Wife’s Lament, The

(Wife’s Complaint)

(10th century)

   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.