fragment: wulf and eadwacer, the strangest and most beloved poem

it's different for us.

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In my post ‘how do I get to the Middle Ages’ (read it, it’s good), I gave a few recommendations for possible starting points and subjects to get lost in for people curious about the medieval period and its many different ways of viewing the world. I talked about the Old English elegies a good bit. My favourite of the elegies, and my favourite piece of literature in Anglo-Saxon, and potentially my favourite short poem of all time, is Wulf and Eadwacer.

I wax lyrical about it plenty in my longer post, but this is a deeply strange poem. It cuts off halfway through the nineteenth line, and the story doesn’t make much sense, so we can imagine it was meant to be longer than this. But how much longer? It might have had a couple more lines than this, or some have argued it is either a fragment or a spin-off of a great lost epic. I love imagining the parallel universe where we know its full story and Wulf and Eadwacer replaces Beowulf, a surreal (maybe) werewolf (maybe) love story. I also love this universe, where the unnamed woman and her unnamed lover stare at each other across a wartorn archipelago, with no context and no ending.

In that post, I suggested people contact me if they wanted to read the translation of Wulf and Eadwacer I wrote during undergrad. I mainly said it as a joke, a clever funny joke that makes it clear I was the kind of undergraduate who wrote extracurricular translations of Old English elegies. Then I was flattered when a non-zero number of people told me they wanted to read it. Then I realised I didn’t have the file anymore. I reread pages of old essay notes (for essays that weren’t good) but couldn’t find the translation anywhere.

It disturbs me a bit to have it be lost, but I suppose that’s the kind of thing Wulf and Eadwacer demands - gaps where you thought texts would be, and manuscripts that don’t last.

I’m meant to be working on my Old English language skills before I start my PhD in October, and my friend who is a year ahead of me in the same programme with the same supervisor is a much better Anglo-Saxonist. So if a text can be translated and lost once it can be translated again. My translation style is gonzo, liberal, and aesthetically motivated, so I wouldn’t quote it extensively anywhere academic (or anywhere at all).

I hope you like it though. I fell in love with this poem when I was eighteen, in the winter, in my college library. I sat up later than I needed to trying to work out the best path through the odd vocabulary, the many words that didn’t seem to mean anything, and the great aching emotions that didn’t fit in the fragment of text we have. Now I’m sitting at my desk in the winter, almost exactly a decade later, and trying again.

This Old English text is taken from the excellend Old English Aerobics website. I’m also indebted to Jonathan A. Glenn’s 1980 translation. I’m admitting before you read anything that I’ve hallucinated some extra grammatical words here to make the sentences carry the meaning better. That’s mainly true of ‘if he comes here, if he threatens to’ where I’ve added an extra ‘if’ becuase I couldn’t find a way to make ‘if he comes here in a threatening manner/if he threatens to come here’ sound sexy enough. I haven’t preserved the rhythm or alliteration. Who do you think I am, Seamus Heaney?

Lēodum is mīnum swylce him mon lāc gife;
willað hȳ hine āþecgan gif hē on þrēat cymeð.
Ungelīc is ūs.
Wulf is on īege, ic on ōþerre.
Fæst is þæt ēglond, fenne biworpen.
Sindon wælrēowe weras þǣr on īge;
willað hȳ hine āþecgan gif hē on þrēat cymeð.
Ungelīce 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 eargne hwelp
bireð wulf tō wuda.
Þæt mon ēaþe tōslīteð þætte nǣfre gesomnad wæs,
uncer giedd geador.

It’s as if my people have been offered a gift -
They’ll kill him if he comes here, if he threatens to.
It’s different for us.
Wolf is on one island, I on the other.
The island is bound up by fens,
The men are cruel,
They will kill him if he comes here, if he threatens to.
It’s different for us.
My wolf, wandering far, I hope for him,
When I weep in the rain.
When the warrior held me in his arms,
I felt delight and I felt pain.
Wolf, my wolf! Hoping for you
Made me sick, you who never comes.
It’s my mourning heart, not hunger.
Can you hear, my watcher? The wolf carries
Our poor puppy to the woods.
What was never joined is easily broken,
Our song together.

This is a quick and scrappy translation written while I put off picking out my clothes for work tomorrow, with YouTube ads playing in the background. I’ll be deeply embarrassed if any real academics read it, because I’m not a real Anglo-Saxonist. Despite all that, though, I hope you agree there’s something here that really grabs you, haunts you, takes you, won’t let you go.

Weeping in the rain is a commonplace now but this is one of the earliest poems written in English. The woman’s aching heart bleeds into the rain, into the fens, into the seas that separate the islands. The slippage of peopple into land into animals here is breathtaking to me. The final image, the broken song, sung across the fens and the sea to the man who can’t hear, strikes me as a howl. The howl reverberates a millennium later, echoing through my college library to my current basement flat.

If you’ve got the energy for a quick commentary, I’ll explain a couple of the choices I made.

Wulf and Eadwacer is a poem of ambiguous vocabulary and, particularly, ambiguous names. A lot of the poem’s mystery hangs on how many men you think there are here and how far one or both of them are human. First we have Wulf/Wolf. In Old English, the name Wulf and the noun for the big dog thing are the same and can only be told apart with context. Most people translate wulf here as Wolf with a capital letter, a man called Wulf. I find it more romantic for him to be Wolf, or my wolf. Still broadly man shaped but I prefer the idea of wolf being a shared name, a piece of romantic lore that leads us into the wider wolf themes, rather than someone’s given name. We learn a tiny bit more about this couple and their love if we know she calls him her wolf, her man who reminds her of a wolf, or her literal wolfman.

The second man (perhaps) in the poem is Eadwacer. ‘Eadwacer’ is a compound noun that appears nowhere else in the surviving canon of Old English writing. It seems to be a name, but it also seems to mean ‘watcher of property’, or ‘watcher’ as I’ve translated it. I read a journal article once that suggested ‘watcher of property’ sounds like a name you might give to a dog - I’m afraid I read that nearly ten years ago so I can’t give a proper citation. So who is Eadwacer? If this name refers to Wulf/Wolf, then she is remembering being held by her lover when she talks about the warrior who holds her in his arms with both delight and pain. If Eadwacer is a second man, then he seems to be from the group of people who want to kill Wulf/Wolf. When he embraces the woman it forms a love triangle. In this reading ‘watcher of property’ could be a name referring to the type of dog who defends livestock from wolves.

It’s traditional to see Wulf/Wolf and Eadwacer as two separate characters, and I don’t hate that version of the poem. The woman gets out of her husband’s bed to weep on the fens in the rain for the wolf-man, perhaps an exile, perhaps a monster, who can’t come home to her and she can’t go home to. But I prefer the poem if Wulf/Wolf and Eadwacer are the same person, probably. I am obsessed with this surreal, horrific love story where past, present, human, animal, monster, land and weather blend into a single broken mourning song. This is a liberal translation where I take a lot of liberties but I hope if you look between the old language and my remix you can see both versions of the story as possibilities.

The final character in the poem is the (potential) child, only mentioned once, right at the end. The Old English ‘hwelp’ means the same as modern-ish English ‘whelp’, meaning young animal, usually puppy. I use puppy here. This is usually interpreted as the woman’s child, fathered by either Wolf/Wulf or Eadwacer. In the third to last line of the poem, the word wulf is usually given in modern editions with a lower case W, implying this is a wolf rather than our boyfriend wolf. Who is the father of this child? Is it a child at all? One of my undergraduate essays argued that it was not a literal child, rather it was the secret monstrous thing treasured by the couple, thier love, their hope. I don’t know how far I can really back that with citations now. Again, I like the image both ways.

I hope this introduction and dodgy translation has shown you something of why I’ve been so obsessed with this poem for so long. I hope you have even more questions than I have about it. I know that none of them will ever get answered.