Wulf and Eadwacer

(10th century)

   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.