Matt Hutchinson
Part Three: Diversions, Digressions, Discoveries, Chapter XII
Richard sat in his basement and opened Old English Poetry to the section called “Elegies.” It began with an eighteen-line poem entitled “Wulf and Eadwacer.” A prelusive note stated that the poem
"...is one of the most elusive and enigmatic members of the OE verse canon. It tells of a love triangle with a backstory shrouded in mystery. Several interpretations have been proposed. (For a close analysis of the various critical interpretations of this poem’s “plot,” see Appendix D, “Further Study,” pgs. 725–9.) The following explanation is the one preferred by the editor of this volume.
"The poem begins with an unnamed female speaker who is being held against her will on an island. Her lover, Wulf, has been banished to another island and is unable to come to her rescue because by doing so he will make himself a “gift” to his enemies—i.e., they will murder him. The woman is watched over by another man, Eadwacer, a warrior who has embraced her with “battle-bold arms,” a sly way of saying that he has forced himself upon her sexually. The encounter brought her pleasure (a frank admission), but at the same time she found it unbearable. She cries out to her beloved Wulf, whose absence causes her to be physically ill. In the poem’s riveting climax, the woman taunts Eadwacer, saying that Wulf kidnapped “our sorry whelp.” Whether this whelp is the child of Wulf or Eadwacer is left maddeningly, mesmerizingly ambiguous. The woman concludes her lament with the caustic, and self-evident, observation that keeping apart two people who were never meant to be together in the first place is easily accomplished."
Carver’s translation ran as follows:
"It is as if one gives a gift to my people;
they mean to kill him if he enters their camp.
It is not the same for us.
Wulf on one island, I on this one.
His isle is fenced, surrounded by a fen.
The men there are murderous and cruel;
they mean to kill him if he enters their camp.
It is not the same for us.
I thought of my Wulf on his distant wanderings
and was hopeful. I sat in the rain and sobbed.
Whenever those battle-bold arms embraced me,
I was filled with pleasure—but pain as well!
Wulf, my Wulf! Waiting for you here
causes me to retch, you come so rarely.
My spirit has failed…and not from lack of food.
Is that clear, Eadwacer? A Wulf will carry
our sorry whelp into the woods.
To sunder what was never made one is simple,
our twofold tale."
Richard was amazed. A trifle of a lyric, written over a millennium ago, yet so tightly wound, well preserved, and sophisticated. The poem trembled with raw feeling, unconstrained by a refinement or discretion one would expect to find in typical English lyrics, the Byronic odes and Elizabethan sonnets. Richard sat there, half-transfixed, half-perplexed. It had been a long while since a single poem had so affected him upon a first reading. Now that he’d been exposed to the icy ferocity of Anglo-Saxon love poetry, he was impatient to learn more about the language in which it had been composed.
He next attempted to read the poem in the original Old English, sounding out each syllable as he went.
Lēodum is mīnum swylce him mon lāc gife;
willað hӯ hine āþecgan gif hē on þrēat cymeð.
Ungelīc is ūs.
Wulf is on īege, ic on oþerre.
Fæst is þæt ēglond, fenne biworpen.
Sindon wælrēowe weras þǣr on īge;
willað hȳ hine āþecgan gif hē on þrēat cymeð.
Ungelīc is ūs.
Wulfes ic mīnes wīdlāstum wēnum hogode
þonne hit wæs rēnig weder ond ic rēotugu sæt;
þonne mec se beaducāfa bōgum bilegde,
wæs mē wyn tō þon, wæs mē hwæþre ēac lāð.
Wulf, mīn Wulf! wēna mē þīne
sēoce gedydon, þīne seldcymas,
murnende mōd, nales metelīste.
Gehȳrest þū, Ēadwacer? Uncerne earmne hwelp
bireð Wulf tō wuda.
þæt mon ēaþe tōslīteð þætte nǣfre gesomnad wæs,
uncer giedd geador.
Richard was a lifelong reader of poetry, both in his own language and, occasionally, in others. But he had never encountered Old English before now. From what little he knew, and from its reputation as the tongue of the Germanic invaders who rid England of the mightiest empire in the planet’s history, Richard had conceived of Old English as the throaty, blood-soaked language of Dark Age barbarians, not so much spoken as ejected, far removed from the mellifluous simplicity of the King’s English. Slogging through “Wulf and Eadwacer,” stumbling over its diphthongs, macrons, and consonants rougher than sharkskin, did little to alter this conception. The poem’s grip slackened a bit. He was disappointed—in himself for his failure to find beauty in the poem in its original form, but mostly in the gruff, coarse words of the poem itself. If this was indeed the precursor tongue of modern English, why did it sound so weird, so wrong? He wondered why anyone would want to read this stuff, let alone dedicate whole academic careers to it. Greek and Latin he could appreciate, those fluid, harmonic, versatile vessels for poetry and oration, the life-givers of occidental thought, the Old Reliables. Old English could only be an unworthy successor, deservedly booted into exile.
Richard soon recognized that he was being stubborn, that he, like most people, was reluctant to delve into the strange and unfamiliar. Needing a place to start, he turned to the section on pronunciation, and was encouraged when he recognized the thorn rune, þ, which, as Carver explained, was a consonant in the Germanic and Norse alphabets. Carver went on to point out that while most Old English letters were written and pronounced much as they would be today, there were differences, multiple levels of differences, and a beginner would do well to familiarize himself with all of them before he can hope to appreciate the aural qualities of the language. Richard nodded in agreement. Crawl before pulling yourself upright; stand before taking a step; walk then run.
He read the first three subsections, learning about verb inflexions, pronouns, adjectives, syntax, articles, syllabic stress, and vocabulary. He cherry-picked the glossary, looking up specific words such as “sword” (sweord), “shield” (scylde), “ship” (scip; ceol), and “shore” (ӯðlāf). (He was able to check himself from looking up the passage on the hilt.)
Taking all this in, he readied his ears and sized up the page. Then he re-read “Wulf and Eadwacer” out loud in Old English, trying to put the pronunciation rules into effect.
It sounded like slow asphyxiation. Syllables refused to form; words faltered; tongue, teeth, and lips were at each others’ throats. Nothing came out of his mouth that could be interpreted as a system of communication devised by humans. The poem’s nineteen lines kept running away from him like frightened children, and he kept losing his place in the poem from constantly flipping back to the pronunciation guide.
He sighed. What did you expect? To be fluent after two hours and one tiny poem?
(HWÆRCWOM)
(HWÆRCWOM)
“H-w-a-r Qu-aw-m… Hwair Quawm…”
He read “Wulf” again. And again. Before long, whole lines were tripping off his tongue: “Layo-dum is mee-num, swilch-e him mon lahk yiv-e.”
He dipped into other poems. Every few words, he darted to the glossary to look up definitions and tenses, but before long his trips to the glossary became less frequent, and the conjugations, irregular pronouns, and gender endings started to make some semblance of sense.
The constant shuffling from one end of the book to the other began to erode his powers of retention, so he shut the thing (thwump) and set it aside. Closing his eyes, he took a moment to listen to his surroundings, taking in every wall-groan, ceiling-squeak, furnace-hum, rain-tap, wind-wail, as well as noises he himself made: sighs of clothing, susurrations of breathing, pulmonary pulsations. He supposed what he was doing was akin to Buddhist meditation, the Music of Permanence. The noises around him—of him—was a reassurance that the physical world hadn’t wandered off.
This didn’t last. Exactly forty-seven seconds later, he was at it again. He opened Old English Poetry to the second of the elegies. Said Carver:
"'The Wanderer' is a dramatic monologue in one hundred fifteen lines. Its central discourse is spoken by a hypothetical pagan nobleman who is doomed to walk the earth with no lord or hearth-companions to comfort him. A heroic-age representative of loneliness and displacement, he broods on the memories of more joyous days and laments the ephemeralness of earthbound things. He is a restless spirit whose thoughts reach inexorably back to the past, yet he cannot escape the need to keep moving forward into an unknown future. To appreciate the Wanderer’s suffering, one must keep in mind that Germanic society in the early Middle Ages was based on the comitatus, the bond between a lord and his hall-thanes. The warrior who is deprived of this relationship finds himself in the most desperate state possible because he has been deprived of everything of value in his society—he is a man without status, wealth, honor, or identity.
"The poem begins with a Christian narrator invoking the implacability of divine fate. The Wanderer then enters and delivers his monologue, a powerful cri de coeur that is altogether pagan in perspective. The outside world is full of malice, prosperity is fleeting, and the “Shaper of Men” sets everything to ruin. The narrator then returns to conclude the poem with a Christian exhortation to seek salvation in God the Father."
Richard began to read the Old English of “The Wanderer” with steadfast care. All of a sudden, it leapt out at him from its hiding-hole and slashed him across the face with a razor-sharp talon: “Hwær cwom,” at the top of page 42, line 91. He ran a hand across his cheek to make sure he wasn’t bleeding. He sounded out lines 91 to 95.
Hwǣr cwōm mearg? Hwǣr cwōm mago? Hwǣr cwōm māþþumgyfa?
Hwǣr cwōm symbla gesetu? Hwǣr sindon seledrēamas?
Ēalā beorht bune! Ēalā byrnwiga!
Ēalā þēodnes þrym! Hū sēo þrāg gewāt,
genāp under nihthelm, swā hēo nō wǣre.
[Where has the war-steed gone? The stout young fighter?
The rings, the beef, the beer, the laughter?
O gleaming chalice! armor-clad champion!
undaunted ruler! That age has withdrawn
beneath night’s cloak, as though it never was.]
Arriving as it did like a flash of lightning on the heels of a thunderclap, Richard’s first thought was that these lines were a distillation of all that the word “Elegy” implied: an outpouring of grief, a disdain for the present, a longing for heroic grandeur that has faded from remembrance. There remained in the aging exile a thirst for this irrecoverable bliss, while memories taunted him, pissing on his shriveled honor.
And what are those memories that the Wanderer can’t let go of? Richard didn’t need to scroll through the rest of the poem to find out. The images entered unbidden: a great hall with long tables and benches; friends and fellow warriors to the left and right; weapons stacked against walls or resting at their owners’ feet; foaming mugs of mead within arm’s reach; a royal lady circulating from man to man offering praise; acrid odors of unwashed furs, burnished iron, fire-roasted venison…
His next thought was that “HWÆRCWOM” was not the sort of inscription one would expect to find on the hilt of a sword. “Glory in death,” “Flesh is but dust; the steel is truth,” “This blade shall shed hot blood, mine eyes no tears”—any of these would be more appropriate. The words the maker of his sword had chosen—“Where has the war-steed gone? The stout young fighter…”—seemed a little too wistful, too self-consciously melancholy, unswordworthy. Though moving in a romanticized way, the passage seemed an unsuitable decoration for a warrior’s weapon. Any swordsman worth his mettle would want to proclaim, boisterously and unequivocally, that his steed was present and accounted for, that he was the stout young fighter who would lead his troops to victory. To Richard’s ears, these words could have been uttered by an old man, a swordsman who’d laid his blade aside, perhaps bequeathing it to a son (or a daughter).
Richard had expected that once he learned what “HWÆRCWOM” meant, he’d have the answers he needed to take the next step. Now these five lines in “The Wanderer” had revealed the meaning, and all he had to show for it was more questions. Next step? As far as he could see, there was no next step. The Quest had become even more of a quandary.
He re-scanned the sword hilt, and this time he noticed something. The engraver had used the rune for “horse,” eoh, instead of spelling out the word for horse, “mearg.” Same with “mago,” or “young man,” which was represented by the “M” rune. Was this significant? Maybe. Yes, definitely. Or perhaps not.
Richard assigned himself the task of absorbing as much as he could before the afternoon collapsed into evening. But after a few pages, his eyelids began to droop, and within minutes Old English Poetry was put to use as a headrest. Richard nodded off.
When he woke, his back was stiff and his eyes were itchy. What time is it? It was late. Past ten. He’d been out for over four hours.
A semi-conscious Richard lurched his body up the stairs to his bedroom. His exhaustion (Jim—Groats—Carver—Wanderer) was total. No more reading, no more thinking. The Quest could wait. He threw off his clothes, slid under the covers, and slept a dreamless sleep.