Нации и этничность в гуманитарных науках

According to the Wife

-narrator, the couple had taken vows that death only could separate them, but now they are living widely apart (‘is nu swa hit no wære/ freondschipe uncer’); for some reason the husband chose not to reveal his whereabouts and his next plan to his wife, leaving the woman lamenting her fate alone. But near the end of the poem, the wife seems to have reached reconciliation with her bitter feelings, especially those against her husband: ‘a young man may have to be sad-hearted, his heart’s thought painful’, yet despite all that, he still must keep up a ‘cheerful appearance’ like a Stoic (lines 42-5). The same phrase ‘bliþe gebæro’ (heart care) which has in line 20 expressed the wife’s astonishment or disappointment at finding her husband to be a hypocrite (‘plotting murder with a cheerful appearance’) later in line 44 shows that the wife has understood, or thought she has understood, her husband’s contradictory behaviour: perhaps he is already doing his best to be united with her again, or perhaps the murder part has been an unjustified conjecture on her part in the first place– in her grief-stricken situation she could have been unfair to him. These thoughts are immediately followed by the two relenting and sympathizing subjunctive lines, and end by a heart-rending aphorism ‘Wa bið þæm þe sceal/ of langoþe leofes abidan’ (lines 50-1,’Woe be to those who must/Wait for their beloved in longing’), bringing the poem to a perfectly elegiac end.

The second OE elegy, Wulf and Eadwacer

equally abounds of claustrophobic imagery. ‘Wulf is on iege, ic on oþerre./ Fæst is þæt eglond, fenne biworpen.’ (lines 4–5, ‘Wulf is on one isle, I am on another./ Fast is that island set among the fens’). An island – a small piece of land surrounded by the vast ocean, or by marshes, as the first island here – is in itself a confining locale. The person confined on an island is doubly locked, as in a ‘fast’ prison. As if this is not enough, a third powerful image of ‘engulfing’ and ‘trapping’ is twice implied in the repeated line of ‘willað hy hine aþecgan gif he on þreat cymeð’(line 7): if Wulf comes to the island, ‘they’ will wish to receive him, but more likely to kill or consume him as animals do their prey. The etymology of ‘aþecgan’ can be traced to ‘þicgan’ (‘to take’, usually food) and ‘þecgan’ (‘to take, to consume’), and even, according to Klinck, to ‘þeccan’ (‘to cover’, often describing the action of fire)[269]

. Despite the nuance between the meanings of these verbs, the central image of enclosing a prey to the point of threatening to swallow it is obvious.

The narrator’s lover Wulf, possibly a former warrior-leader, has lost a battle to Eadwacer (literally ‘keeper of wealth’), and was exiled from his home island to a remote one. Eadwacer desires Wulf’s ex-lover as a consort. Ironically, Eadwacer again ‘aþecgan’ the narrator when he wraps his arms around her in sexual intercourse, the imagery made all the more powerful by the abovementioned plant image implied by ‘bogum’.

Trapped both in Eadwacer’s embrace and on the island, the narrator’s longing for Wulf is hopeless, and she can only ‘reotugu sæt’ (‘sit mournfully’). The verb ‘sit’ appear three times in all in WL and W&E, each time in a claustrophobic environment where the inhabitant is immobilised by various hostile forces. In a desperate protest against her current situation, she bitterly warned Eadwacer that ‘a wolf shall carry our wretched whelp to the woods’(lines 6–7). The ending line of aphorism ‘þæt mon eaþe tosliteð þætte næfre gesomnad wæs,/ uncer giedd geador’ (lines 18-9, ‘Man very easily may tear apart /what was never joined, our song together’) gives a hint to the possible fate of the ‘wretched whelp’, as well as points out that their life together may not last.