Wulf and Eadwacer is a very obscure OLD ENGLISH
poem from the EXETER BOOK. At 19 lines, the lyric
appears fragmentary at first, but the sketchy images
do suggest a complete dramatic situation.
The poem’s speaker is a woman longing for her
lover,Wulf, who is apparently an outlaw living in
exile. Eadwacer, whom she taunts contemptuously
in the poem, appears to be her husband, though
she seems never to have considered theirs a true
marriage. Despite her intense longing, she fears for
Wulf ’s safety if he returns. In the end the speaker
mocks Eadwacer because Wulf has come back and
apparently has carried off his child by her, whom
she calls, with a punning reference to the father’s
name, “our cub,” or hwelp, in the original.
Peter Dronke has suggested that Wulf and
Eadwacer is the type of song that CHARLEMAGNE
banned from any nunneries in his kingdom in 789.
He had called them winileados (“songs for a
friend”)—songs composed by women to express
their longing for absent lovers. Dronke believes that
there were many such songs in Germanic languages
that have not survived. The poem is also unusual
in the Old English corpus because of its division
into strophes and its use of a refrain, translated as
“our fate is forked.”DEOR is the only other poem in
Old English with a similar structure.
Bibliography
Alexander,Michael, trans. The Earliest English Poems.
Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1966.
Baker, Peter S. “The Ambiguity of ‘Wulf and
Eadwacer.’ ” In Old English Shorter Poems, edited
by Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, 409–426. New
York: Garland, 1994.
Dronke, Peter. The Medieval Lyric. 3rd ed. Woodbridge,
U.K.: Boydell and Brewer, 1996.
Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie,
eds. The Exeter Book. Vol. 3 of The Anglo-Saxon
Poetic Records. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1936.
Pulsiano, Philip, and Kirsten Wolf. “The ‘Hwelp’ in
‘Wulf and Eadwacer,’ ” English Language Notes 28
(1991): 1–9.