also bringing into consideration the roles they play in effecting the narration. Therefore, in this paper I would venture to provide my own interpretation (and translation) of the two poems when examining their ways of representing female identity in Anglo-Saxon England (or the lack of one, without claiming this is the only way to understand them).
The Wife's Lament is full of claustrophobic sceneries, both physical and mental. According to 'Het mec hlaford min herh eard niman’ (line 15) and 'Heht mec mon wunian on wuda bearwe’ (line 27), the woman was commanded to dwell in a grove-sanctuary, which is described in details in three and a half terse, quick-paced, clangorous lines that follow immediately: 'Eald is Les eardsele, eal ic eom oflongad/sindon dena dimme, duna uphea/ bitre burgtunas, brerum beweaxne/ wic wynna leas (lines 29–32)’ (The dales are dark, the hills high/The enclosures biting, overgrown with briars /Habitation without joy)[265].
The choice of the phrase 'bitre burgtunas’(biting enclosures) is usually accounted for by the thorny briars that have overgrown the earthcave, but it could equally be the psychological result of the wife’s confined and perhaps suffocating condition, which allows her the sole relief of walking around the earth-cave under the oak tree 'on uhtan’ (in dawn). In fact, why 'on uhtan’ in particular? The hour of dawn being the moment when the wife particularly needs to breathe fresh air could be the traumatic sequence of her 'uhtceare’ (line 7, literally 'dawn anxiety’) in the past, when she used to worry about 'hwaer min leodfruma londes waere’(line 8, where in the land was my lord’) just before daybreak.
The briar, however, with its natural tendency to outreach, intertwine and cover, does contribute to the claustrophobic atmosphere of the narrator’s joyless dwelling. Leslie noted that 'Briars, thorns and brambles are similarly used as elegiac motifs in early Welsh and Irish poetry’[266], supplemented by Hall’s observation of the similarity between the 'eordscraef (earthcave) and the Green Chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight[267]. Admittedly these are geographically or temporally remote examples of parallel, but they at least provide a context for such imagery of a desolate, hollow mound made worse by wild, unrelenting and enclosing bushes. This is also echoed in line 11 of the second poem, Wulf and Eacwacer (Tonne mec se beaducafa bogum bilegde’: 'the bold warrior laid his arms about me’), where 'bogum’ can mean 'with the forearms (usually of animals)’ as well as 'with shoots, sprouts, twigs of a seed, herb, shrub. In the latter case, we get the image, as we do in WL, of a woman being locked within plants.
The 'eordsele’ ('earth hall’) has been described by Hume to be an 'anti-hall’, a distorted reflection of the mead-hall in OE literature, the mead-hall being symbol of'a circle of light and peace’ and 'the social system associated with it’(Hume, 64)[268]. Nevertheless, a hall in OE poetry has always been a claustrophobic image – prone to be broken in, not at all immune to the lurking dangers and darkness that surround it. In fact, if we think about the first slaughter scene in Beowulf (lines 115–125) in which Grendel single-handedly destroyed 30 men who were feasting at the mead-table, or about the massacre scene in Cynewulf and Cyneheard in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, where Cynewulfs avenging followers locked themselves with their outnumbered enemies in a fortress to prevent the latter from escaping, we feel too vividly the anxiety about being 'trapped’ in a man-made structure.
The fact that the OE poet chose the same world ‘sele’ (hall) to describe both the wife’s dwelling (‘eorðsele’) and her lord’s imagined whereabouts (‘dreorsele’ in line 50, literally ‘sad hall’) suggests an intended parallel: both are ‘wic wyna leas’ (‘dwelling without joy’) combining hostility from both human design and the wild nature, together making a comfortless prison for its respective inhabitant. The wife shut in a claustrophobic, ‘biting enclosure’, seized with longing for her husband and anxious about his whereabouts can naturally and subconsciously envision him to be in a situation comparable to hers. ‘Sy æt him sylfum gelong/ eal his worulde wyn, sy ful wide fah/ feorres folclondes, þæt min freond siteð/ under stanhliþe, storme behrimed/ wine werigmod, wæter beflowen/ on dreorsele. Dreogeð se min wine/ micle modceare; he gemon to oft/ wynlicran wic’ (lines 45–52), according to my understanding, can be translated as this: ‘whether his worldly joy be dependent on himself’ (i. e. he is a free man capable of looking for his own happiness) or ‘whether he be very widely outlawed in a faraway country’ (so that he might easily be confined and guarded), ‘my friend’ will be forced to ‘sit under stony slope, frost-coated by the storm, surrounded by water, sad-spirited in a sad hall’ – a semi-cell that doesn’t even provide shelter from the violence of nature. In either case, he ‘will too often think about a more pleasant inhabitation’ (as ‘I’ now too often do), of the home where ‘we’ once shared as husband and wife.
According to the Wife-narrator, the couple had taken vows that death only could separate them, but now they are living widely apart (‘is nu swa hit no wære/ freondschipe uncer’); for some reason the husband chose not to reveal his whereabouts and his next plan to his wife, leaving the woman lamenting her fate alone. But near the end of the poem, the wife seems to have reached reconciliation with her bitter feelings, especially those against her husband: ‘a young man may have to be sad-hearted, his heart’s thought painful’, yet despite all that, he still must keep up a ‘cheerful appearance’ like a Stoic (lines 42-5). The same phrase ‘bliþe gebæro’ (heart care) which has in line 20 expressed the wife’s astonishment or disappointment at finding her husband to be a hypocrite (‘plotting murder with a cheerful appearance’) later in line 44 shows that the wife has understood, or thought she has understood, her husband’s contradictory behaviour: perhaps he is already doing his best to be united with her again, or perhaps the murder part has been an unjustified conjecture on her part in the first place– in her grief-stricken situation she could have been unfair to him. These thoughts are immediately followed by the two relenting and sympathizing subjunctive lines, and end by a heart-rending aphorism ‘Wa bið þæm þe sceal/ of langoþe leofes abidan’ (lines 50-1,’Woe be to those who must/Wait for their beloved in longing’), bringing the poem to a perfectly elegiac end.
The second OE elegy, Wulf and Eadwacer equally abounds of claustrophobic imagery. ‘Wulf is on iege, ic on oþerre./ Fæst is þæt eglond, fenne biworpen.’ (lines 4–5, ‘Wulf is on one isle, I am on another./ Fast is that island set among the fens’). An island – a small piece of land surrounded by the vast ocean, or by marshes, as the first island here – is in itself a confining locale. The person confined on an island is doubly locked, as in a ‘fast’ prison. As if this is not enough, a third powerful image of ‘engulfing’ and ‘trapping’ is twice implied in the repeated line of ‘willað hy hine aþecgan gif he on þreat cymeð’(line 7): if Wulf comes to the island, ‘they’ will wish to receive him, but more likely to kill or consume him as animals do their prey. The etymology of ‘aþecgan’ can be traced to ‘þicgan’ (‘to take’, usually food) and ‘þecgan’ (‘to take, to consume’), and even, according to Klinck, to ‘þeccan’ (‘to cover’, often describing the action of fire)[269]. Despite the nuance between the meanings of these verbs, the central image of enclosing a prey to the point of threatening to swallow it is obvious.
The narrator’s lover Wulf, possibly a former warrior-leader, has lost a battle to Eadwacer (literally ‘keeper of wealth’), and was exiled from his home island to a remote one. Eadwacer desires Wulf’s ex-lover as a consort. Ironically, Eadwacer again ‘aþecgan’ the narrator when he wraps his arms around her in sexual intercourse, the imagery made all the more powerful by the abovementioned plant image implied by ‘bogum’.
Trapped both in Eadwacer’s embrace and on the island, the narrator’s longing for Wulf is hopeless, and she can only ‘reotugu sæt’ (‘sit mournfully’). The verb ‘sit’ appear three times in all in WL and W&E, each time in a claustrophobic environment where the inhabitant is immobilised by various hostile forces. In a desperate protest against her current situation, she bitterly warned Eadwacer that ‘a wolf shall carry our wretched whelp to the woods’(lines 6–7). The ending line of aphorism ‘þæt mon eaþe tosliteð þætte næfre gesomnad wæs,/ uncer giedd geador’ (lines 18-9, ‘Man very easily may tear apart /what was never joined, our song together’) gives a hint to the possible fate of the ‘wretched whelp’, as well as points out that their life together may not last.
In both poems, the passivity and immobility of the female lamenters are in sharp contrast to the geographical and spiritual mobility seen in most OE male elegies. It is as if both female lamenters are locked in an eternal present, in the same place, in what Belanoff called the ‘hereness’ and ‘nowness’ of women’s poetry[270]. In WL, the wife, once bereft of her husband, loses all linear mobility and is reduced to walking around the earthcave whenever not sitting in misery: a cyclical movement that leads her to nowhere; and her thoughts, be it resentful or reconciling, is solely about the husband. In