Нации и этничность в гуманитарных науках

The briar, however, with its natural tendency to outreach, intertwine and cover, does contribute to the claustrophobic atmosphere of the narrator’s joyless dwelling. Leslie noted that 'Briars, thorns and brambles are similarly used as elegiac motifs in early Welsh and Irish poetry’[266], supplemented by Hall’s observation of the similarity between the 'eordscraef (earthcave) and the Green Chapel in

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight[267]. Admittedly these are geographically or temporally remote examples of parallel, but they at least provide a context for such imagery of a desolate, hollow mound made worse by wild, unrelenting and enclosing bushes. This is also echoed in line 11 of the second poem, Wulf and Eacwacer

(Tonne mec se beaducafa bogum bilegde’: 'the bold warrior laid his arms about me’), where 'bogum’ can mean 'with the forearms (usually of animals)’ as well as 'with shoots, sprouts, twigs of a seed, herb, shrub. In the latter case, we get the image, as we do in WL, of a woman being locked within plants.

The 'eordsele’ ('earth hall’) has been described by Hume to be an 'anti-hall’, a distorted reflection of the mead-hall in OE literature, the mead-hall being symbol of'a circle of light and peace’ and 'the social system associated with it’(Hume, 64)[268]. Nevertheless, a hall in OE poetry has always been a claustrophobic image – prone to be broken in, not at all immune to the lurking dangers and darkness that surround it. In fact, if we think about the first slaughter scene in

Beowulf (lines 115–125) in which Grendel single-handedly destroyed 30 men who were feasting at the mead-table, or about the massacre scene in Cynewulf and Cyneheard

in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, where Cynewulfs avenging followers locked themselves with their outnumbered enemies in a fortress to prevent the latter from escaping, we feel too vividly the anxiety about being 'trapped’ in a man-made structure.

The fact that the OE poet chose the same world ‘sele’ (hall) to describe both the wife’s dwelling (‘eorðsele’) and her lord’s imagined whereabouts (‘dreorsele’ in line 50, literally ‘sad hall’) suggests an intended parallel: both are ‘wic wyna leas’ (‘dwelling without joy’) combining hostility from both human design and the wild nature, together making a comfortless prison for its respective inhabitant. The wife shut in a claustrophobic, ‘biting enclosure’, seized with longing for her husband and anxious about his whereabouts can naturally and subconsciously envision him to be in a situation comparable to hers. ‘Sy æt him sylfum gelong/ eal his worulde wyn, sy ful wide fah/ feorres folclondes, þæt min freond siteð/ under stanhliþe, storme behrimed/ wine werigmod, wæter beflowen/ on dreorsele. Dreogeð se min wine/ micle modceare; he gemon to oft/ wynlicran wic’ (lines 45–52), according to my understanding, can be translated as this: ‘whether his worldly joy be dependent on himself’ (i. e. he is a free man capable of looking for his own happiness) or ‘whether he be very widely outlawed in a faraway country’ (so that he might easily be confined and guarded), ‘my friend’ will be forced to ‘sit under stony slope, frost-coated by the storm, surrounded by water, sad-spirited in a sad hall’ – a semi-cell that doesn’t even provide shelter from the violence of nature. In either case, he ‘will too often think about a more pleasant inhabitation’ (as ‘I’ now too often do), of the home where ‘we’ once shared as husband and wife.