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Hilda M. R. Murray includes twenty-five texts in her 1911 volume, The Middle English Poem, Erthe upon Erthe.1 They range from the first half of the fourteenth century to the first half of the seventeenth, and Murray traces some of their language to the "Dialogue of the Soul and Body" tradition, the earliest texts of which can be dated to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.2 Ten additional texts related to those Murray identifies have been discovered since her work. Four of them have been edited before now, without a thorough discussion of their relation to Murray's list of texts, and I have edited the other six in this article. The variety and number ofwitnesses found since 1911 suggest that Murray's conclusions should be revisited and the Erthe tradition as a whole should be reconsidered. Many of Murray's thoughts about her texts can be better supported now than when she wrote, but her thinking of diverse texts as variants of the same poem is no longer feasible. Instead, I view Erthe not as a single Middle English lyric in thirty-five copies but as a tradition within which a few poems have multiple witnesses but most texts are unique and to some extent original compositions.
What distinguishes members of this tradition from other medieval lyrics is their punning use of "earth" to name at least two referents: people and soil. The pun is clearly inspired by "Memento homo quod cinis es et in cinerem reverteris" [Remember, man, that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return], but Murray argues compellingly for an English-language origin for the Erthe tradition.3 Her division of the poems into three groups is based on their sharing one or more stanzas, no matter how much the members of a group may differ otherwise. Thus, she identifies two texts as the A group on the basis of one similar stanza, twenty as the B group on account of five shared stanzas, and one as the C version, which she sees as a combination of material from A and B.4 In an appendix, she adds a twenty-fourth text that she considers wholly unrelated.5 Her twenty-fifth text, which appears only in her introduction, consists of one of the five shared stanzas in the B group....