Wulf and Eadwacer

Today I was reading about this poem, Wulf and Eadwacer, written in the West Saxon dialect of Old English. The manuscript of the poem dates to the late 900s c.e. and it struck me immediately with its ache and mourning. I must admit, I was somewhat shocked to read that there is a lack of consensus around what the text means. Each interpretation that I read seemed to get at a piece of the whole — but, I felt a key element was being missed entirely.

I came to the below interpretation based on my experience as a writer and as someone who studied anthropology and linguistics in undergrad. Obviously, I have not written a dissertation on the subject (yet…hmmm), and I’m sure that I would need to do so to exhaustively “prove” my interpretation. Nonetheless, I am proceeding with this casual entry, I suppose, because I am curious if anyone else agrees with me.

First: the poem itself. This version is borrowed from the current Wikipedia entry on the subject (apologies for how the web design mucks up the enjambments):

Leodum is minum   swylce him mon lac gife;
willað hy hine aþecgan,   gif he on þreat cymeð.
Ungelic is us.
Wulf is on iege,   ic on oþerre.

Fæst is þæt eglond,   fenne biworpen.
Sindon wælreowe   weras þær on ige;
willað hy hine aþecgan,   gif he on þreat cymeð.
Ungelice is us.
Wulfes ic mines widlastum   wenum dogode;

þonne hit wæs renig weder   ond ic reotugu sæt,
þonne mec se beaducafa   bogum bilegde,
wæs me wyn to þon,   wæs me hwæþre eac lað.
Wulf, min Wulf,   wena me þine
seoce gedydon,   þine seldcymas,

murnende mod,   nales meteliste.
Gehyrest þu, Eadwacer?   Uncerne earne hwelp
bireð Wulf to wuda.
þæt mon eaþe tosliteð   þætte næfre gesomnad wæs,
uncer giedd geador.

It is to my people as if someone gave them a gift.
They want to kill him, if he comes with a troop.
It is different for us.
Wulf is on one island I on another.

That island, surrounded by fens, is secure.
There on the island are bloodthirsty men.
They want to kill him, if he comes with a troop.
It is different for us.
I thought of my Wulf with far-wandering hopes,

Whenever it was rainy weather, and I sat tearfully,
Whenever the warrior bold in battle encompassed me with his arms.
To me it was pleasure in that, it was also painful.
Wulf, my Wulf, my hopes for you have caused
My sickness, your infrequent visits,

A mourning spirit, not at all a lack of food.
Do you hear, Eadwacer? A wolf is carrying
our wretched whelp to the forest,
that one easily sunders which was never united:
our song together.

Now, a line by line exegesis of sorts:

It is to my people as if someone gave them a gift.
Here, the speaker is referencing the child that she is pregnant with. She is calling the unborn child a gift that has been given to her, and by extension, to her people (even though, as we see immediately following, that gift is unwanted).

They want to kill him, if he comes with a troop.
Her group of people wants to kill the child, lest his birth bring an influx of the father’s group into their own.

It is different for us.
The speaker and father come from different groups of people. ALSO, their feelings about the child (as parents) are different than the feelings felt by the groups they belong to. (This is such a lovely doubling.)

Wulf is on one island and I on another.
The father, Wulf, is on a different island, and she, the speaker, is on another.


That island, surrounded by fens, is secure.
Wulf’s island, surrounded by bogs, is difficult to cross into or out of.

There on the island are bloodthirsty men.
Wulf’s island is full of men quick to kill.

They want to kill him, if he comes with a troop.
Like her own people, Wulf’s people also want to kill the child, if the child’s birth means an influx of the mother’s group of people into their own.

It is different for us.
The speaker and father come from different groups of people. ALSO, their feelings about the child (as parents) are different than the feelings felt by the groups they belong to.

I thought of my Wulf with far-wandering hopes,
The speaker longed for Wulf.


Whenever it was rainy weather, and I sat tearfully,
When it rained, the speaker cried and thought of Wulf where he was.

Whenever the warrior bold in battle encompassed me with his arms.
When the warrior man of her own people made love to her, she thought of Wulf.

To me it was pleasure in that, it was also painful.
It felt good, but it reminded the speaker of Wulf, and she missed him, and this was hard.

Wulf, my Wulf, my hopes for you have caused
Wulf, darling Wulf, the speaker’s daydreams have caused—

My sickness, your infrequent visits,
—the speaker to become sick with missing Wulf, visits are not enough.


A mourning spirit, not at all a lack of food.
The speaker is heart-sick, not literally starving.

Do you hear, Eadwacer? A wolf is carrying
our wretched whelp to the forest,
Do you hear, man of the speaker’s people OR Wulf’s people – literally “property watcher”? (Eadwacer could also be interpreted as a calling out of Wulf as the father’s child, if the child is interpreted as the property in question.) The child of Wulf and the speaker has been born and determined wretched because it is not purely of one people, and so it has been discarded. (The use of whelp/hwelp here, and the mention of the wolf, makes it clear to me that the child was the offspring of the speaker and Wulf.)

that one easily sunders which was never united:
The speaker never held the child and so they are easily separated (mother and child were never united). The child was taken from the speaker.

our song together.
Wulf never held the child either. This is what Wulf and the speaker share, apart: this loss, their child left for dead.

Previous interpretations have noticed the child being taken away, but seem not to have grasped the child’s presence throughout the poem. I suspect this is because contemporary English speaking people have such strong taboos about infanticide.

As I read the poem, I was reminded of a story from an anthropology class I took many years ago, in which we read an essay by an ethnographer who was studying a group of people that practiced regular infanticide. In this group, a newborn child was not considered human until the mother claimed it. When the ethnographer witnessed a mother give birth and not claim her infant, the ethnographer was shocked when that infant was then left to die in the woods. The ethnographer was torn, wanting to rescue the newborn from exposure. However, she knew that to interfere and save the child would be to interrupt a regular cultural practice with her own values, and doing so would compromise her own position — she would be, essentially, overstepping her role as an observer amongst people who had a completely different moral system than she did, and in doing so, would exert undue influence. (To save the child would also likely mean raising the child, as the group had already determined the child was not categorically worth raising in their own group.) As I recall this now, I wish I could tell you which ethnographer wrote about this dilemma (and which people she was referring to — if you know, please comment); these many years later, I remember only that the story moved me immensely, and it taught me that much of the moral principles we take for granted as being “universal” or “natural” are very culturally-determined.

To that end, it seems that this poem’s ambiguity has long been preserved by a lack of understanding of the cultural circumstances in which it was written (or, less generously, a willful desire to not want to face how common infanticide has been throughout history, and especially in circumstances where offspring were known to be the product of a person from a neighboring or enemy group). In cursory research, I found that there is even already known evidence that infanticide was a common practice amongst Anglo-Saxons at the time when the poem was written (pre-Norman Conquest). Literary criticism and interpretation can always benefit from historical and anthropological contributions that offer extra-textual context. (Honestly, until I started thinking about this, it had never occurred to me how much I would enjoy such interdisciplinary pursuits.)

I find Wulf and Eadwacer to be a heart-rending lament that captures both the limerence of forbidden love and the sadness brought by the loss of the speaker’s child with her lover. I wonder how many others might see evidence for my interpretation as well? Let me know.

xo,

LJ

SIGH AND BLUNDER

FILM
We Live in Public (full documentary): the early tech boom, hubris and art
Maggie Cheung retrospective
Despotism (1946)

READING & WRITING
Transit Books talks with Publisher’s Weekly
Hating the press is not American
Interview with James Ellroy in the Paris Review
Where are the female lit mag editors? Here.

HISTORY
About Belle Starr, American outlaw
President Martin Van Buren was born 12/5/1782
After his murder, the head of Metacomet, also called King Philip, was displayed on a pike at the early American colony of Fort Plymouth for 25 years

CURRENT DISASTERS
How technology killed manufacturing jobs in America
Incredible first person video, driving through fire in Gatlinburg, TN
On the Oakland warehouse fire
On the Cambridge fire
More about the Gunman at the DC pizzeria

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Pro-tip: email subscribers click title for still of Josh Harris from We Live in Public

From Sea to Shining Sea

VOTE TOMORROW.

America The Beautiful
The trial of Susan B. Anthony and the ratification of the 19th Amendment
A stunning map of America’s rivers
1600s American Colonial song of complaints about New England
The Georgia food truck that serves up gourmet coffee and jobs for refugees
To be both Midwestern and Hmong
Gay rights in the U.S., state by state
Daughters of the American Revolution manual for citizenship
The National Parks: America’s Best Idea
Eyes on the Prize, a 14-part history of the Civil Rights Movement
The Federalist Papers
Portraits of 70s and 80s Chola culture in Southern Californi

MAN CANDY
Shirtless male models with cats
Portraits by Stephen O’Donnell

ART
Famous artworks ruined with design by committee
The original emoji set has been acquired by MOMA
Marlow Moss, the female Constructivist artist you’ve never heard of
This year’s best art related Halloween costumes

HODGE-PODGE
The secret behind Italy’s rarest pasta
British Man adopts stray dog than ran beside him through Gobi Desert Marathon
Profile of Alexandra Ansanelli, the ballerina who gave it all up at 28

Image credit
Pro-tip: email subscribers click header for inspiring pic of hella dignified suffragette

Who Will Be Heard?

This morning I read an internet post in which someone tried to argue we did not put Buzz Aldrin or Neil Armstrong on the moon because no wreckage from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had been found. No, really. And that got me thinking: the internet is becoming an echo chamber of fools, with branded channels to provide a pseudo-respite from the cacophony. The big channels have become like cable networks, each with its own target demographic, anxieties and aspirations, ad buys and media. I click around and around and around. I find the channels that interest me. Sometimes—and when it happens, it feels like magic—I stumble on a piece of treasure in the midst of the mess, and I want to share. 

Fundamentally, I believe in the democratization of information, but I would be willfully blind if I did not acknowledge the need for curation in the chaos. Play every sound at once and you get static. The fact is, the more voices there are, the more we need unique voices. But that’s where the role of gatekeepers becomes tricky. Which voices get amplified?

I ask that question out of time. You can find the answer for the past in the historical record and in your memory/knowledge of who the greats of history have been. That many of the greats come from one or two demographic groups is evidence of what cultural obstacles prevented other groups from rising and/or from being remembered. For the present, the answer is in the surveys, like VIDA count, that keep track of who gets heard. But I ask that question out of time because I am obsessed with how we define the criteria for amplification. I think we want to believe in a meritocracy, where everything of quality gets the loudest signal, but a cursory survey of viral content or even who is given a platform on the networks and big internet channels belies this belief. Instead, the looking glass is ever-pointed at our values. The things we find funny are tainted by our taboos. The people we trust as authorities fit our cultural biases of what an authority looks and sounds like. The celebrities we watch and follow are the gods and goddesses of our inadequacies. The outrage we perform is rooted in what we hold sacred and inviolable.

Watching the media of other countries gives an equally salient experience of what any given country holds dear. So I wonder: what would a gatekeeper look and sound like, that did not have these cultural blindnesses? Would it have a perspective? Is it even possible for quality to be a perspective, outside of a culture’s definition of what quality is? The work that people do, presently, to have more women and minorities heard, is often characterized as giving a more diverse swath of quality voices a platform—but I think too, if not moreso, this work is about changing what our culture considers quality and by extension, what our culture values. 

That scares the hell out of the people who could, in the past, take for granted that their voices would be valued and amplified. They know instinctively that we can only hear so much, read so much, watch so much, and they resent the new competition. The echo chamber of fools is full of these angry anonymous, shouting desperately to be heard. They don’t want the criteria to change. They don’t want the values to shift. And much to their chagrin, they are becoming the noise. I say that confidently, even as the noise has its own Presidential candidate.  Fundamentalism, religious or secular, is a sign of the shifting, a response to the changes already happening. It doesn’t mean a new epoch has begun, but it does mean we are living in a transition. For what it’s worth, I hope we come out the other side with new definitions, values and a more inclusive culture that is also reflected in our media and by our gatekeepers. But there’s no guarantee. The signal is vacillating. Who will be heard?

Obligatory unrelated links:

POLITIK
Only 9% of America chose Trump and Clinton: A lesson in American democracy
From Reagan to Trump

MEN’S ISSUES
The big sexy problem with superheroines and their liberated sexuality
The plight of the alpha female
10 ways to identify a witch

CUTE SET
14 terrifying facts about otherwise adorable animals
Tiger cubs being ridiculously cute
Buffalo can be cute, right?

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