A Translation of the Anglo-Saxon Poem Wulf and Eadwacer

Lady Teleri Barod

Atlantian Spring Crown Tournament

Fortieth year of the Society

 

Introduction

Wulf and Eadwacer is one of the more cryptic Anglo-Saxon poems.  Critics have suggested that it is a Cynewulfian rune-poem, a canine/lupine love story, a fragment of a Germanic legend, an elegy for a dead infant son, an elegy for a dead adult son, a charm against wens… the list goes on.  By far the most common translation is that of a lover’s lament.  This makes it somewhat unusual in the Anglo-Saxon corpus – The Wife’s Lament has similar features, and it can be said that The Husband’s Message is a love-poem of sorts.  Some authors have argued that Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife’s Lament cannot be the passionate poems they appear to be because of this rarity, but “the argument founders on the evidence of the text.” (Klinck 1987).  Rare they may be, but we have them.

            I became interested in Wulf and Eadwacer precisely because it is unusual in the corpus.  The general impression of Anglo-Saxon culture that permeates the Society is one of a Beowulfian warrior-society full of mead halls and theigns and glittering Sutton Hoo treasures.  All that, surely, was part of Anglo-Saxon society, and an important part.  But Wulf and Eadwacer gives us a view that is at once very different and entirely congruous.  The speaker may be torn by a heartsick passion that we hardly glimpse elsewhere, but the language used to describe her reaction to her situation has all of the grim courage we would expect to find in the mead hall.

 

The Text

 

Aside from its content, the poem has several peculiar features.  Only two poems in Old English contain refrains: Deor and Wulf and Eadwacer, and they appear in precisely that order together, in the Exeter Book (c. 975).  This has lead one scholar to hypothesize that they are actually part of a larger myth-cycle – that the narrator in Deor is “Wulf” in Wulf and Eadwacer (Frankis 1962).  Wulf and Eadwacer also makes use of half-lines (indeed, the refrain contains one of these half-lines).  It contains several hapax legomenon, words that we have no certain meanings for – they appear in this poem and nowhere else.  Sometimes they are considered scribal errors and the translators suggest emendations; sometimes, the translators suggest possible meanings. 

 

This is the original poem:

 

1   Leodum is minum     swylce him mon lác gife:

     willað hy hine aþecgan     gif he on þreat cymeð.    

     Ungelic is us.

     Wulf is on iege,     ic on oþerre;

5   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 wid-lastum     wenum dogode:

10  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,

15   murnende mód—     nales meteliste.

       Gehyrest þu, Eadwacer?     Uncerne earne hwelp    

       bireð Wulf to wuda.

       þæt mon eaþe tosliteð     þætte næfre gesomnad wæs

       uncer giedd geador.

 

I am not, unfortunately, an Old English scholar.  However, many such scholars have written extensively on these lines, providing a wealth of meanings for the would-be translator to examine.  What follows are the original lines of the poem along with a close translation, made without concern for meter. 

 

Leodum is minum     swylce him mon lác gife:

To my people, it is        as if one gave them a lác.

 

The word lác is the problem here.  It is usually taken to mean “gift.” (Baker 1994).  Lác can also mean “sacrifice” or “offering,” but it would typically take a more formal verb than gife, “give.”  “Battle” has been put forward (“To my people, it is as if one gave them battle”) but Baker claims that this is the result of a mistranslation of a metaphor used elsewhere and wrongly applied to this poem as well.  “Game” has been suggested, but that meaning depends upon an unlikely Old Icelandic pedigree for the word.  There is an Old English word lác, and it means “gift,” and there seems to be little reason to not use it.

 

willað hy hine aþecgan     gif he on þreat cymeð. 

They will aþecgan him  if he on þreat comes.

 

Aþecgan is a conjugation of the verb “to take,” in the sense of “taking food.”  This line, with only the preceding one for context, is ambiguous – it is not beyond possibility that “my people” will be feeding “him,” their “gift.”  However, subsequent lines make it clear that “my people” are hostile towards “him,” so aþecgan is usually translated with a connotation of consuming – “kill” or “destroy.”

            On þreat could be an adverb – “violently.”  “They will kill him if he comes violently.”  Klinck (1992) and Baker (1996) both agree its conjugation, and the form of the verb cymeð, imply that the þreat is something concrete that “he” is moving toward in a physical way – a troop of men.

 

Ungelic is us.

It is different/unalike for us.

 

The meaning of this line is not in question, and it is entirely ambiguous in the original who is unalike whom.  The speaker and her people?  The speaker and the gift-man? 

 

Wulf is on iege,     ic on oþerre;

fæst is þæt eglond,     fenne biworpen;

sindon wælreowe     weras þær on ige:

Wulf is on an island                   I on another;

Fast is that island          by fens surrounded;

Slaughter-cruel men      are there on the island

 

These lines are fairly straightforward.  It is not clear which island is the fast, fen-surrounded one.  Both the speaker and Wulf are trapped, in different ways, so it could be applied to either.

            Some commentators make a note of Wulf’s name or pseudonym.  Frese (1990), in trying to build a link to a Germanic mythic influence, claims connection to Odin’s wolves.  Klinck (1992) argues that it is more likely to refer to an outlaw status.  Outlaws could be killed without penalty, like a wolf, and so were called “wolf’s heads” in Anglo-Saxon England.

            Wælreowe almost exclusively refers to evil and cruel men.  Whoever is on the island with Wulf is not there to help him – these are certainly not his retainers or war-band, but enemies hunting him.  Possibly, they are the speaker’s people or family, mentioned in Line 1.

 

willað hy hine aþecgan     gif he on þreat cymeð.    

Ungelice is us.

They will kill him           if he comes to their troop

It is different/unalike for us

 

Lines 2-3 are repeated as a refrain here.

 

Wulfes ic mines wid-lastum     wenum dogode:

I followed the far journeys of my Wulf in (my) hopes. (after Klinck 1992)

I thought with hope of my Wulf’s long journey. (after Baker 1994)

 

Dogode is one of the most contentious hapax legomenon in the poem.  Baker emends the word to hogode, “I thought.”  Klinck argues in her articles that an important feature of this poem is its use of “animal imagery” – words more suited to discussing the doings of animals than humans.  Unlike a few of the early commentators (e.g., Sedgefield 1931), she does not think that any of the actors in the poem are animals – rather, that the language is specifically chosen to give it a vicious, feral edge.  She believes dogode to be related to the word for “dog,” much like our usage in Modern English.  To dog someone is to follow him closely and relentlessly, as a dog would.

 

þonne hit wæs renig weder,     ond  ic reotugu sæt,

Then/When/Whenever it was rainy weather          and I sat wailing

 

þonne has an ambiguous temporal characteristic; it can mean “then,” “when” or “whenever.”

            “Reotugu” is another hapax legomenon, but it is clearly related to the verb reotain, “to lament” (Klinck 1992).  It is also the first word in the poem to clearly identify the speaker as a woman – the adjective is feminine.  It is often translated as “weeping,” but reotain “speaks not of quiet grief and decorous tears, but of wild lamentation” (Baker 1994).  “Wailing” is probably closer.

 

þonne mec se beaducafa     bogum bilegde;

Then/When/Whenever the battle-bold man        bogum biledge

 

Bogum is another contentious word in the poem.  It is typically translated as “arms.” Klinck, in her animal imagery essays, argues that bogum are not usually found on humans, but that the word refers to the shoulder of an animal.  Bogum is also sometimes translated as “boughs.” Biledge comes from belecgan, “to surround.”  So the sense seems to be either “held me in his arms” or “surrounded me with branches,” perhaps a reference to a cell of some sort. 

            None of the translations I found seemed to actually use the “boughs” sense of bogum.  Both Klinck and Baker see something violent or negative in the battle-bold man’s embrace.  Klinck returns to her definition of bogum as a shoulder or limb of an animal – the speaker is dehumanizing the man who takes her in his arms.  Baker looks to the verb belecgnan, which he says has negative connotations:  to accuse, afflict, load down.  Subsequent lines bear out these ideas.

 

wæs me wyn to þon,     wæs me hwæþre eac lað.

That was joy to me, to a point               but that was pain also.

I had joy in that; even so, he was also an enemy (after Whitbread 1941)

 

Sedgefield (1931) rather gratingly translates this as “I like it, but I liked it not (i.e., I was coy).”   The violent language of the rest of the poem does not support this.  The speaker is wailing, weighted down – not coy.  Most translations favor some variation of the first line, above.  Many fail to translate the sense of to þon, “to a point.”  Klinck (1992) claims that lað can be translated as either an adjective or a noun, and most authors prefer the noun so that it better parallels wyn, joy, from the first half-line.  Whitbread (1941) claims that lað should rather be “the hostile one.”  No later analysis seems to support that view, however.

 

Wulf, min Wulf,     wena me þine

seoce gedydon,     þine seldcymas,

murnende mód—     nales meteliste

Wulf, my Wulf  It was wishing for you

That made me sick;       your seldom-comings

Troubled my mind         not missing meals.

 

These lines are fairly straightforward.  Wulf’s “seldom-comings” are likely an ironic understatement – Wulf never comes to visit her on her island.  The first half-line here, Wulf, min Wulf, is missing a syllable if one were strictly adhering to the Old English meter.

 

Gehyrest þu, Eadwacer?     Uncerne earne hwelp    

bireð Wulf to wuda.

Do you hear, Eadwacer?  Our earne whelp

A wolf/Wulf bears to the woods.

 

Klinck points out that the placement of the question mark can greatly affect the meaning of these lines.  Placed after þu, it is “Do you hear?  Eadwacer, our earne whelp…” making the “whelp” clearly something belonging to the speaker and this new character, Eadwacer.  It is typically placed after Eadwacer, which makes the sense of “our” somewhat ambiguous.  It could also go at the end of the line: “Do you hear, Eadwacer, our earne whelp?”  This would make Eadwacer the whelp.  (Although asking the whelp if he has heard that a wolf is carrying him to the woods makes little sense.)

            Eadwacer is a name formed out of words, and usually translated as “property-watcher.”  This seems to make him a guardian of the speaker, and stands him against the (potentially) outlaw Wulf.  A few try to argue that Eadwacer and Wulf are one in the same person, and another theory posits that an “eadwacer” is some sort of angel or spirit guide (Frese 1990).  Baker argues that the word for “watcher” would be wacere, and that wacer should be translated as “watchful,” making Eadwacer “Watchful of Wealth/Happiness” (as happiness, property and wealth are all translations of ead) and even more likely to be a jailer of some sort.

            Earne is the last hapax legomenon.  Most translators emend it to one of three Old English words that translate as either “swift,” “cowardly,” or “wretched.”  “Swift” makes sense only if one is taking the animal imagery to a fairly ludicrous extreme.  If the whelp belongs to the speaker and Eadwacer, Baker prefers “cowardly,” to match the speaker’s apparent contempt for Eadwacer.  On the other hand, if the whelp is the speaker and Wulf’s, “wretched” may be the better fit. 

 

þæt mon eaþe tosliteð     þætte næfre gesomnad wæs

uncer giedd geador.

It is easy to tear apart               what never united was:

Our giedd together

 

Many translators have seized upon the similarity of these lines to Matthew 19:6 – “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.”  The speaker may be emphasizing that she was not married – but to whom?  Is she lamenting her separation from Wulf – perhaps a lover whom she never wed?  Is Eadwacer her husband as well as captor?  Or is she mocking Eadwacer, to whom she has never been truly united (e.g., in marriage) even if he has possessed her physically?  If so, might Wulf be her proper husband, whose exile or outlawry keeps him away?

            Tosliteð is another word that Klinck seizes on to make her “animal imagery” arguments.  It is a word that expresses a violent parting, a slitting or cutting or tearing.

            Giedd is alternately used in Old English to indicate a poem, a story, a song, or a chant.

 

Alternate Interpretations

 

The canonical “story” of this poem, which I have followed, is that the speaker is a woman who is in love with Wulf, but is being held apart from him by Eadwacer.  Within this version, there is still plenty of ambiguity – to whom the speaker is married, if either; whose whelp it is; the fate of the whelp (raised by Wulf, or torn apart in vengeance?).

            Other critics have seen other possibilities.  Early on, it was thought that this was a reference to some lost (or known) Germanic myth cycle.  Scholfield (1902) called this poem “Signy’s Lament,” a reference to a Germanic story about a woman whose husband kills all her family save her twin brother.  Her sons will not avenge their mother, so she seeks out her brother in disguise and conceives a child with him.  She gives him the child to raise to avenge his family’s deaths, and when her son comes to kill her husband, she elects to die with him.  Scholfield thought that the incestuous relationship between Signy and her brother explained the joy/pain paradox in Line 12 and the bearing away of the whelp to the woods.  She and her brother were of the Wolfings, so the pseudonym “Wulf” is also a good fit.  However, Signy does not spend much time thinking on her brother after the fact, following his far-wanderings in her hopes, and the passion with which the speaker regards Wulf seems misplaced for a reluctant brother-sister coupling.

            Frankis (1962) makes an interesting case for Wulf and Eadwacer to be linked with Deor, the poem which comes just before it in the Exeter Book and which also has a refrain.  The speaker in Deor says “My name was Deor,” but, if one translates the word deor this could also be “My name was an animal” – a riddling way of alluding to Wulf.  If one takes the events in Deor and adds them to Wulf and Eadwacer, one gets a tale of an illicit love affair between the king’s daughter and the king’s scop.  The scop is banished and the daughter is placed on an island under guard.  She is pregnant and Lines 16-17 (“our wretched whelp/a wolf bears to the woods”) either allude to an accomplished fact (left curiously unmentioned in Deor) or an anticipated one.  This interpretation deepens rather than conflicts with the canonical one and, while it cannot be conclusively shown true or untrue, is of interest.

            Frese (1990) puts forward the theory that Wulf is the speaker’s dead son, and that the poem is an elegy.  Her translation is effective, but her arguments are rather wide-ranging.  In her version, “eadwacer” is some sort of spirit guide, a Valkyrie or angel, that the speaker is imploring to guide Wulf in the next life.  It feels stretched.

            Osborne (1994) continues the mother-son theme, but proposes that the son, Wulf, is not dead.  She suggests that the speaker is a peace-weaver, a woman of one people married to their enemies to end a feud.  Her son, Wulf, has been sent to her people (like a gift) to learn their ways and traditions.  The speaker begins the poem fearful for her son – will her people be hostile to him, on his father’s account?  Then it shifts as she begins to fear her son – when he returns, will it be with all her family’s old grudges against his father’s people?  In this case, the giedd being torn asunder could be the peace between the families, and Eadwacer might be her husband or even a younger son in whom she is confiding these fears.  This version I find more plausible; however, the shift in fear occurs suddenly at Line 16 (“Do you hear, Eadwacer?”), since she is worrying about Wulf and his seldom-comings just before that.  The sudden change makes it difficult to see this meaning naturally.  Osborne motivates her interpretation on the basis that a passionate or erotic love poem could not exist in an Anglo-Saxon context; I think Klinck argues convincingly that it can.  There are gnomic verses that condemn wives who take secret lovers, and the Riddles certainly show an interest in sexuality.  The poem can be read as Osborne suggests, but it is less intuitive, and the reasons for doing so are dubious.

            Most recently, Tasoiulas (1996) tries to make the case that Wulf is the son of the unmarried speaker and Eadwacer, and has been left exposed to die because of his bastard status.  This fits Wulf being given to the speaker’s people, and the speaker’s grief, and even the whelp being borne into the woods by a wolf.   But what about “they will kill him if he comes to their troop”?  An exposed infant will not “come” to anyone, but rather lie where he is left.  Since that line is not only written, but repeated as a refrain, it has a certain importance which I think this interpretation misses.

 

Translation

 

Unconvinced by the alternate interpretations of the poem, I primarily followed Klinck and Baker, doing my best to fit the meanings of the lines into the Old English rhythmic meter.  When possible, I chose words with a harder edge to them, in keeping with Klinck’s “animal imagery,” even if I could not replicate the imagery itself.  For instance, in Line 11, I elected to use “bore me in his arms” rather than use a softer word such as “embraced,” which would have also preserved the alliteration.

            I followed the alliteration rules presented in by M. Wendy Hennequin (2005).  In brief, words that start with the same letter alliterate.  “Set” and “sell” alliterate with each other, and also with “shell,” “steak,” and “snake,” even though the “s” sound is blended with other consonants in these cases.  Also, all vowels alliterate with each other.

            The stress patterns for each half-line follow one of five major types, defined by a German scholar named Sievers in the late nineteenth century.  Alexander (1991) follows Tolkien in describing them, and I reproduce his example here.

 

Table 1: Anglo-Saxon half-line stress patterns

 

            “Ungelic is us” presented a problem.  “Ungelic” and “unalike” sounded similar enough that I thought to replace one with the other; however, the stress in “unalike” is on “like,” not “un.”  Despite the many vowels in the word, it does not actually alliterate with “us.”  “Unalike it is for us” alliterates “is” with “us,” but “like” still has a stress, giving this half-line three stressed syllables.  Still, this seemed preferable to me rather than use the more standard “It is different with us” that has no alliteration.  To the ear of the audience, the alliteration is more likely to make an impression than an additional stressed syllable in a poem with such changeable meter.

            My main challenge came in Line 9 in dealing with the dogode/hogode debate.  I tried to combine the two senses of this line offered by Klinck and Baker as “My thoughts and hopes far-traveled to Wulf.”  This greatly changes the grammatical structure of the line – the speaker is not thinking or following, but “far-traveling.”  Wid-lastum, “far journeys” are nouns and something Wulf has embarked upon.  I have turned it into a verb and given it to the speaker as the action of her “thoughts and hopes.”  However, I think it preserves two main ideas – first, that Wulf is distant, and second, that she is “dogging” him, at least in her mind.  Having her travel to him keeps Klinck’s meaning with dogode; giving her thoughts to do it with helps the meter and alliteration of the line.

            The alliteration in this line may be dodgy; I have assumed “thoughts” and “traveled” alliterate, since they both begin in Modern English with a “t.”  But the sound that begins “thoughts” would be spelled “ð” in Old English and may have been considered separately.

            The final half-line would not admit a solution as satisfactory as “giedd geador.”  None of the translations of giedd begin with the “g” sound that would alliterate with the stressed syllable of the only translation of geador, “together.”  “Song” at least has a “g” sound at its end, and so I used it.

            I have tried my best to keep to the stress patterns in Table 1, but later poetry like Wulf and Eadwacer allows more unstressed syllables per line, which can make determining which Sievers type a line ought to be somewhat troublesome.  (I take as an example Line 10, þonne hit wæs renig weder, which would seem to have three fairly strong stresses – is it “falling by stages” with the extra unstressed syllables hit wæs between the two strong stresses þonne  and re(nig), or is it something else?)

           

Conclusions

 

Wulf and Eadwacer is ambiguous and admits many interpretations.   I have tried to adhere as closely to the original as I could.  Many phrases, like Line 10, þonne hit wæs renig weder (When it was rainy/raining weather), have obvious modern cognates and I used these whenever I could.  Sometimes, one half of a line would have cognates but its second half would not, forcing a rewording of both to preserve alliteration.  When interpretations were unavoidable, I looked for those which were based more on the grammar and structure of the poem rather than assumptions on what Old English poetry could or could not be about.  The result, I believe, is a fairly faithful translation of the original into Modern English. 

            One may believe that other interpretations or senses can be had from the poem, ones that require different language to adequately display to the modern audience.  While I agree that the modern audience does not have all of the cultural referents to instantly grasp all possible meanings of the work, I am unsure of the value of rewriting it to highlight these possible meanings.  One very powerful and affecting meaning is sitting right under the surface of the words – why should it be ignored?

            The poem is short – only 19 lines – and so well-suited for performance at a bardic circle or other SCA venue.  Indeed, one could perform both the original Old English version and the translation and not exceed a polite span of time.  The translation preserves the meaning of the original, some of its brutal force if not its original animal imagery, and follows Anglo-Saxon poetic conventions fairly well.  I believe I have accomplished my goal of making the poem accessible to a wider audience while, at the same time, maintaining the poetic features that mark it as a product of a particular time and place.

 

References

 

Alexander, Michael, trans.  The Earliest English Poems, Penguin Books: New York, 1991.

Baker, Peter S. “The Ambiguity of Wulf and Eadwacer,” Old English Shorter Poems: Basic Readings, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ed., Garland Publishing, Inc.: New York, 1994, 393-407.

Frankis, P.J. “Deor and Wulf and Eadwacer: Some Conjecture,” Medium Aevum 31(3), 1962, 161-75.

Frese, Dolores W. “Wulf and Eadwacer: The Adulterous Woman Reconsidered.”  New readings on women in Old English literature, Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey, eds., Indiana University Press, 1990.

Hennequin, M. Wendy.  “Building Blocks of Old English Poetry,” http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~mwh95001/oepoetry.htm, downloaded January 2005.

Klinck, Anne L.  The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study.  McGill-Queen’s University Press: London, 1992, pp. 47-49, 92-93, 168-175.

Klinck, Anne L.  “Animal Imagery in Wulf and Eadwacer and the Possibilities of Interpretation.”  Papers on Language & Literature 23(1), Winter 1987, pp. 3-13.

Osborne, Marijane.  “The text and context of Wulf and Eadwacer.”  Old English Shorter Poems: Basic Readings, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ed., Garland Publishing, Inc.: New York, 1994, pp. 409-426.

Scholfield, W.G. “Signy’s Lament,” PMLA 10, 1902, pp. 247-261, 262-295.

Sedgefield, W.D. “Miscellaneous Notes: Old English Notes,” The Modern Language Review 36, 1931, pp. 74-75.

Tasoiulas, J.A.  “The mother’s lament: Wulf and Eadwacer reconsidered.”  Medium Aevum 54(1), 1996, pp. 1-18.

Whitbread, L. “A note on Wulf and Eadwacer,” Medium Aevum 10, 1941, pp. 150-154.