Abstract
Wulf and Eadwacer is famously difficult to interpret. The assessment of Benjamin Thorpe, “[o]f this I can make no sense” (Thorpe in Codex exoniensis: a collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry, from a manuscript in the library of the dean and chapter of Exeter. W. Pickering, London, 1842, p. 527), has largely stood. However, since the poem is complete, legible, and the manuscript is undamaged, it must have been equally perplexing to a medieval audience—unless it was contextualised. This has led some scholars to conclude that the story of Wulf and Eadwacer must have been known and that poem’s narrator must be a mythic figure. The most common assumption is that she is to be identified with Signy whose story is strikingly similar. Even still it seems strange since none of the other elegies appear to have mythic narrators. However, I suggest that Wulf and Eadwacer, like many Old English texts including the riddles, Wonders of the East, or Daniel, adapts a Latin genre to a vernacular sensibility and that if an early English poet were to adapt the Heroides, Signy would be the obvious heroine to choose. Moreover, the differences in style between the Heroides and Wulf and Eadwacer are typical of the adaptations of classical models to old English literature.
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Notes
All quotations from Exeter Book poems are from Krapp & Dobbie (1936). All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
All quotations from Beowulf are from Fulk, Bjork, & Niles (2008). All translations are my own.
All quotations and translations from Völsunga saga are from Finch (1965).
It is impossible to be certain whether this detail was absent from the version of the legend know in England or if English poets deliberately left it out. O’Donoghue expresses the common view the incest is excised from the poem for the sake of morality (2013, p. 27). Elsewhere I have argued, as Harris does, that the detail has been changed in Beowulf so that the story better illustrates the concerns of the Beowulf Poet (Harris 2013; Sebo 2018a). In any event, the variation of this detail makes it more likely that other English versions of the story might change it as well.
Although there has been debate on this point, as Shippey suggests, Modthryth “does seem on the face of it to have been married twice” (Shippey 2001).
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Sebo, E. Identifying the Narrator of Wulf and Eadwacer? Signy, the Heroides and the Adaptation of Classical Models in Old English Literature. Neophilologus 105, 109–122 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-020-09653-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-020-09653-7