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"The Wife's Lament" or "The Wife's Complaint" is an Old English poem of 53 lines found on folio 115 of the
Exeter Book The Exeter Book, also known as the Codex Exoniensis or Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501, is a large codex of Old English poetry, believed to have been produced in the late tenth century AD. It is one of the four major manuscripts of Old Engli ...
and generally treated as an
elegy An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, and in English literature usually a lament for the dead. However, according to ''The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy'', "for all of its pervasiveness ... the 'elegy' remains remarkably ill defined: sometime ...
in the manner of the German '' frauenlied'', or "women's song". The poem has been relatively well preserved and requires few if any emendations to enable an initial reading. Thematically, the poem is primarily concerned with the evocation of the grief of the female speaker and with the representation of her state of despair. The tribulations she suffers leading to her state of lamentation, however, are cryptically described and have been subject to many interpretations. Indeed, Professor Stephen Ramsay has said, "the 'correct' interpretation of "The Wife's Lament" is one of the more hotly debated subjects in medieval studies."


Genre

Though the description of the text as a woman's song or ''frauenlied''—lamenting for a lost or absent lover—is the dominant understanding of the poem, the text has nevertheless been subject to a variety of distinct treatments that fundamentally disagree with this view and propose alternatives. One such treatment considers the poem to be
allegory As a literary device or artistic form, an allegory is a narrative or visual representation in which a character, place, or event can be interpreted to represent a hidden meaning with moral or political significance. Authors have used allegory th ...
, in which interpretation the lamenting speaker represents the Church as
Bride of Christ The bride of Christ or the lamb's wife is a term used in reference to a group of related verses in the Bible, in the Gospels, Revelation, the Epistles and related verses in the Old Testament. Sometimes, the bride is implied by calling Jesus a br ...
or as an otherwise feminine allegorical figure. Another dissenting interpretation holds that the speaker, who describes herself held within an old earth cell (''eald is þes eorðsele'') beneath an oak tree (''under actreo''), may indeed literally be located in a cell under the earth, and would therefore constitute a voice of the deceased, speaking from beyond the grave. Both the interpretations, as with most alternatives, face difficulties, particularly in the latter case, for which no analogous texts exist in the Old English corpus. The status of the poem as a lament spoken by a female protagonist is therefore fairly well established in criticism. Interpretations that attempt a treatment diverging from this, though diverse in their approach, bear a fairly heavy burden of proof. Thematic consistencies between the ''Wife's Lament'' and its close relative in the genre of the woman's song, as well as close neighbour in the Exeter Book, ''
Wulf and Eadwacer "Wulf and Eadwacer" (, approximately ) is an Old English poem of famously difficult interpretation. It has been variously characterised, (modernly) as an elegy, (historically) as a riddle, and (in speculation on the poem's pre-history) as a s ...
'', make unconventional treatments somewhat counterintuitive. A final point of divergence, however, between the conventional interpretation and variants proceeds from the similarity of the poem in some respects to elegiac poems in the Old English corpus that feature male protagonists. Similarities between the language and circumstances of the male protagonist of '' The Wanderer'', for example, and the protagonist of the ''Wife's Lament'' have led other critics to argue, even more radically, that the protagonist of the poem (to which the attribution of the title "the wife's lament" is wholly apocryphal and fairly recent) may in fact be male. This interpretation, however, faces the almost insurmountable problem that adjectives and personal nouns occurring within the poem (geomorre, minre, sylfre) are feminine in
grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns ...
. This interpretation is at the very least dependent therefore on a contention that perhaps a later Anglo-Saxon copyist has wrongly imposed feminine gender on the protagonist where this was not the original authorial intent, and such contentions almost wholly relegate discussion to the realm of the hypothetical. It is also thought by some that ''The Wife's Lament'' and ''
The Husband's Message "The Husband's Message" is an anonymous Old English poem, 53 lines long and found only on folio 123 of the Exeter Book. The poem is cast as the private address of an unknown first-person speaker to a wife, challenging the reader to discover the sp ...
'' may be part of a larger work. The poem is also considered by some to be a riddle poem. A riddle poem contains a lesson told in cultural context which would be understandable or relates to the reader, and was a very popular genre of poetry of the time period. Gnomic wisdom is also a characteristic of a riddle poem, and is present in the poem's closing sentiment (lines 52-53). Also, it cannot be ignored that contained within ''the Exeter Book'' are 92 other riddle poems. According to Faye Walker-Pelkey, "The Lament's placement in ''the Exeter Book,'' its mysterious content, its fragmented structure, its similarities to riddles, and its inclusion of gnomic wisdom suggest that the "elegy"...is a riddle."


Narrative content and interpretation

Interpreting the text of the poem as a woman's lament, many of the text's central controversies bear a similarity to those around ''Wulf and Eadwacer''. Although it is unclear whether the protagonist's tribulations proceed from relationships with multiple lovers or a single man, Stanley B. Greenfield, in his paper "''The Wife's Lament'' Reconsidered," discredits the claim that the poem involves multiple lovers. He suggests that lines 42-47 use an optative voice as a curse against the husband, not a second lover. The impersonal expressions with which the poem concludes, according to Greenfield, do not represent gnomic wisdom or even a curse upon young men in general; rather this impersonal voice is used to convey the complex emotions of the wife toward her husband. Virtually all of the facts integral to the poem beyond the matter of genre are widely open to dispute. The obscurity of the narrative background of the story has led some critics to suggest that the narrative may have been one familiar to its original listeners, at some point when this particular rendition was conceived, such that much of the matter of the story was omitted in favour of a focus on the emotional drive of the lament. Constructing a coherent narrative from the text requires a good deal of inferential conjecture, but a commentary on various elements of the text is provided here nonetheless. ''The Wife's Lament'', even more so than ''Wulf and Eadwacer'', vividly conflates the theme of mourning over a departed or deceased leader of the people (as may be found in ''The Wanderer'') with the theme of mourning over a departed or deceased lover (as portrayed in ''Wulf and Eadwacer''). The lord of the speaker's people (''min leodfruma, min hlaford'') appears in all likelihood also to be her lord in marriage. Given that her lord's kinsmen (''þæt monnes magas'') are described as taking measures to separate the speaker from him, a probable interpretation of the speaker's initial circumstances is that she has been entered into an
exogamous Exogamy is the social norm of marrying outside one's social group. The group defines the scope and extent of exogamy, and the rules and enforcement mechanisms that ensure its continuity. One form of exogamy is dual exogamy, in which two groups c ...
relationship typical within the Anglo-Saxon heroic tradition, and her marital status has left her isolated among her husband's people, who are hostile to her, whether due to her actions or merely due to political strife beyond her control. Somewhat confusing the account, however, the speaker, longing for her lover, has apparently departed (''Ic me feran geƿat'') either to seek out her lord or merely to seek exile, and the relationship, chronologically or causally, between this act and the hostility of her and/or her husband's people is unclear. She is told by her lord (''hlaford min'') to take up a particular dwelling place, where she encounters a man of unclear identity, who is or was "suitable" (''ful gemæcne'') to her, and they declare they will not be separated by anything save death. This, however, does not last, seemingly as a consequence of prior difficulties concerning her marriage. The remainder of the narrative concerns her lamentable state in the present of the poem. She is commanded to dwell in a barrow within the earth (''þes eorðsele''), wherein she is compelled to mourn the loss of her lord and her present exile. The poem concludes with what begins as a gnomic exhortation admonishing youth to adopt a cheerful aspect, even in grief, but subsequently develops into an expression of the grief of the speaker's beloved. More recent interpretations have disputed this gnomic exhortation. According to John Niles, in this “genteel” reading, it seems less consequential whether the wife has been scorned by one husband or two; it is her “dignified passivity” as well as her gnomic wisdom on which scholars focus. In “vindictive” readings, however, the wife is generally seen to burn with anger toward one man – her husband. In such views, ''The Wife’s Lament'' begins as a bold statement of misery, transitions into a description of her misfortunes in which she nostalgically recalls happy days with her husband, and ends in a bitter curse upon this same man who has now abandoned her. One proponent of this approach is Barrie Ruth Straus, author of “Women’s Words as Weapons: Speech as Action in ‘The Wife’s Lament.’” Straus bases her analysis of the poem on the speech act theory of J.L. Austin and John Searle, which regards speech as an action. Strauss breaks the poem into sections and shows how the language or “illocutionary acts” of each can be seen as an assertive act of telling. In a world in which women have little control, Straus emphasizes how speech could be an act of power; thus in the first section, the narrator deliberately establishes an intent to tell her story. She then persuasively presents her story as one of being wronged by her husband, avenging herself in the telling. In light of this speech act theory, Straus concludes that the final ten lines of the poem should be construed as a curse upon the husband, as this is the “least problematic interpretation”. Like Straus, Niles views the poem as an aggressive act of speech. While arguing that the poem presents certain philological evidence to support an optative reading, the bulk of his support comes from contextual analysis of the act of cursing within the Anglo-Saxon culture. His article, “The Problem of the Ending of the Wife’s ‘Lament’ ” provides an intriguing overview of curses, discussing biblical influences of cursing as seen in Psalms 108 and the book of Deuteronomy. He also examines the act of cursing in charters and wills, quoting examples such as the following: “If anyone ever alters or removes anything in this will, may God’s grace and his eternal reward be taken from him forever…”. The Exeter Book itself is inscribed with such a curse. The Anglo-Saxon culture that took all acts of ''ƿearg-cƿedol'' (evil speaking) very seriously and even warily watched for potential witches, Niles argues, would have little trouble accepting the poem as a curse. Whether intended as a formal malediction or an emotional vituperation is less important.


Influence

Various efforts have been made to link this poem to later works featuring innocent, persecuted heroines, but its lyrical nature and brevity of information make establishing such links difficult. For instance, the
Crescentia ''Crescentia'' (calabash tree, huingo, krabasi, or kalebas) is a genus of six species of flowering plants in the family Bignoniaceae, native to southern North America, the Caribbean, Central America northern South America. The species are mode ...
cycle, a series of
chivalric romance As a literary genre, the chivalric romance is a type of prose and verse narrative that was popular in the noble courts of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a chivalric k ...
s such as ''
Le Bone Florence of Rome ''Le Bone Florence of Rome'' is a medieval English chivalric romance.Carol Falvo Heffernan, ''Le Bone Florence of Rome'', p vii , Featuring the innocent persecuted heroine, it is subcategorized into the Crescentia cycle of romances because of two ...
'' featuring a woman persecuted by her brother-in-law and would-be seducer, has been said to traced to it; however, the woman herself complains only of malevolent relatives, not the specific brother-in-law that is the distinctive trait of the Crescentia cycle. Similarly, attempts have been made to link it to the Constance cycle, where the heroine is persecuted by her wicked mother-in-law, which has English instances of ''
Vitae duorum Offarum The '' Vitae duorum Offarum'' "The lives of the two Offas" is a literary history written in the mid-thirteenth century, apparently by the St Albans monk Matthew Paris; however, the most recent editor and translator of the work rejects this attrib ...
'', ''
Emaré ''Emaré'' is a Middle English Breton lai, a form of mediaeval romance poem, told in 1035 lines. The author of ''Emaré'' is unknown and it exists in only one manuscript, Cotton Caligula A. ii, which contains ten metrical narratives. ''Emaré'' see ...
'', and ''
The Man of Law's Tale "The Man of Law's Tale" is the fifth of the ''Canterbury Tales'' by Geoffrey Chaucer, written around 1387. John Gower's "Tale of Constance" in ''Confessio Amantis'' tells the same story and may have been a source for Chaucer. Nicholas Trivet's ...
'', but no definitive conclusion can be made.


Editions, translations, and recordings

These include: * ''The Exeter Book'', ed. by George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie
The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records: A Collective Edition
3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), pp. 210–11. (Edition.) * ''Three Old English Elegies'', ed. by R. F. Leslie (Aberdeen: Manchester University Press, 1961). (Edition.) * ‘The Wife’s Lament’, trans. by R. M. Liuzza, in ''The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Volume 1: The Medieval Period'', ed. by Joseph Black and others (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006), p. 21. (Translation.) *. (Student edition.) * (Student edition.) * (Student edition.) * (Student edition and translation.) * Michael D. C. Drout,
The Wife’s Lament
, ''Anglo-Saxon Aloud'' (2 November 2007). (Reading.)


See also

*
Exeter Book The Exeter Book, also known as the Codex Exoniensis or Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501, is a large codex of Old English poetry, believed to have been produced in the late tenth century AD. It is one of the four major manuscripts of Old Engli ...
*
Wulf and Eadwacer "Wulf and Eadwacer" (, approximately ) is an Old English poem of famously difficult interpretation. It has been variously characterised, (modernly) as an elegy, (historically) as a riddle, and (in speculation on the poem's pre-history) as a s ...
* The Wanderer *
Old English literature Old English literature refers to poetry and prose written in Old English in early medieval England, from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman conquest of England, Norman Conquest of 1066, a period often termed Anglo-Saxon England. Th ...
*
The Husband's Message "The Husband's Message" is an anonymous Old English poem, 53 lines long and found only on folio 123 of the Exeter Book. The poem is cast as the private address of an unknown first-person speaker to a wife, challenging the reader to discover the sp ...
*
Freyja In Norse paganism, Freyja (Old Norse "(the) Lady") is a goddess associated with love, beauty, fertility, sex, war, gold, and seiðr (magic for seeing and influencing the future). Freyja is the owner of the necklace Brísingamen, rides a chario ...


References

;Footnotes


External links

{{wikisource
''The Wife's Lament''
(Old English)

Modern English Translation with Translator's Comments Wife's Lament