MY EPIGRAPH, taken from Helen Macdonald's prize-winning memoir on hawk taming, captures the central concern of this essay: that close attention to birds and their behavior sheds light on the protean nature of ontological boundaries. As Macdonald immerses herself in the rhythms of hawk life in order to tame the wild goshawk Mabel – a quest propelled by the hope that ditching her humanity will also free her from the grief occasioned by her father's sudden death – she gains insight into the limitations of being human as well as a glimpse of the world through a new ontological lens. At once a biography of the deeply troubled novelist T. H. White, best known for his Arthurian novel The Once and Future King, and an elegy for her father's passing, Macdonald's account of a year spent losing a father and finding a hawk underscores the fine line between the human and the nonhuman animal world, as well as the processes of taming and socialization that serve to maintain or, conversely, to bridge this divide.

H is for Hawk is set partly in Cambridge, the home of Macdonald, and partly in Scotland, the home of her newly acquired goshawk, Mabel. My essay revisits bird life in Britain while taking us back in time to a body of literature similarly fascinated by the boundaries of humanity, yet composed over a millennium before Macdonald set out to soften the edges of both her goshawk and her grief. More specifically, my essay investigates representations of avian life in the ninety-eight-line Old English wisdom poem known variously as The Fortunes of Men, The Fates of Men, and The Fates of Mortals, and preserved in the late tenth-century Exeter Book.