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 W&E, the narrator is doubly locked on the island and in her master or capturer’s arms, but depicted as feeling both pain and pleasure in her enemy’s embrace, ‘wæs me wyn to þon, wæs me hwæþre eac lað’(line 12). In each poem, the female narrator describes her life’s activities and emotional turbulences as pivoting around a man: it is a man who causes her present imprisonment; it is also a man that she hopes will release her from it. Such description can be autobiographical, if we read these poems historically. For instance, seen in the light of Viking invasions of tenth-century England, WF may well reflect women’s real anxiety of being raped or killed, and the historically possible practice of hiding themselves in earthcaves. Likewise, considering the usually political nature of tenth-century aristocratic marriages, the adulterous fantasy the heroine of W&E habours for an enemy should not be seen as melodramatic, especially if we believe that she is taken by her current master against her will and forced to become an enemy of her previous lover. However, according to the reality presented in these poems, are we to understand that a married Anglo-Saxon woman had no alliances whatsoever except those of her husband? Had she no communal identity, except as the wife or consort of a man in his people? Why is there a complete absence of any mention of female-female relationship? Scheck reminds us that King Alfred’s daughter, Æðelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, managed to ward off a Danish infiltration, and that Anglo-Saxon women were able to rule just as effectively on some occasions and engage in important ways in political affairs, and could keep as well as sell property
[271]. We are also to remember that Beowulf, probably slightly earlier in composition, in spite of depicting a predominantly male Anglo-Saxon heroic society with its social-economic values, does include a heroine, the Danish princess Hildeburh, who was portrayed predominantly as an active ‘freoðowebbe’ (peace-weaver) rather than a passive ‘geomoru ides’ (mournful lady). These all prompt us to ponder about the motivation and rationale behind such an archetype of ‘mournful ladies’ and their ‘modceare’ (heartsorrow) in these two poems. They may be genuine representation of female desperation and loss, but can they not also be male-authored manipulation of a fictional female identity through rhetoric?
Being the only extant female-voiced poems written in Old English, WL and W&E are often taken to be authored by female, a theory increasingly supported by scholars of recent decades, partly as a counter-reaction of previous ready assumption of male authorship of any anonymous medieval text. However, such an authorship theory can also backfire as automatic assumption – after all, the allusive and often disjunctive narrative structure and enigmatic syntax of these poems allow various interpretations of their plots, but provide no concrete evidence as to the gender of the author. Those arguing for female authorship often take the narrator’s speech, sometimes fierce and revengeful, to be evidence of female strength that goes beyond endurance. For example, Straus claims that ‘telling her story from her own point of view is a positive act for the speaker, the means by which she attempts to control the way the events of her life will be seen’
[272]. Nevertheless, such strength, if it can be called so, is overwhelmed by the ubiquitous depiction of claustrophobic sceneries, and the narrator’s immobility and impasse as a prisoner locked in these sceneries, both temporally and spatially, both physically and mentally.
They may suggest female fear about actual enclosure, but they can also be suggestive of male anxiety about the need for female enclosure, especially when read in the context of late Anglo-Saxon England and its monastic reforms which increasingly witnessed the practice of active female religious enclosure, i.e. living as an anchoress, symbolically dead to the world
[273]. Even the mental reconciliation of the wife with her husband at the end of WL may well be male fantasy, or patriarchal prescription about how a woman in wretched situation should guide her feelings. The pleasurepain in a forced sexual intercourse described in W&E can be voicing genuine feelings, but can equally be male fantasy about the temperament of women: frail, hesitant, always harboring conflicting emotions, unable to be resolute and responsible for their own actions. In other words, they can be reflective of male unacceptability of ‘female autonomy’ in a patriarchal society embracing heroic and martial ideals
[274].
