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ArchivesAnelida and Arcite
Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a poem during the Middle Ages about Anelida, a fictional queen of Armenia, and her Greek lover, Arcite. Does anyone know where these names come from?
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Annelid is a phylum of worms. Its root meaning is "ringed."
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It seems there was a lot of borrowing from other sources during Chaucer's time. The name Arcite was used twice by Chaucer, in the poem Anelida and Arcite, and "The Knight's Tale" in Canterbury Tales. I'm not sure of the poem but "The Knight's Tale" was inspired from Boccaccio's Teseida (an epic poem) in which one of the characters is named Arcita; the main setting is Athens, Greece, so I'm assuming the name may have a Greek origin or source. The closest I could find was that it may have been borrowed from another epic poem, a Byzantine poem named Digenes Akritas, Akritas referring to someone who lived on the borders of a country though in Byzantine it also refers to soldiers who defended their borders against enemies.
Anelida is trickier. I've seen it listed as originating from the Arthurian romances, from an obscure Italian poem titled "L'intelligenza". I couldn't find much behind it but it seems to be an Italian variant of Laudine.
I posted some links to the sites I've been to if that'll help.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/456817.pdf
http://www.columbia.edu/dlc/garland/deweever/contents.htm
https://books.google.com/books?id=9YxSAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA33&lpg=PA33&dq=names+from+anelida+and+arcite&source=bl&ots=UFYuSaEFP0&sig=ACfU3U2PjE0gJUkQBrYl2J_XnN_rZU0E0g&hl=en&ppis=_e&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwifqqyP85XoAhUnkHIEHb02BOMQ6AEwB3oECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=names%20from%20anelida%20and%20arcite&f=false
Anelida is trickier. I've seen it listed as originating from the Arthurian romances, from an obscure Italian poem titled "L'intelligenza". I couldn't find much behind it but it seems to be an Italian variant of Laudine.
I posted some links to the sites I've been to if that'll help.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/456817.pdf
http://www.columbia.edu/dlc/garland/deweever/contents.htm
https://books.google.com/books?id=9YxSAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA33&lpg=PA33&dq=names+from+anelida+and+arcite&source=bl&ots=UFYuSaEFP0&sig=ACfU3U2PjE0gJUkQBrYl2J_XnN_rZU0E0g&hl=en&ppis=_e&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwifqqyP85XoAhUnkHIEHb02BOMQ6AEwB3oECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=names%20from%20anelida%20and%20arcite&f=false
This message was edited 3/13/2020, 8:11 PM
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Thank you so much for this. I wonder how one would get Anelida from Laudine.
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I wish I could tell you for sure but my guess is something to do with the translation of the text. The original story of Yvain was written in French in the 12th century. There's a Middle English translation of the original in which Laudine is known as Alundyne, so I'm assuming that somehow, for whatever reason, it became Anelida in Italian. But like I said, that's just my guess.
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