“Rounes to Rede”: Ludic Reading Games in the Alliterative Wheel of Fortune Poem Somer Someday

Somer Soneday survives as the last item in a unique manuscript copy, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108. Sixty-three of the manuscript’s sixty-nine items comprise one of the earliest collections of Middle-English temporale (stories of scripture) and sanctorale (saints’ lives), known as the South English Legendary, while three items, the Sayings of St. Bernard, the Vision of Saint Paul, and the Debate Between Soul and Body, include similar themes and subjects and so complement the Legendary.1 The manuscript’s three remaining items are secular poems, including two early Middle-English romances (Havelok the Dane and King Horn) and an alliterative chanson d’aventure (waking vision) on the Wheel of Fortune, titled Somer Soneday, all discovered by Frederic Madden in 1826.2 Since Madden’s edition of Somer Soneday was published in 1843, the few critical studies on the poem have primarily focused on three topics: its possible allusions to historical figures, its similarities in theme and meter with other fourteenth-century alliterative poems, and its treatment of the Wheel-of-Fortune motif.3 While these studies have promoted awareness and understanding of this literary tour de force,4 no one has remarked upon the poem’s themes and images of playing games, perhaps because the games it treats—a deer hunt and the Wheel of Fortune—are no longer recognized as games in the modern sense. But these activities were clearly understood to be games by a medieval audience, and when we see them as games (i.e., as participative, autonomous activities that are governed by rules of play within a formal system), another, more complex game emerges from this poem. Specifically, we find that the anonymous