The Three Dead Kings The Fifteenth Century Middle English Alliterative Poem De Tribus Regibus Mortuis Attributed To John Audelay Giles Watson by Giles Watson instant download after payment.

De Tribus Regibus Mortuis is didactic in tone and moralistic in purpose, but like the iconographic tradition which inspired it, it has a muscularity and a taste for the macabre which make it compelling. The muscularity is largely a result of the poet’s adoption of terse and determined patterns of alliteration, and a rhyme-scheme which can be subtle and strident by turns. These lend themselves particularly well to the description of the hunting scene which opens the poem, but also to its descriptions of the decomposing corpses of the three dead kings, which are related with a vigour almost suggestive of relish. In translating from the Middle English, I have loosely observed these alliterative patterns in a manner which hopefully will not seem strained to a modern English reader, but have rendered the whole poem in the present tense.