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The Wife's Lament Reconsidered

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2021

Stanley B. Greenfield
Stanley B. Greenfield*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin Madison 6
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Extract

The Old English lyric The (Banished) Wife's Lament has evoked much critical comment without producing an acceptable interpretation. Ostensibly the situation of the poem is that the wife of a lord has been made a prisoner in an oak grove at the instigation of her husband, who has been led to perpetrate this cruelty by the machinations of his kinsmen. The wife (who is the speaker) first laments her own exiles and sorrows; she continues with a description of her husband as an exile; and she concludes with a bit of gnomic wisdom to the effect that “It is woe for him who must long for his beloved with a sad heart.” But it is a strange poem, with many obscurities. Norah Kershaw has suggested that “It is perhaps an ambitious attempt to portray excited feelings which causes the difficulty of the poem. The asyndetic and not altogether logical sequence of thought, the absence of metrical form in 1.24, and the involved construction in 1. 42 ff. may possibly all be ascribed to this cause.” This does not alter the fact, however, that no satisfactory explication of the meaning of the poem has been made, not even by Miss Kershaw.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 68 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1953 , pp. 907 - 912
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953

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References

1 Anglo-Saxon and Norse Poems (Cambridge, 1922), p. 31.

2 See A. Brandl, in Paul's Grundriss der germanischenPhilologie (2d ed.), II, 1,977, and E. Sieper. Die allenglischeElegie (Strassburg. 1915), p. 223, for the one theory. See W. W Lawrence, “The Banished Wife's Lament,” MP, v (1908), 387-405; E. Rickert, “The Old English Offa Saga, II,” MP, II (1904-5), 365ff; and Kershaw, pp. 28-31, for the other.

3 All quolations are from The Exeter Book. ed. Krapp and Dobbie (New York, 1936).

4 The words “folgaosecan” have given some trooble. Kershaw (p. 172) happily cites Bede, H. E., v, ll, reWillferö: “in Mercnalandefolgade,” which translates the Latin

5 Cf., e.g., Bede, H.E., II, 13, the story of Edwin's exile with Redwald.

6 Pp. 388-391.

7 Rickert, p. 366; Krapp and Dobbie, p. lviii

8 Just as “heard” in 1. 15b is in apposition to “hlaford,” so “heard heortangepoht” is in apposition to “mon,” the impersonal figure which represents the wife's husband. I think this interpretation clears up much of the difficulty of this passage.

9 The wife knows that her busband has “blipegebæro” (cf. 1. 21a); hence the indicative “sceal.” There is also a suggestion of the idea found in The Wanderer, that a nobleman must always lock his grief in his heart and present an attractive exterior. A certain irony, from the wife's point of view, is implicit here.

10 Cf. R. Imelmann, ForschungensurallenglischenPoesie (Berlin, 1920), p. 32.

11 I follow Miss Kershaw here, removing the comma usually placed by editors after “folclandes”; “pæt,” then, introduces a clause which is the resultant of the preceding “sy.” The verb “siteö” and the verbs in the following clauses, “dreogeö” and “gemon,” I take to be future in meaning (Miss Kershaw translates as presents); this, I feel, makes the dependence of these verbs on the subjunctive “sy” a much more logical one from the points of view of both syntax and context.

13 On the last sentence, Miss Kershaw comments: “In accordance with the general custom of A.S gnomic utterances, this sentence is expressed in the masc, sing., though the speaker is obviously thinking primarily of her own position” (p. 176). But it is her own position which she is projecting upon her husband, as I have tried to indicate; and the immediate reference here is to ter load. This sentence concludes the image of the exiled husband in a stylistic manner similar to that in which the image began—gnomically. But since it does express the wife's great sorrow, it further points the way in which the exile image of the lord must be accepted—as i indicative of the wife's ambivalent attitude toward ter husband.