Anglo-Saxon Literature: The Wife's Lament
【key words】:
Peace-weaver;
fœhðu (feud ) : the technical term for a blood feud in——the way it is used in Beowulf when Hrothgar says he settled a great feud started by Beowulf’s father with few ( fee ), i.e., monetary compensation.
Wræccas: outcasts or exiles; the Old English root survives in modern wretch and wretched.
The grammatical gender of the pronouns reveals that the speaker is a woman, but she shares the sorrow and wretchedness with the poet of The Wanderer. According to the poem, we may conclude that the man she refers to as “my lord” is her husband. And it is sure that the speaker is married to a nobleman of another country because he went away from his people. That is to say, in spite of the shadowy context, it is reasonable to conjecture that the wife has been a “peace-weaver”, like Hildeburh and Freawaru in Beowulf, whose politically inspired marriages only result in further bloodshed. However, the wife was exiled because his husband’s kinsfolk hatch a plot when he goes far away. The speaker thinks that she has suffered the greatest misery “since she grew up”; but the nobleman may be mesmerized by his kinsfolk’s false words so that he turns against her wife, as she accounts that he hides “murderous thoughts in his heart”. The nature seems to conspire to match the wife’s mood, such as “dark dales”, “high hills”, “bitter bulwarks overgrown with briers”, which render the “earthen-cave” an atmosphere of desolation. It is notable that the elegy is concluded with the wife’s vision that her husband as well “suffers great anguish”. As the last sentence suggests that “woe is the one who, languishing, waits for the lover”, we find that both alliteration and personification foreground that the wife is deeply trapped in love, and her grievance on marriage is dumb under the political diplomacy.
References:
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th edition, vol. A, the Middle Ages, p113-114
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_literature#Extant_manuscripts
