erle, and ends with the prospect of studying it from a diachronic or transnational perspective.