Lyric Modes and Metaphor in The Wife’s Lament

ABSTRACT

Decades of analysis of The Wife’s Lament based on a presumed, underlying narrative have produced interpretations that are contradictory and competing. As a lyric poem, The Wife’s Lament is more profitably approached through its non-narrative elements, especially metaphor and intertextuality. Two major metaphors control The Wife’s Lament: “Wife as exiled retainer”—currently uncontroversial—and “Wife as seer from beyond the grave.” The latter metaphor is supported by a verbal parallel from Old Frisian and by character analogues from the Poetic Edda.

KEYWORDS:

• Old English
• Old Frisian
• Old Norse
• lyric
• metaphor

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See, for example, Doane; Orton; Luyster.

2 For proof that such links can be made successfully, see Harris (“Hadubrand’s Lament”) on Wulf and Eadwacer.

3 A few examples include Battles; Horner; Jamison. Scheck comments on the problems of historicism in feminist readings of The Wife’s Lament.

4 Culler, 109.

5 Ibid., 2.

6 Ibid., 118–9.

7 Ibid., 7; see also 122–24.

8 Notable exceptions are Hall; Lalla; F. Gameson and R. Gameson; Kinch. Åström contrasts traditional, problem-solving approaches to those that are more open-ended or theoretical.

9 Lines 5–10. All quotations of The Wife’s Lament are from Muir, ed., The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, I.328–30. All translations are my own.

10 This outrage against both philology and feminism began with Thorpe’s edition of the Exeter Book and continued to crop up through the late twentieth century: see Bambas; Mandel.

11 On leger, see Lowe; Hill.

12 Battles; Harris, “A Note on eorðscræf/eorðsele”; Jensen; Wentersdorf.

13 Tripp, 358, refers to the Wife as a revenant, but his conception of her character is quite different from that of Lench et al.: “the narrator is not a living woman or even a dead one (in a horror-story sense), but the animal soul in the body.”

14 Lench, 19. Hall, 6–11, 21, also explores the images connoting death in The Wife’s Lament, but he ultimately favors interpreting the eorðscræf as a place of sanctuary.

15 Buma and Ebel, eds., Das Emsiger Recht, 90 & 92; my translation, emphasis added.

16 Deskis, Alliterative Proverbs, 29–31.

17 Bremmer, “The Orality of Old Frisian Law Texts.”

18 Bremmer, “Dealing Dooms,” 80.

19 Ibid., 87–8.

20 Ibid., 82.

21 Bremmer, “Old English and Old Frisian” and “The Nature of the Evidence.”

22 Bremmer, An Introduction to Old Frisian, 128.

23 See Bremmer, “Continental Germanic Influences,” 378.

24 Ibid., 378–9.

25 Ibid., 379–80. See also Bremmer, “Frisians in Anglo-Saxon England,” 72–3.

26 Bremmer, “Frisians in Anglo-Saxon England,” 75.

27 Ibid., 74–5.

28 Bremmer, “Old English and Old Frisian,” 84, and An Introduction to Old Frisian, 126–7.

29 Bremmer, “Old English and Old Frisian,” 84.

30 In context, that is. Professor Bremmer has located two other examples of “eke/eerthe”, but they use the preposition mit rather than vnder and refer quite literally to the building of dikes and locks (personal communication, 3 November 2018).

31 Caciola, 246.

32 Lench, 19, n. 42, cites speakers from beyond the grave in Old Norse sagas and in folktales from Germany and Denmark, but all are male. On destructive revenants, see Blair; Caciola, ch. 5. One saga revenant is female and helpful: in Eyrbyggja saga, chap. 51, Þorgunna prepares dinner for the men who are following her wishes by transporting her body to Skálholt for burial.

33 Most thoroughly by Harris, “Hadubrand’s Lament” and “Elegy in Old English and Old Norse.”

34 Hall, 11; Johnson, 73–6.

35 Harris, “Beowulf’s Last Words,” 16–7, lists such a recitation as one element of the death song.

36 In support of this reading, see von See, et al., eds., Heldenlieder, 563–4.

37 Helreið Brynhildar, str. 14, Neckel and Kuhn, eds., Edda.

38 Helreið Brynhildar, str. 5 and 13, Neckel and Kuhn, eds., Edda.

39 The giantess in Helreið Brynhildar, also encountered near Hel, may thus also be dead, though she appears without being commanded.

40 Baldrs draumar, str. 4, Neckel and Kuhn, eds., Edda.

41 Baldrs draumar, str. 12, Neckel and Kuhn, eds., Edda.

42 Vǫluspá, str. 28, Neckel and Kuhn, eds., Edda.

43 Pálsson, 70–2, asserts that such an activity was associated in Iceland with communing with the dead. Von See, et al., eds., Götterlieder, i.258–9, explain that the expression sitia úti usually describes conjuring or the practice of magic (the likely meaning in Vǫluspá, str. 28), but also that in the Old Norse translation of the Vitae patrum, útiseta corresponds to sepulchrorum violator.

44 “She remembers the nine worlds of death beneath the earth, but we are not told that she had been roused from the grave,” Dronke, 31.

45 Vǫluspá, str. 66, ed. Neckel and Kuhn, Edda.

46 Müllenhoff, 86.

47 Sijmons and Gering, 78.

48 “The Prophecy of the Seeress,” str. 65, in Hollander, trans., The Poetic Edda.

49 “The Sibyl’s Prophecy,” str. 64, in Terry, trans., Poems of the Vikings.

50 Terry, trans., Poems of the Elder Edda, rev. edn, str. 50.

51 Dronke, 2.153, note to Vǫluspá 62/8.

52 Helreið Brynhildar, str. 14, Neckel and Kuhn, eds., Edda.

53 Although Butt quite specifically puts the composition of Vǫluspá in the Danelaw based on perceived borrowings from the sermons of Wulfstan and from Judgment Day II. His argument has been met with respect, though not widespread acceptance.

54 Niles; see also Straus.

55 Muth, 70, advocates an even broader reading, suggesting that the poem’s conclusion can combine “knowledge, curse, or even wishful thinking.”

56 Schorn offers a substantive analysis of the nexus between wisdom and the dead in eddic poetry: see esp. 48–9, 95–102.

57 Evans, ed., Hávamál.

58 For example, many proverbs warn against apparent friends who turn out to be faithless; see Deskis, “Proverbs and Structure,” 679–81.

59 On agglutination, see Larrington.

60 Much the same can be said of The Wanderer and The Seafarer.