Love and Loss in Anglo-Saxon Poetry

A Subcast episode!  Let's read two Old English poems that treat the female experience in Anglo-Saxon England: "Wulf and Eadwacer" and "The Wife's Lament" -- the only surviving OE poems written in a woman's voice!

Transcript

Hello, literati, and welcome to the inaugural episode of the Classic English Literature Subcast.  I want to start this new little project by jumping back to the Old English period, maybe late 9th or 10th century and look at a couple of unique poems in the Anglo-Saxon corpus: “Wulf and Eadwacer” and “The Wife’s Lament.”  They are unique because, alone among Old English poetry, they are first-person laments from the woman’s point of view – the female is speaking in these poems.  I have probably mentioned before that Old English lacks a romantic love poetry tradition, what French would call “fine amour.”  The elegy – that type of poem in which a (usually male) speaker laments his exile and mourns the passing of a warrior’s golden age is generally about as close to any real emotional expression here.  Think back to episode 4 of the podcast about the elegies “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer.”

But with today’s two poems, we can see the elegy tradition turned inside out.  Women weren’t part of that comitatus bond that united the male members of a war band – they had no military obligations other than as “peace-weavers” – that is, as property to be married off as a peace settlement between warring tribes.  And they did not participate in the great victory feasts and rituals of mead-hall comradeship.  Yet the theme of exile so prevalent in masculine military poems becomes a meditation on the sorrows of love and marriage in today’s texts.

The first poem, “Wulf and Eadwacer,” presents us with a puzzle – maybe even a riddle, in the Anglo-Saxon sense.  Its dramatic situation is quite obscure.  A female speaker worries about her husband (Eadwacer) and her lover (Wulf) and her child.  What she worries about is temptingly open to interpretation.  Here it is in the translation by Kevin Crossley-Holland:

Prey, it's as if my people have been handed prey.

They'll tear him to pieces if he comes with a troop.

O, we are apart.

Wulf is on one island, I on another,

a fastness that island, a fen-prison.

Fierce men roam there, on that island;

they'll tear him to pieces if he comes with a troop.

O, we are apart. 

How I have grieved for my Wulf's wide wanderings.

When rain slapped the earth and I sat apart weeping,

when the bold warrior wrapped his arms about me,

I seethed with desire and yet with such hatred.

Wulf, my Wulf, my yearning for you

and your seldom coming have caused my sickness,

my mourning heart, not mere starvation.

Can you hear, Eadwacer? Wulf will spirit

our pitiful whelp to the woods.

Men easily savage what was never secure,

our song together.

Since this is a podcast, you might not notice that the poem’s first word, “prey” is a noun, not a verb.  “Prey” as in that which is hunted.  The “him” of the second line is presumably the prey who will be destroyed if he comes with his warriors.  And the speaker is apart from him – he (Wulf) is on another island, and she repeats her fear that he will be destroyed if he comes for her.  And her refrain: “O, we are apart” – just so heartrending!

She then gives us a rather passionate description of her yearning for her lover and how it has literally made her ill.  Then, my favorite part, that sharp question to her husband: “Can you hear, Eadwacer?”  Rage, frustration, but also rebellion.  Has her husband locked her away from her lover.  Is he literally listening to her speak or is she shouting at the rain-soaked darkness?  Then, here’s an interesting line: “Wulf will spirit our pitiful whelp into the woods.”  Nice pun on her lover’s name.  The whelp is, of course, a child, but whose?  To whom does the “our” refer: is the baby Wulf and the speaker’s, or is it Eadwacer and the speaker’s?  If the latter, why should Wulf take it?  Is Eadwacer a cruel father as well as husband?  

If you read other translations, you get different ways of interpreting the poem.  I like this one best because, to me, it most deftly weaves together the speaker’s awful craving for her lover, her desperate fear for his destruction, and her teeth-clenched defiance.  For my money, whatever the heck is actually going on here, this is one of the most raw and emotionally–expressive poems I’ve ever read.

The second poem, “The Wife’s Lament,” similarly offers us some ambiguous circumstances.  Here it is, again translated by Crossley-Holland.

I draw these words from my deep sadness,

my sorrowful lot.  I can say that,

since I grew up, I have not suffered

such hardships as now, old or new.

I am tortured by the anguish of exile.

First my lord forsook his family

for the tossing waves; I fretted at dawn

as to where in the world my lord might be.

In my sorrow I set out then,

a friendless wanderer, to search for my man.

But that man's kinsmen laid secret plans

to part us, so that we should live

most wretchedly, far from each other

in this wide world; I was seized with longings.

My lord asked me to live with him here;

I had few loved ones, loyal friends

in this country; that is the reason for grief. 

Then I found my own husband was ill-starred,

sad at heart, pretending, plotting

murder behind a smiling face.  How often

we swore that nothing but death should ever

divide us; that is all changed now;

our friendship is as if it never had been.

Early and late, I must undergo hardship

because of the feud of my own dearest loved one.

Men forced me to live in a forest grove,

under an oak tree in the earth-cave.

This cavern is age-old; I am choked with longings.

Gloomy are the valleys, too high the hills,

harsh strongholds overgrown with briars:

a joyless abode.  The journey of my lord so often

cruelly seizes me.  There are lovers on earth,

lovers alive who lie in bed,

when I pass through this earth-cave alone

and out under the oak tree at dawn;

there I must sit through the long summer's day

and there I mourn my miseries,

my many hardships; for I am never able

to quiet the cares of my sorrowful mind,

all the longings that are my life's lot.

Young men must always be serious in mind

and stout-hearted; they must hide

their heartaches, that host of constant sorrows,

behind a smiling face.

Whether he is a master

of his own fate or is exiled in a far-off land—

sitting under rocky storm-cliffs, chilled

with hoar-frost, weary in mind,

surrounded by the sea in some sad place—

my husband is caught in the clutches of anguish;

over and over again he recalls a happier home.

Grief goes side by side with those

who suffer longing for a loved one.

The speaker here sounds very like that of “The Wanderer,” but again the lamentation for exile, isolation, and loss changes dramatically when we realize that the speaker is female.  All we really can tell here is that she has lost her lord, a husband from another tribe (was she a peace-weaver?).  The circumstances of her loss are cloudy.  She says that, “Men forced me to live in a forest grove, under an oak tree in the earth-cave.” Note the triple-layered isolation here: she is in a forest (so outside the bounds of civil society), she is under an oak, in a cave – so shunned and, in a sense, prematurely interred.  Why?

Well, the line is ambiguous.  She says: “Early and late, I must undergo hardship / because of the feud of my own dearest loved one.”  It’s the prepositional phrases here that mess us up: has her husband been exiled and she banished because he took part in an unsanctioned blood feud with another tribe?  Or is the feud between the husband and the speaker?  She does say something about her lord having forsaken his family – was that in  marrying her against their will and, to reconcile with his family, has he put her out?  It’s difficult to say because the word translated as “feud” can be a rather specific legal term for a blood-feud or a fee-grief (a comitatus obligation) or it can simply be a husband’s hatred for his wife.

She may not be sure either.  In the last stanza, she says, 

Whether he is a master

of his own fate or is exiled in a far-off land—

. . . my husband is caught in the clutches of anguish;

over and over again he recalls a happier home.

Very elegiac, that.  She doesn’t know if their situation is by his own choice or imposed by others, but she is sure he must regret his loss.

I am too.  Who wouldn’t want to be loved by someone as hungrily as the two women speaking in these poems love their lords?  Phew.

There has been, of course, speculation that these poems are not only from the point of view of women, but from the pens of women.  Unsurprisingly, there is not too much scholarly support for this argument available in the casual Google search.  A few folks have made the case that, while literacy was not over-common among the Anglo-Saxons, a large proportion of the literate were female.  So, the possibility exists.  Couple that with some documents chastising 8th century nuns for writing love poetry while they should be working, and you’ve got grounds for some very pleasing speculation, at the least.  We’ll never really know and, perhaps at this remove, it is enough that the poems feel real to us and that, regardless of our current obsessions with sex and gender, is profoundly human.

Put these beside the Wife of Bath’s materials, particularly her dissertation on the “woe that is in marriage.”  Or, maybe more obliquely, think about Guinevere in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s version of the Arthur tales: the wife who speaks not.  In an upcoming episode, we’ll be looking at women who have had profound mystical religious experiences and the isolation that brings, so these poems may be a good pairing with that, too.

Thanks so much for supporting the Classic English Literature Podcast – I very much appreciate your generosity.  Till next time, all best!