Wife’s Lament, The (Wife’s Complaint) (10th century). Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature

The Wife’s Lament is an OLD ENGLISH poem of 53
lines found in the EXETER BOOK, a 10th-century
manuscript that is the largest single compilation of
Old English poetry. Like WULF AND EADWACER, The
Wife’s Lament has a female speaker who is pained
by the absence of her man, in this case her husband
rather than her lover.
The situation of the poem’s speaker is rather
obscure. Clearly she was married to a noble husband
outside of her own tribe. It can be conjectured
that the marriage was intended to bring
peace between warring tribes, as was common in
Germanic society—one might compare Hrothgar’s
queen Wealtheow in BEOWULF. In this poem
the speaker’s husband is separated from her, apparently
because his kinsmen have hatched a plot
to keep them apart. She is left alone among hostile
enemies, she says, and apparently has been forced
to live alone in a cave in the wilderness. She imagines
her husband alone on some rocky shore, suffering
the same friendless exile as she endures.
Because the details are sketchy, scholars have interpreted
the poem quite differently. Some believe
that the husband, swayed by his kinsmen’s enmity,
has himself banished the wife. Others believe that
the husband has been exiled because of some feud,
and so left the wife alone with his hostile family.
In that case her picture of him in the end may be
reality rather than her imagining.
The language of The Wife’s Lament is very similar
to that of other Old English poems like The
WANDERER and The SEAFARER, and the mood of loss
is very similar, making it appropriate to include
The Wife’s Lament in the genre of ELEGAIC POETRY.
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. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records,
3.New York: Columbia University Press, 1936.
Wentersdorf,Karl P.“The Situation of the Narrator in
the Old English Wife’s Lament,” Speculum 56
(1981): 492–516.

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