Two Old English poems translated by Elijah John Petzold

These two Old English poem come from the Exeter Book, a hefty codex which preserves a large proportion of the Old English corpus. I’ve given them new names, drawn from phrases repeated in each poem. The traditional titles assigned to them—“The Wife’s Lament” and “The Husband’s Message”—suggest a parallelism not supported by the text: there’s no explicit connection between the poems, and the narratives, vague as they are, don’t seem to match up. As with several other Old English elegies, they do, however, describe feelings of love, loss, and longing across watery expanses. As both poems present significant interpretive issues, I’ve highlighted some particularly challenging elements. 

beneath an oak (The Wife’s Lament)

            The nebulous narrative of this poem has stumped generations of Anglo-Saxonists. Although elaborate theories abound, there’s nothing close to scholarly consensus on what exactly is going on. It’s clear enough that here a female speaker laments a tumultuous romantic past, but the sequence, location, and causality of the events remain murky. First, the beloved disappears, but then, we are told, his family connives to keep them apart. It’s unclear whether their scheming led to the beloved’s departure in the first place, or whether they took advantage of his departure to reinforce their separation. No sooner do we hear about the family, however, than they are out of the poem entirely, but it seems that the speaker has gone in search of her beloved and finds him changed: morose and murderous. He imprisons her in the earthen cave from which she tells her story, suggesting perhaps that he has murdered and buried her, leaving her waking ghost to mourn. I’m not entirely convinced of this, nor of any other theory that claims to conclusively explain the text beyond what is actually said. Although translation necessarily privileges some readings over others, I’ve tried to leave narrative possibilities open, rendering a poem that feels fragmentary, abrupt, elliptical: a long, traumatic memory distorted and elided by time and repetition.

in days gone by (The Husband’s Message)

            Interpreting this poem hinges on two related questions: who is speaking?, and what is the function of the runes? I’m quite certain our speaker is a piece of wood inscribed with runes, delivering a coded message to an absent lover. More than ninety verse riddles are interspersed throughout the Exeter Book, generally written in the voice of the riddle’s solution: an animal or inanimate object. The riddle immediately preceding the “The Husband’s Message” speaks of an object that talks without a mouth, is carved by a knife and a “prince’s mind,” and passes on a message that no one else can understand. “Rune-staff” seems the obvious answer. The riddle illuminates (and perhaps anticipates) “The Husband’s Message,” particularly the cryptic runic sign-off. The runes read S, R, EA, W, and M, but these don’t render any name or word. The runes’ names may provide a clue: Sigel, “sun”; Rad, “ride/path”; Ear, “earth” or “sea”; Wynn, “joy”; and Mann, “man/human.” Runologist Ralph Elliott has us construe these ideas together to find the epitome of the poem: “Follow the sun’s path south across the ocean to find joy with the man who is waiting for you.”[1] Tempting though it seems, I’m not inclined to presume anything. By design, the runes are untranslatable except to the lovers, whose private oaths of love in bygone days decipher the code.

—Elijah John Petzold

[1]Ralph W.V. Elliott,  Runes: An Introduction (Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 1989), 90.