The Ambiguity of "Wulf and Eadwacer" Author(s): Peter S. Baker Reviewed work(s): Source: Studies in Philology, Vol.

78, No. 5, Texts and Studies, 1981. Eight Anglo-Saxon Studies (Winter, 1981), pp. 39-51 Published by: University of North Carolina Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4174096 . Accessed: 02/11/2011 10:26
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The Ambiguity of Wuif

and Eadwacer

by Peter S. Baker
Leodum is minum willab hy hine apecgan
ungelic is Us.

swylce him mon lac gife gif he on Preat cymeS

ic on operre wulf is on iege 5 faest is Pet eglond fenne biworpen sindon waelreowe weras xaer ige on wi11a5hy hine a pecgan gif he on Preat cyme6 ungelice is us wulfes ic mines widlastum wenum dogode 1o Ponne hit wos renig weder ond ic reotugu saet. bogum bilegde Ponne mec se beaducafa was me wyn to Pon wos me hwaepre eac lao. wena me Pine wulf min wulf seoce gedydon Pine seldcymas nales meteliste 15 murnende m6d gehyrest Pu eadwacer uncerne earne hwelp bireS wulf to wuda paet mon ea e toslite5 Paette naefre gesomnad waes 71 uncer giedd geador.
C

RITICS have often noted the difficulty of the Old English Wulf
and Eadwacer, of whose nineteen lines perhaps half pose lexical, syntactical, or interpretive problems. Since 1842, when Benjamin Thorpe confessed his inability to translate the poem,2 efI My text of Wulf and Eadwacer is from the facsimile, The Exeter Book of Old English Poetry, with introductory chapters by R. W. Chambers, et al. (London, 1933). I have made no changes except to modernize word and line division. Citations of other Old English poems are from George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 6 vols. (New York, 1931-53). Short titles are from Bruce Mitchell, Christopher Ball, and Angus Cameron, "Short Titles of Old English Texts," Anglo-Saxon England, IV (1975), 207-21. 2 Codex Exoniensis:A Collectionof Anglo-Saxon Poetry,from a Manuscript in the Libraryof

39

? 1981 The University of North Carolina Press.

0039-3738/81 /050039-51$01 .30/0

40

The Ambiguity of Wulf and Eadwacer

forts to solve these problems have brought us far; indeed, they have brought us an embarrassment of riches that threatens to obscure as much as it illuminates, for nearly every critic who takes on this literary puzzle either proposes yet more solutions to its many cruces or brings to our attention cruces that we were not even aware of before.3 Interpretations multiply and plain places are made rough; the reader, faced with deciding whether the poem is a riddle or a charm, a canine romance or the lament of a woman for her absent lover, may well wonder if he can be certain of anything about it. One of the most interesting recent attempts to bring order to this critical anarchy is by Arnold E. Davidson, who writes, "the very fact that the poem can be read in so many different ways suggests that it might be ambiguous and perhaps deliberately so" (p. 24). To follow up this idea, Davidson produces a composite translation, culling alternative definitions of problematic words from the dictionaries. For example, his translation of the first line, "Leodum is minum swylce him mon lac gife," reads "Is to my people as if one might give them (a battle/sacrifice/gift/message!game)" (p. 25); the words in parentheses all translate lac. But "battle" results from a misinterpretation by Bosworth-Toller of a passage in Guthlac B;4 "message," found in
the Dean and Chapterof Exeter (London, 1842), p. 527. Thorpe's was the first edition of this poem. 3 I hasten to add that most of these studies have on the whole advanced our understanding of the poem rather than set it back. For references, see Fred C. Robinson and Stanley B. Greenfield, Bibliographyof Publications on Old English Literature (Toronto, 1980), pp. 287-8. More recent studies include Norman E. Eliason, "On Wulf and Eadwacer," in Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, ed. R. B. Burlin and E. B. Irving (Toronto, 1974), pp. 225-34; Arnold E. Davidson, "Interpreting Wulfand Eadwacer," Annuale Mediaevale, XVI (1975), 24-32; Wesley S. Mattox, "Encirclement and Sacrifice in Wulf and Eadwacer,"Annuale Mediaevale, XVI (1975), 33-40; Clifford Davidson, "Erotic 'Women's Songs' in Anglo-Saxon England," Neophilologus, LIX (1975), 451-62; John M. Fanagan, "Wulf and Eadwacer: A Solution to the Critics' Riddle," Neophilologus, LX (1976), 130-7; Terrence Keough, "The Tension of Separation in Wulf and Eadwacer," NeuphilologischeMitteilungen, LXXVII(1976), 552-60; Harry E. Kavros, "A Note on Wulf and Eadwacer,"English Language Notes, XV (i977), 83-4; James B. Spamer, "The Marriage Concept in Wulf and Eadwacer,"Neophilologus, LXII (1978), 143-4; Emily Jensen, "Narrative Voice in the Old English Wulf,"ChaucerReview, XIII (1978-9), 373-83; Johan Kerling, "Another Solution to the Critics' Riddle: Wulf and Eadwacer Revisited," Neophilologus, LXIV (1980), 140-3 [a reply to Fanagan's article]. 4 Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Oxford, 1882-98) is here abbreviated BT. Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary . . . Supplement (Oxford, 1908-21) iS abbreviated BTS. Alistair Campbell's EnlargedAddendaand Corrigenda (Oxford, 1972) has notes on apecgan and dogode, but has been of little use in this study. I have supplemented the information in BT and BTS by tracing words through J. B. Bessinger, Jr. and Philip H. Smith, Jr., A Concordanceto the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records

Peter S. Baker

41

Guthlac B and several glossaries, is a metaphorical extension of the meaning "gift," conditioned by the context in which it occurs; and "game," imported from Old Icelandic by modern scholars, is not attested in Old English. "Gift, offering, sacrifice" are well-attested definitions, but when lac means "offering, sacrifice," it usually takes a more ceremonious verb (e.g., offrian, bringan, beran, onbleotan, bebeodan) than gifan.5 Here, then, lac probably means nothing more than "gift." The ambiguity vanishes, leaving us with a straightforward line: "To my people it is as if one gave them a gift." To determine just how ambiguous Wulf and Eadwacer is, we must distinguish carefully between the meanings a word or phrase had for a speaker of Old English and the meanings it may have for modern readers, who must depend on fallible scholarly tools. The remarks that follow are based on semantic and syntactical evidence drawn less from dictionaries and earlier criticism than from Old English poetry, prose, and glosses; my intent is not only to take note of possible readings, but also to weed out impossible readings that have taken root in the critical literature. Once ambiguities of modern origin are removed, we shall find that those which remain are artfully used: the poet makes enigmatic statements and withholds for several lines the information we need to interpret them, puns with words and phrases that have nearly opposite meanings, and manipulates the context of the repeated lines so as to shift their meaning. Such techniques are demanding of a listener's attention, much as a riddle is; but while their presence in a riddle is simply good fun, here they generate tension, which increases the emotional power of the poem. If the literal meaning of line i is plain enough, the interpretation of it is exceedingly difficult. Someone or something is being compared to a gift; some action or situation is being compared to the giving of a gift to the speaker's people. If we assume, in the absence of manuscript evidence to the contrary, that the poem is complete, our first impulse will be to look for the explanation in line 2. But here we run
(Ithaca, 1978) and through the many glossaries to Old English prose and glosses. BT defined lac as "battle" in GuthB 1034; see, however, Angus Cameron and Antonette diPaolo Healey, "The Dictionary of Old English," Dictionaries:Journalof the Dictionary Society of North America, 1 (1979), 96, s.v. lIc, I, 1, where the definition is "offering to a hostile force as to a god (fig)." In GuthB the word refers to Guthlac's life. However, see also Jane Roberts, ed., The Guthlac Poems of the Exeter Book (Oxford, 1979), p. 169: Roberts prefers to translate "battle." 5 On this point see also Ruth P. M. Lehmann, "The Metrics and Structure of 'Wulf and Eadwacer,"' PQ, XLVIII (1969), 157.

42

The Ambiguity of Wulf and Eadwacer

into no fewer than three problems: what, precisely, do atecgan and treat mean, and is the line a question or a statement? Henry Bradley supposed atecgan to be a weak first-class causative from ticgan "to receive, take, eat, consume," and so glossed it "to give food to, to entertain."6 He was not aware that it was attested once more in Old English, namely in a medical recipe: "Gif mon Pung ete, ajege buteran and drince; se Pung gewit on J7abuteran."7 Toller (BTS) glossed atecgan "to take food, consume," and in the recipe translated it "let him take"; most scholars have accepted his gloss. But atege must be an imperative, not a subjunctive (which would be atecge); it is directed to the lxce rather than the patient, who is mentioned in the third person. If atecgan is indeed a derivative of ticgan, it probably means "to give, serve, administer," or as Bradley deduced from the etymology, "give food to." In the recipe it is construed with the dative of the things served (buteran, drince); I would translate, "If one should eat poison, serve him with (i.e., feed him) butter and a liquid; the poison will depart with the butter." Although atecgan is found only twice in Old English, the simplex tecgan is attested, and so are getecgan, ofkecgan, and fortecgan. The prefixes a-, of-, and for-, though not identical in meaning, need not change radically the meaning of the words to which they are attached. Further, these prefixes share common semantic features: they intensify and often add negative connotations. The senses of -tecgan in its other occurrences are quite different from its sense in our medical recipe: Peah hy him Purh minne noman waetanboedan, werge, wonhale, drynces gedreahte, duguPa lease, ge him Pristeoftugon. Purstegepegede,
(ChristC 15o6-9)

Wip heortece gif him on innan heard heortwaercsie Ponne him wyxJ wind on Paereheortan and hine Pege&Purst and bip unmehtiglic (Cockayne, ii, 6o).
6 Review of English Writers:An Attempt Towardsa History of English Literature, by Henry Morley, Academny, XXXIII(i888), 198. 7 Thomas Oswald Cockayne, ed., Leechdoms,Wortcunning,and Starcraftof Early England, Rolls Series (London, 1864-6), ii, 154.

Peter S. Baker sona hie on mergan massan syngab and forjegide, }urste gebaded, teoj geond straeta. aeftertaeppere (Seasons 213-15)
him on swa&e feollon

43

aeelinga beam,
willgesi5bas.

ecgum of Pegde, (GenA2001-3)

The sense associated with thirst perhaps originated in a metaphorical phrase, "to serve someone with thirst" (as opposed to, say, ale); a comparable phrase, though without the irony, is the modern French "donner soif a quelqu'un." The second quotation above, from another medical recipe, seems to show the metaphor beginning to be fossilized, and we might better translate "thirst parches him" than "thirst serves him." The third quotation shows the metaphor entirely dead, fortegide needing little further context to mean "thirsty." The fourth quotation shows another meaning entirely, and one that is perhaps more appropriate to Wulf and Eadwacer. We could translate ecgum oftegde "served with swords (i.e., killed)" and compare Beowulf 560-1, "Ic him }enode / deoran sweorde." But ecgum oftegde looks very much like a stock phrase, so "kill," like "make thirsty," may well be the meaning of a dead or dying metaphor using -,becgan.8Our evidence for the meaning of a tecgan, meager though it is, indicates that here it can be translated either "to feed" or "to kill." Meanings proposed for treat in lines 2 and 7 include "band of men, violence, force, peril, want." "Peril" is Kemp Malone's definition, influenced by Old Icelandic firaut;9 treat is well attested in Old English, but not in this sense. All of the quotations in BT, and all others that I have seen, use the word to mean "band of men, army, violence, cruelty." Because treat is accusative, on does not likely express accompaniment, but rather movement towards; I would not translate "with a band of men;' but "to a band of men." On treat could also be adverbial, "violently."'0 Both renderings are plausible, but cyme;5in these lines suggests that we should take on as expressing movement, and thus understand treat as something concrete to move towards, namely a band of men.
8 Henry Sweet glossed abecgan "destroy, kill" in The Student's Dictionary of AngloSaxon (Oxford, 1896). 9 "Two English Frauenlieder,"ComparativeLiterature,XIV (1962), 109. 10 BT, s.v. on, B.I.(i); B.III.(9).

44

The Ambiguity of Wulf and Eadwacer

Bradley took lines 2 and 7 as questions, but it is at least equally likely that they are statements, and that is the way most scholars have read them." In the poetry, the willan-subject-infinitive word order is rarely used for questions without an interrogative word like hu or hwxt (I have found one example, GenA 2482-4); but the same word order is common in statements. We may compare: Wille ic asecgan sunu Healfdenes, maerumJeodne, min arende. (Beo344-5) Wile faedereahtan hu gesunde suna sawle bringen of Pam eMle Je hi on lifdon. (ChristC 1073-5) According to Friedric Klaeber, the verb-subject word order can "intimate in a vague, general way a connection of the sentence with the preceding one."'12In modem English we signal this connection with a semicolon; that is the punctuation I would choose for the end of line
1.

After the linguistic problems have been solved, it remains to apply the solutions to the interpretation of the first two lines. Leodum, the only plural noun of line 1, must be the antecedent of hy in line 2, but hine and he have no grammatical antecedent, since mon is an indefinite pronoun and lac is neuter. The listener must wait for a suitable noun, but in the meantime he may associate hine and he with lac-singular pronouns with singular noun, all standing in some illdefined relation to the speaker's people. How, then, is this so-far unidentified man like a gift? The answer depends on the way we read afiecgan. If we take it to mean "serve, feed," the people will, as Malone wrote, "welcome him as they would a gift" (p. io8). But if we take it to mean "kill," he will be like a gift to them much as John the Baptist was a gift to Salome. The ambiguity of apecgan gives the first two lines two plausible, but nearly opposite meanings; again, the reader must wait for clarification. Line 3, "It is different with us," only deepens the ambiguity.'3 A listener probably would understand the
11 A recent exception is Keough, p. 554, who reasons that the line is a question because "there is some doubt about the outcome of the situation." But I doubt that every sentence that expresses uncertainty must be a question. 12 Beowulfand the Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd ed. with first and second supplements (Boston, 1950), p. xciv. 13 Note that line 3 contains ungelic, an adjective, while line 8 contains ungelice, an ad-

Peter S. Baker

45

most likely antecedents of us in line 3 to be the speaker and her people, who had been so clearly paired in line i, and would assume that the situation of the speaker and her people was somehow different from that of the "he" of line 2, but would presumably have only the vaguest idea what the difference might be. In contrast to the poem's riddling opening, we have in lines 4-7 a series of factual, lucid statements: "Wulf is on an island, I on another. That island is secure, surrounded by fen. Slaughter-cruel men are there on the island; they mean to (feed? kill?) him if he meets [their] troop." These lines clear up much of what has gone before. The "he" of line 2 now has a name. The fens that surround Wulf's island prevent his escaping the wxlreowe weras there. Men described as wxlreow in Old English are often evil and nearly always hostile, so there is little chance that the men on the island mean to feed Wulf. Thus after the ambiguity of line 2, the meaning of atecgan is established as "kill"; if Wulf meets the troop of "slaughter-cruel men," his corpse will be like a gift to the speaker's people. If lines 4-6 clear up the meaning of lines 2 and 7, they further complicate the meaning of lines 3 and 8. Whereas us in line 3 most likely referred to the speaker and her people, by line 8 it seems to refer to the speaker and Wulf, who have been linked by the simple statement that they are apart.'4 Neil D. Isaacs has written that, since the poet uses the dual form uncer (lines i6, 19), us in this poem probably refers to more than two people.15 But authors who used the dual form might also use plural forms in a dual sense, as IElfric does (see BT, s.v. we); nothing prevents us from referring to two people in one place and to more than two in another if the context demands it. The meaning of line 8 differs from, but does not cancel, that of line 3; the effect, rather, is cumulative. The speaker belongs to two groups that are violently opposed and can both be called "us." "Our" situation (the speaker's and her people's) is different from "our" situation (the speaker's and Wulf's) in that the leode, the treat, the walreowe weras
verb. For a possible difference in meaning between the two constructions, see Kavros (cited above, n. 3). Both constructions are attested elsewhere (see Vain 67 and Met 20, 33); I can detect little difference between them and suspect that the variation here may be scribal. 14 Alain Renoir, "Wulfand Eadwacer:A Noninterpretation," in Franciplegius:Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of FrancisPeabodyMagoun, ed. J. B. Bessinger, Jr. and R. P. Creed (New York, 1965), p. 156. 15 "A Negative Note on Wulf and Eadwacer,"in his Structural Principles in Old English Poetry (Knoxville, 1968), p. 115.

46

The Ambiguity of Wulf and Eadwacer

are hunters, and Wulf the prey. The speaker unwillingly finds herself on both sides of the battle; the enmity between people who have claims on her loyalty causes much of her grief. With line 9, Wulfand Eadwacerbegins to build towards its emotional and rhetorical climax.16 The tone of lines 1-8 was tensely controlled and the verses end-stopped. But now the lines become longer and more rapid, the syntax more fluid. There are several ways to divide up lines 9-12: ,bonne introduces lines lo and 11, which may both be "when" clauses, io subordinated to 9 and li to 12, or to and ii to 9, or to and ll to 12; or 1o may be subordinated to it, a "then" clause. The syntactical decision is difficult: on first glance, line 10 appears to be subordinated to line 9, but lines to and it are drawn together by their similar construction (both have the subject-verb word order), and line it appears to be subordinated to line 12. The best decision, perhaps, would be to take lines 9-12 as a complex apo koinou construction, lines to and ti being paired subordinate clauses suspended between two independent clauses.'7 The ambiguous syntax, together with the rapid movement of the lines, expresses very well the speaker's excited state. The most difficult problems in line 9 concern the words wenum and dogode. Alfred Bammesberger has argued persuasively for F. Hicketier's emendation of dogode (a hapax legomenon) to hogode, which he would construe with the dative widlastum:'8 "I thought ... of my Wulf's long journey." Hogian with dative is rare, but not unknown; it probably is better to emend than to invent etymologies and meanings for a supposititious verb *dogian. Wenumis the dative plural of the strong feminine noun wen; the plural wena of line 13 shows that the word is not the weak masculine wena, as Terrence Keough has suggested (p. 555). But once we have identified the word itself, there remains the problem of defining it, for the definitions of wen in BT include (among others) "thought, idea, hope, expectation," and many scholars have translated both wenum and wena as
Renoir, pp. 155-9, has discussed this buildup with great sensitivity. See Herbert Dean Meritt, The Construction dln6 KOIVO1 in the Germanic Languages (Stanford, 1938), pp. 49-52. 18 Beitrage zu einem etymologischen Wirterbuch des Altenglischen, Anglistische Forschungen 139 (Heidelberg, 1979), p. 37. For the major arguments for and against the emendation, see F. Hicketier, "Funf Ratsel des Exeterbuches," Anglia, X (1888), 579; Karl Bulbring, review of Die Rithsel des Exeterbuches und ihr Verfasser, Georg Herzfeld, by Literaturblattfiirgermanische und romanischePhilologie, XII(1891), 157-8; Malone, p. og9.
17
16

Peter S. Baker

47

"thoughts."'9 But although hopes and expectations are a kind of thought, the quotations in BT and BTS show that "thought" and "idea" are too general to be possible meanings for wen. In the same way, a table is a kind of furniture, but one could not say "table" when one meant "furniture" without causing great confusion. A good translation of line 9 would be, "I thought with hope of my Wulf's long journey." The speaker's apparent concern for Wulf's safety in lines 4-9 may suggest that we are listening to a woman, but we cannot be sure; the poet withholds this information until we reach the nominative feminine reotugu in line io. In this respect, Wulf and Eadwacer is quite different from The Wife's Lament, in which the poet uses three feminine endings in the first two lines lest we mistake the speaker's gender. Reotugu, a hapax legomenon, has not much interested critics and lexicographers, though perhaps it ought to do so. It is almost certainly an adjective reotig, related to reotan "to bewail, lament," and usually translated "weeping."20 But the idea behind reotan is not tears, but sound; compare the Old Icelandic cognate rj6ta "to sound dully."2' Reotan, as we see in BT, glosses crepitare,and we find it also in the following noisy passage: Peodegsa bib hlud gehyred bi heofonwoman, cwaniendracirm, cerge reotaS fore onsyne eces deman, wace truwia&. Pa Pe hyra weorcum (ChristB 833-7) Reotan describes the lament of a mother by her son's funeral pyre in The Fortunes of Men 46; it describes the thundering heavens over Grendel's mere in Beowulf 1376. This sense of sound no doubt carries over to the adjective; a woman who says she is reotugu speaks not of quiet grief and decorous tears, but of wild lamentation. We should translate not "weeping," but "wailing."
19 E.g., Keough, p. 555; Lehmann, p. i6i; and Fanagan, p. 136. E.g., Malone, p. io8; Lehmann, p. 164; A. E. Davidson, p. 26. Keough, p. 555 translates "in tears"; Fanagan, p. 133 translates "sadly." 21 Elmar Seebold, Vergleichendes und etymologischesWorterbuch germanischenstarken der Verben, Janua Linguarum Series Practica 85 (The Hague, 1970), s.v. reut-a-1. Old High German riozan has much the same meaning as Old English reotan; Seebold cites a
20

48

The Ambiguity of Wulf and Eadwacer

Se beaducafain line 11 has puzzled critics, the problem being not its meaning, but the identification of the person it describes. If lines 9-lo and 11-12 were separate sentences, then ,bonne in line io could refer to a different time from that of sonne in line i:; Wulf, absent from lines 9-10, could be present in lines I1-12.22 But if, as I believe, lines lo-11 are paired temporal clauses, the action they describe must take place in a single period, when Wulf is away. The speaker hopes for his return and laments his absence; meanwhile, a "battle-quick" man puts his arms around her. The gesture itself is tender enough, but the verb that describes it-belecgan, literally "to surround"-so often has negative meanings (e.g., "to accuse, afflict, load down") that this embrace seems not so pleasant as an embrace should be.23 Line 12 tells us that it was pleasure to ,bon-"to that point"-but that there was also pain. Very likely se beaducafawent beyond "that point" and used the speaker sexually. Just as we were made to wait to know the identity of Wulf and the gender of the speaker, so we are made to wait for the identity of the "battle-quick" man; but his military epithet perhaps allows us to associate him with the treat and the wxlreowe weras of earlier lines. Certainly the juxtaposition of opposites-the tender embrace with the oppressive load of arms and the wyn with the lag-mirrors the speaker's inner turmoil: just as she is on both sides of the quarrel between Wulf and her people, so she finds the attentions of se beaducafa both pleasant and painful. As the speaker cries out to Wulf in lines 13-15, the verses again become shorter, and the syntactical pauses strongly mark the rhythmic divisions; though the passage is one sentence, it has the quality of a series of exclamations. Again the speaker expresses herself through an opposition: her illness is emotional, not physical; it is brought on by her endless waiting, her anxious mind, Wulf's seldom coming (doubtless litotes for "never coming"), not the hunger she must endure.24 Next she addresses someone she calls eadwacerin two unusually long lines which alternate with two strikingly emphatic halfnumber of other cognates, among the most striking of which is Latin rudo "roar, bellow, bray, cry out." 22 Kerling, p. 140 argues in favor of this reading. 23 See Fanagan, pp. 132-3. 24 See P. J. Frankis, "Deor and Wulfand Eadwacer:Some Conjectures," Medium lEvum, XXXI (i962), 172, n. 33: "Line 15b is best interpreted not as an arbitrary comparison, but as an implication that the woman had actually been compelled by her circumstances to go short of food."

Peter S. Baker

49

lines (16-19). I agree with most critics in taking eadwacerto be a proper noun, as suggested by the direct address gehyrest Au, by the occurrence of the proper noun elsewhere in Old English,25 and by the absence of eadwaceras a common noun or adjective. But just as some critics have pointed out that Wulf's name, which suggests outlawry, reflects his predicament,26 so it is possible that the Anglo-Saxon audience would have analyzed Eadwacer's name into its component parts and applied their meaning to his role in the poem. The first element must be ead- "wealth, prosperity, happiness," not eag- "easy, easily," for the compound elements ead- and ea;Y- are not, as some have thought, interchangeable.27 The change of a to d in the supposed parallel eafmod, eadmod "gentle, humble" and related words is conditioned by the following m and presumably would not take place before w.28 The second element of the name could be connected with the adjective wacor "watchful," but it could not be a noun meaning "watcher," for the r-suffix noun from wacian "to wake, watch" would be *wacere if it existed.29 Nor can the second element of Eadwacer be the comparative of wac "weak," which would be wacra.30 Eadwacer's name, "watchful of wealth or happiness," perhaps suggests that he is the speaker's guardian or jailer. He probably is to be identified with se beaducafaof line 11. Most readers have followed Bradley in understanding Eadwacer to be the speaker's "tyrant husband," though Bradley himself offered that view with cautious modesty. Several recent scholars have pointed out that line i8 echoes Matthew 19:6, "Quod ergo Deus coniunxit, homo non separet."31 James Spamer has noted that the speaker in this line seems to deny that she is married to Eadwacer; I agree and think we should take her at her word. If she is married at all, she probably is married to Wulf-a situ25 William George Searle, Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum (Cambridge, 1897), p. 189, and Donald K. Fry, "Wulfand Eadwacer:A Wen Charm," ChaucerReview, V (1971),,260, n. 41. 26 Pointed out most recently by Kerling, p. 142. 27 The interchangeability is assumed in BTS, s.v. eadwacer;Isaacs, p. 116; and Fry, p. 260. 28 Karl Luick, Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache (1914-40; rpt. Oxford, 1964), ?673. 29 On the -ere suffix, see Wolfgang Meid, GermanischeSprachwissenschaftIII: Wortbildungslehre, Sammlung Goschen 1218 (Berlin, 1967), ?85.1. 30 Proposed by Fry, p. 261. For the formation of comparative adjectives, see Karl Brunner, Altenglische Grammatiknach der angelsachsischen Grammatikvon Eduard Sievers, 3rd ed. (Tubingen, 1965), ?307-or, indeed, any Old English grammar. 31 Frankis, p. 173; Keough, p. 558; and Spamer (cited above, n. 3).

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The Ambiguity of Wulf and Eadwacer

ation consistent not only with the little evidence that the poem itself offers, but also with the parallels of The Husband's Message and The Wife's Lament, both of which most critics take to be about separated
spouses.32

Conceivably Eadwacer has fathered the speaker's child, though hwelp in line i6, which many have translated "child," means literally "pup, cub" and can refer to a child only metaphorically. John M. Fanagan (p. 135) suggests that hwelp is not a child at all, but rather a metaphor for the relationship of the speaker and Eadwacer. Both of these readings make good sense, but perhaps it is best to allow the metaphor to remain ambiguous. The presence of a child might very well add poignancy to the story, but even if it were mentioned directly it would be to some extent metaphorical, being uncerne "belonging to the two of us" and thus representative of whatever bond is between the speaker and Eadwacer. Child or no child, hwelp sounds a scornful note that is very much in keeping with the taunting, threatening tone of lines 16-19, with their images of devouring and rending.33 For this reason, to replace the nonsensical earne (line i6), which must describe indirectly the speaker's feelings for Eadwacer, I prefer the emendation ear<g>ne "cowardly, vile," expressive of the speaker's contempt, to ear<m >ne "poor, pitiful," expressive of her
compassion.34

The foregoing observations on Wulf and Eadwacer support, with a few minor adjustments, the reading offered by Bradley in i888 and since that time accepted by most critics: The speaker "is a captive in a foreign land. Wulf is her lover and an outlaw, and Eadwacer (I suspect, though it is not certain) is her tyrant husband." As I have mentioned, it is more likely that Wulf is her husband. He has been outlawed by her people; she, perhaps because she is the wife of an outlaw, has been sent to live on an island, where she is watched over by Eadwacer, who has made love to her. As Bradley observed, "the general sense does not seem to present any great difficulty." Rather, our difficulties with the poem stem from our too-great reliance on BT
32 Some general comments on the genre to which these poems belong may be found in C. Davidson (cited above, n. 3) and Alain Renoir, "A Reading Context for The Wife's Lament," in Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation, ed. L. E. Nicholson and D. W. Frese (Notre Dame, 1975), pp. 224-41. 33 See Mattox (cited above, n. 3), pp. 38-9. 34 Since g was lost between r and n in syncopated forms of morgen (see Brunner, ?214 Anm. ii and Luick, ?677.8) perhaps emendation of earne is not necessary.

Peter S. Baker

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and BTS, whose definitions often are imprecise, and on the work of earlier critics, whose readings depend on those definitions or on sheer guesswork. Once we have cleared away the poem's scholarly encrustations, much ambiguity remains, but this ambiguity is more artistic than puzzling, and justifies the reputation of Wulf and Eadwaceras a little masterpiece of Old English literature.35 Emory University

35 I wish to thank Professors Fred C. Robinson and Carl T. Berkhout for advice on an earlier version of this paper.