Robert Nye, a poet and novelist who found rich material in the legends of ancient England and Wales, and who invented a rollicking afterlife for one of Shakespeare’s most enduring characters in his acclaimed novel “Falstaff,” died on Saturday in Cork, Ireland. He was 77.

The cause was cancer, his literary agent, Vivienne Schuster, said.

Mr. Nye was a word-drunk fabulist, steeped in the oral tradition. “My stories,” he told the reference work World Authors in 1980, “have their source in dreams which more than one person has dreamt, in ballads, jests, yarns, and in those folk tales which are as it were the dreams of the people coming to us without the interference of our own identity.”

He was happy to describe his own output as “tall tales, fibs, lies, whoppers” — a penchant that explains his attraction to the vainglorious, less than truthful hero of “Falstaff.” Told in florid, exuberantly vulgar Rabelaisian prose, that novel, published in 1976, purported to be Falstaff’s memoirs, dictated in his ninth decade to a series of household secretaries.

The Times of London called it “one of the most ambitious and seductive novels of the decade.” Anthony Burgess, in “Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939” (1984), wrote that it “combines, successfully, the forward drive of modern fiction with the divagations of a more monkish tradition.”