Sir Tryamour is a Middle English tail-rhyme romance that was written near the end of the fourteenth century, the time that Geoffrey Chaucer was writing his Canterbury Tales.[1] Like almost all of the Middle English tail-rhyme romances to have survived from this period, the author of Sir Tryamour remains unknown. The story told in the poem shares many of the features that are commonly found in other Middle English verse romances: a badly-treated queen who is sent into exile, a young man who does not know his origins, damsels in distress, giants, feats of jousting, a tournament to win a maiden's hand in marriage.
The story concentrates its energies on battles rather than on any prolonged declarations of love.[2] The greatest example of love in this romance is reserved for the loyalty shown by a dog to the body of his murdered master; and despite the presence of giants who need to be cut down to size – in the case of one scene quite literally – there are no mythological animals to match the griffin that appears in Sir Eglamour of Artois, the dragon in Sir Degare or the unicorn in Sir Isumbras, and no animals that snatch a hero away as a young child, as does a wolf in William of Palerne, and an ape and a lion in Octavian.[3]
The tale of Sir Tryamour is found complete in two manuscripts, one of the fifteenth century and one, the Percy Folio, dating to the seventeenth. It is also found in one early printed version of the mid-sixteenth century. Fragments of the tale have also been found in one of the Rawlinson manuscripts in the Bodliean Library in Oxford, and in a couple of sixteenth century printed editions, including a volume printed by Wynkyn de Worde.[4]
Sir Tryamour is found complete in two manuscripts and one early printed copy: