The Husband’s Message is an OLD ENGLISH lyric
poem preserved in the 10th-century manuscript
known as the EXETER BOOK, a large collection of
Anglo-Saxon poetry. The poem is often paired
with The WIFE’S LAMENT, because like that poem it
deals with the separation of a husband and wife.
Whereas the speaker of The Wife’s Lament is a
woman expressing anguish over her husband’s absence, The Husband’s Message is sent by a man giving his wife reassurances of their coming reunion.
Despite the coincidental similarities, though, there
is no reason to believe that the two poems were intended to be companions.
Although the poem has been damaged by a fire
that scorched the later pages of the manuscript,
enough is intact to clarify the poem’s situation.
One of the remarkable aspects of the poem is that
its speaker is, in fact, a staff that the husband has
sent, carved with runes that reveal his message to
her. Giving voice to inanimate objects was a familiar device in Old English RIDDLES. The first
part of the poem, where most of the fire damage
has occurred, is clearly the personal history of the
staff, in which it establishes its credentials as a
messenger, speaking of how it has traveled with
its lord (the woman’s husband) in many foreign
lands and has come by ship to bring her a message from him.
The message describes the husband’s state:
Though a feud has driven him from his home and
wife to live in exile, he has found a new home
among strangers and now has accumulated some
wealth and property. Therefore he is sending for
his wife, and the signal for her to board ship and
come to him will be the first cry of the cuckoo.
In the last section of the poem, the husband gives
a runic signature, which is his pledge to keep the
promises he made to her in their youth. The runic
message has been the subject of some critical speculation, but the point seems to be that only the wife
receiving the message would understand it.
Bibliography
Alexander, Michael, trans. The Earliest English Poems.
Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1966.
Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie,
eds. The Exeter Book. Vol. 3, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1936.