This document provides an overview and analysis of the Old English poem "Wulf and Eadwacer". It discusses how scholars have interpreted the poem over time. The key points are: - All critics agree the speaker is female based on grammar, and she is experiencing emotional anguish related to her past relationship with Wulf. - The poem climaxes with her crying out to someone, presumably her husband Eadwacer, mentioning their "earme hwelp" or unhappy offspring. - Early interpretations speculated it was part of a larger story, but more recent analyses see it as a self-contained dramatic monologue or lament by a woman torn between her lover Wulf and husband Eadw

1. THE WIFE’S COMPLAINT
WULF AND EADWACER
WEEK IV

2. ALEXANDER
 The Wife’s Complaint and The Husband’s Message are not separate fragments of a single story, despite what the
titles given them by nineteenth-century editors might seem to imply. 79
 The Wife’s Lament: This is the lament of a woman whose husband, misled by kinsmen, has banished her to an
underground den far away from him. Here she recalls their former happiness, curses the author of their
estrangement, and pictures her husband stranded on some distant shore.
 The Husband’s Message, which occurs some pages further on in The Exeter Book, is not a particularly elegiac one.
The staff upon which the message is carved is made to speak, by a convention which the Riddles will make familiar.
 Wulf and Eadwacer: Also in The Exeter Book; this must at first sight have been a very obscure fragment. The chief
difficulties were cleared up by Henry Bradley, writing in 1888. He declared that the poem is ‘ a fragment o f a
dramatic soliloquy. The speaker, it should be premised, is shown by the grammar to be a woman, Wulf is her lover
and an outlaw, and Eadwacer (I suspect, though it is not certain) is her tyrant husband’
 It has a strophic structure (slightly obscured, perhaps, in the process o f copying), and a refrain. Deor is the only
other Anglo-Saxon poem similarly constructed.

3. GENRE AND GENDER Old English Literature: A Guide to Criticism with Selected Readings, First Edition. John D. Niles
 It is quite possible that a precise native vocabulary to distinguish one poetic genre from one another was never
developed.
 The chief native term for poetry, giedd (or gied), is used in the corpus of Anglo‐Saxon writings with reference to many
things, from poetry, to prophecy, to healing charms, to riddles, to heightened speech
 leoþ ‘”poem, verse”, song “song” and spell “story” or “performance”, are almost impossible to pin down in terms of
generic distinctions.
 Certain types of verse, those that are imitative of Latin models, are unproblematic as regards their generic conventions.
This is true of the Exeter Book riddles, which are clearly inspired by the Latin riddle collections of Aldhelm and other
learned authors.
 Beowulf: heroic-elegiac poem (Tolkien), heroic tragedy (Greenfield), heroic history (Robert Hanning-history and heroic
fantasy are interwoven in the historical writings of the early Middle Ages) difficult to spot the genre.

4. Elegy
• Elegy: The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study by Klinck. The nine poems identified by Klinck as
examples of the type [elegy] are The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Riming Poem, Deor, Wulf and Eadwacer, The
Wife’s Lament, Resignation, The Husband’s Message, and The Ruin. All of these are preserved uniquely in the
Exeter Book, and most are set in the first‐person singular voice. The key elements in the Old English elegiac genre,
in Klinck’s view, is that of separation from an object of desire, together with a corresponding feeling of longing,
combined in certain of the poems with a movement towards some kind of consolation.
• Sense of separation: a distance in time or space between someone and their desire. ‘Longing that springs from
unsatisfied desire is the product of separation, and pervades all the poems, The Wife’s Lament and Wulf and
Eadwacer most painfully, The Husband’s Message with hope for reunion’ (p. 225)
 Some critics would absorb the ‘elegies’ into a larger category, that of ‘wisdom literature’, as was first suggested
by Morton W. Bloomfield in his wide‐ranging 1968 essay ‘Understanding Old English Poetry’. A similar argument
was advanced by Thomas Shippey in his 1976 book Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English Literature
 When one takes account of the Old English ‘elegies’ in particular, it is clear that one factor that cuts across the
notion of genre is that of gender 227

5.  Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife’s Lament, two poems of the Old English poetic corpus that are set into the
voices of women and that deal poignantly with female separation, longing, and loss, are core examples of the
genre known as ‘elegy’
 In her 1990 essay ‘Women’s Songs, Women’s Language’, Patricia A. Belanoff reads two elegiac poems of the
Exeter Book as reflexes of an ancient Germanic genre of Frauenlied ‘women’s song’. Drawing on the writings of
the French feminist critic Julia Kristeva, she argues that these poems employ a kind of language that is specific to
women, regardless of whether or not a woman composed them.
 Women’s experience in OE lit: mourning and loss. The men are in the pursuit of dom (‘glory’, ‘salvation’), ‘lof’ (a
good reputation).

6. “Looking Into Enclosure in the Old English Female Lyrics” by Shari Horner
 “female enclosure” : female enclosure in Anglo-Saxon England produce a discourse of enclosure which in turn
produces and genders each speaker 30
 The only two poems in Old English to feature a first-person female speaker are known by the titles “Wulf and
Eadwacer” and “The Wife’s Lament.” 29
 The speakers of “The Wife’s Lament” and “Wulf and Eadwacer” offer the possibility of a female voice, but they are
nevertheless firmly constrained within social and spatial boundaries.
 Much of the critical discussion about these poems has centered on the question of gender, since several critics
(one as recently as 1987) have found it unlikely that an Old English poem would feature a female persona. They
have thus explained away the grammatical forms that gender these speakers, usually citing scribal error. In
general, however, critics agree that these speakers are women.

7.  Unlike those elegies known to have male speakers, such as “The Wanderer” or “The Seafarer,” the female elegies do not pair earthly sorrow with the
future hope of Christian (or spiritual) consolation […] each speaker “seems irrevocably trapped in her present 30
 Unable to go wandering or seafaring, the female speakers of the elegies instead use another form of creative power: they “weave” their own stories
into texts. […] Because their physical containment restricts action but not speech or thought, their journeys turn inward, insisting upon (and thereby
linking) the physical and the personal.
 They thereby anticipate devotional literature written for enclosed female religious of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which, as Elizabeth
Robertson has shown, developed a feminine spirituality grounded in the body
 “inescapable corporeality”: (mis)conception of the Aristotelian view that saw woman as flawed or imperfect man (?). Intended for female readers
(though written by male authors), this literary tradition linked the categories of woman and body: “From a medieval perspectiveself” or “subject” of
these elegies as the individual identity produced through a given set of linguistic, discursive, and gendered properties or behaviors. […] The elegies are
powerful examples of the cultural construction of gender in Old English texts, made all the more powerful because they are anonymous 31
 Judith Butler’s “performativity”, author(ity)/ authorship: gender is not a stable or fixed category, but is instead a repeated set of culturally and socially
established acts, and this repetition constitutes the appearance of a stable gendered self. The seemingly stable gender identities of the female elegiac
speakers are, I suggest, likewise the products of culturally established “expressions” of gender mandated by the terms of female religious enclosure (?)

8. • Of all the Old English elegies, only the two female elegies exhibit these restrictions against their speakers; the male
elegiac speakers, in contrast, are defined by their free, unfettered physical movement (even though they are exiled).
The Wanderer, in the elegy of that name, walks the paths of exile, and like the hlaford in “The Wife’s Lament,” or
like Wulf, the Wanderer’s body is not enclosed; though exiled, he is not imprisoned
• Weland vs Beadohild: In a poem such as “Deor,” in which a man is fettered (Weland the smith), readers can be
reassured of metaphysical, if not actual release, voiced in the refrain, “πæs ofereode, πisses swa mæg.” In the same
poem, however, Beadohild’s physical condition, pregnancy, is inescapable; she cannot expect the same kind of
physical release from the ties that bind her that Weland can.
• The Wanderer& The Seafarer vs The Wife’s Lament: the speaker in The Seafarer represses his anxious, material
thoughts and turning his attention to a more spiritual plane. (Christianity). The Wanderer tries to repress his
thoughts as well. […] While female physical enclosure prohibits action, it permits speech; the desires of the female
speakers turn inward as they expose and explore memories of their physical lives that the Wanderer would have
locked away 34

9. The Problem of Ending in The Wife’s Lament by John D. Niles
• It is a dramatic monologue that is imagined to be spoken by an isolated, grief stricken woman.
• Although in that regard it resembles the poem known as Wulf and Eadwacer , The Wife's Lament presents a more fully
developed narrative of the speaker's past. That extent it more closely resembles other Exeter Book elegies, including
the longer and more philosophical poem known as “The Wanderer” 1107
• Enigmatic quality by which it modulates toward the riddle. Although it has none of the rhetorical features (such as a
challenge to "guess my name"), anyone reading the poem is forced to enter into a kind of guessing game regarding
who the speaker is, what she has experienced, and what her exact response to that experience is.
• No convincing reason to question the speaker's gender: as a set of three feminine grammatical inflections
("geomorre," lb; "minre" and "sylfre," 2a) are introduced at the start of the monologue 1108
 The consensus view that the speaker is a wronged woman emerges naturally from the monologue as a whole.
 Two different views: Despite occasional arguments to the effect that the speaker tells of a triangle involving a
woman, her husband, and a male rival or usurper, there is good reason to accept the current consensus that only
two main figures are in volved, namely, the woman and her estranged husband.

10. • The man in question is the speaker’s husband: to the vows of fidelity by several of the nouns that are used to refer
to the man, specifically hlaford 'lord, husband' (6a, 15a), frea 'lord' (33a), and wine 'lord, friend, protector 1110
• The man is to be regarded as of very high rank: leodfruma 'leader of the people' (8a) to refer to him
• The woman addresses the man as both her husband and her lord.
 The Wife's Lament can only be understood within a Christian intellectual context (?).
 Alain Renoir has suggested, the central action of the poem might be regarded as a textbook illustration of the New
Testament assertion that the Lord "deposuit potentes de sede" (has put down the mighty from their thrones). If one
adopts this approach, then the mighty one who is put down from her high station is the female speaker, who
recounts her own fall from a privileged status to a state of abject loneliness***.
• The poem's setting in a past time that, seems far more archaic than the late-tenth-century period when the text was
written down and, presumably, was being received by an audience of Anglo-Saxons. The poem is set in a world that
seems like an Anglo-Saxon author's dream of his people's pre-Christian past. This a fabulous northern world of lords
and retainers, gifts and scops, wars and feuds, dynastic rivalries, arranged marriages, intrigues, and exiled victims of
circumstance.

11.  The speakers of The Wanderer and The Seafarer, for instance, are lordless thanes who represent their exile in terms
of the empty hall and the absent ring-giver.
 The female speakers of The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer represent their exile by defining their situation
within their marriages. But the speakers in these two poems also exploit the full resonance of the cultural "exile" of
the female speaker in Anglo-Saxon society.
• As an exile from the center of power and the central sources of identity in her culture, each speaker describes her
geographical isolation and emotional deprivation in terms that effectively express her "otherness” 586
• hlaford [lord], leodfruma [chieftain], wine [friendly lord], frea [lord of a people], and freond [friend]. None of these
terms specifically denotes a husband, and most are only seldom used to refer to a man's position in his marriage.
Rather, these terms are used most frequently to refer to a man's position within the martial or political spheres of
heroic society. The wife uses these terms to represent her position as retainer to her husband/lord. Such language
expresses the subordinate position of a married woman in the intimate, domestic, public, and social context of her
world

12. • She has no faithful friends (holdra freonda, WL, 1. 17a), since her separation from her husband removes her from the
kinship network that should provide protection for her.
• In voicing the poem, she seeks consolation in language; as comfort, she attempts, like other exiles, to construct a
linguistic representation of the world from which she has been exiled.
• The female speaker of Wulfand Eadwacer is likewise defined by her marriage. Her social identity, though, is made
problematic by her geographical and emotional separation from her lover, Wulf: "Wulf is on iege, ic on o erre"
["Wulf is on an island, I on another"], and the suffocating closeness of her marriage to Eadwacer
 Her desire for Wulf, a desire not sanctioned by the social or legal structures of her culture, makes her an exile, an
exile from herself as much as from her community and marriage
 She characterizes herself as emotionally dependent on the outlawed Wulf, who in his absence dominates her
consciousness in much the same way as the absent husband inhabits the language of the wife in The Wife's
Lament 587
 Lack of consolatory hope

13.  The modern reader might read these poems for their anthropological potential to represent female
experience within a cultural context, in Elaine Showalter's terms.
 Gilbert and Gubar's Norton Anthology of Literature by Women presents Julian of Norwich (1342-1416) and
Margery Kempe (c.1373-c.1440) as the beginning of the female literary tradition in England. […] English
literary historians might date the beginning of women's language, if not women's literature, not in the fifteenth
century with Margery and Julian, but five centuries earlier in the heroic world of Anglo-Saxon England.

14. “WULF AND EADWACER: THE ADULTEROUS WOMAN RECONSIDERED” by Dolores Warwick Frese
• Renate Haas: Most recently, Haas has ventured a provocative connection of the lament for the dead with the
love complaint, suggesting that the several shared motifs of the two genres produced the peculiar blend of
amorous and elegiac passion which characterizes some of Chaucer's early poetry
• Wulf and Eadwacer we might profitably be re-examined here, preparatory to relocating the poem in the
elegiac category, where its passion would seem to be, rather than sexual and amorous, more maternal and
religious
• Benjamin Thorpe (1842): “Of this, I can make no sense”, he declined to attempt a translation, writing instead
his now-famous admission of non-comprehension.
• Subsequent scholars attempted to supply a prior "life story" for the poem from the Volsunga Saga, the
Wulfdietrich story, and the Hildebrandslied

15. All critics
• agree that the speaker of the poem is female - a fact conveyed at the most basic interpretive level by the
grammar
• agree that she is in a present state of emotional extremity
• agree that her present anguish - conveyed with extraordinary poetic immediacy - derives from some grief-
giving love relationship in the past with someone named Wulf.
 agree that the poem peaks with the speaker's adjurative outcry to someone directly addressed - by name or
epithet - as "Eadwacer.«
 agree that this passionate outburst includes reference to some offspring described as uncerne earne [earme]
hwelp [our wretched whelp, 1 6b].
 All agree that this moment of tumescent emotional delivery gives way to an intellectual contraction of the
verse into riddling verbal forms of paradox and oxymoron, with explicit reference to something "easily severed
that never was joined".

16. • a mother lamenting a lost son. This ancient ritual of maternal grief, attested as early as Gilgamesh's lament for Enkidu
• It can be demonstrated as deeply rooted in traditions of elegiac memorial inscriptiption’ 5.
• David Daiches: " a sexually tormented woman is a theme […] quite uncharacteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry as it has come down to
us." (?)
 Examples of maternal grief in OE lit: Wealtheow, wife of Hrodgar wants Beowulf to protect her two vulnerable sons; Hredric and
Hrodmund (from a possible political death/feud issue),Hildeburh, sister of Hnaef lamenting over her brother and son near a
funeral pyre. 5a], the psychological surrender is expressed in the text with two terse phrases: ides gnornode [the woman
mourned with sorrowing songs, 11 17b], and geomrode giddum [lamented […] Beowulf poet, accustomed to observing the
epitome of male expertise with the succinct phrase pcet wees god cyning, now expresses his sense of the quintessential female
experience by observing poet wees geomuru ides! [that was a sad woman]. In Widsith Ealhild, on her way to marry Ermanric,
whose shady history includes the cruel possibility that among the many people he put to death, some were his own children.
 And there is the “geomuru ides” of Deor, whose typical troubles with sons and brothers are not only entered into the poem, but
also are ranked according to their priorities of grief, the maternal taking precedence over the fraternal problem: “Beadohild was
not as heartsick over her brother's death as over her own affair (i.e., her pregnancy), a condition she had unmistakably verified,
and could not ever contemplate without having misgivings about the outcome,[ 8a-l2b]” 7

17.  Eadwacer (property-watcher/ husband): here it is Michael: compound, the ead cognate with the well-attested
eadig which commonly refers to the blessed or happy who enjoy the treasure or possession of Heaven.61
"Eadwacer," then, I would take to be some messenger or guide from the Christian spirit-world, appropriately
addressed, as Michael the archangel frequently was, in the adjurative mode at the end of the poem's
conclusion, as at the end of memorial epigraphy, with a petition concerning the conduct and reception of the
soul into the midst of the heavenly-company. Valkyries (?)
 For a son whose name was Wulf, the very word that names him would summon up the coordinate image of
animal predators carrying off the corpse.
 “Gehyrest du, Eadwacer? Uncerne earne hwelp/ bired wulf to wuda” The final anguished outcry to a guardian
spirit - whether the speaker's point of view is explicitly Christian, or defiantly pagan, or something vacillating
between the two - utters the truth of a complex cultural moment where pagan and Christian rites and their
corresponding modes of consciousness are perceived as imperfectly fused or joined.

18. A very different
translation for
the poem: