Of Wolves and Women
This enigmatic poem from the 10th-century Exeter Book defies easy interpretation but speaks with a powerful feminine voice of anguish and longing--a voice that resurfaces in modern literature
It is as though someone were to give a gift to my people— they will kill him if he comes to the troop. Unlike it is for us. Wulf is on an island, I on another. That island is secure, surrounded by fen. The men on the island are murderous and cruel; they will receive him if he comes to the troop. Unlike it is for us. In my hopes I endured the far-wandering of my Wulf, When it was rainy weather and I sat weeping, and when the battle-brave's arms held me— it was pleasure to me, yet it was loathsome to me. Wulf, my Wulf! My wanting you has made me sick—your rare visits, my grieving spirit, not lack of food. Do you hear, Eadwacer? a wolf bears away our wretched whelp to the woods. One can easily separate what was never united, the song of us together. And in the original Old English: Leodum is minum swylce him mon lac gife; willað hy hine aþecgan, gif he on þreat cymeð. Ungelic is us. Wulf is on iege, ic on oþerre. 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 widlastum wenum dogode; 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, murnende mod, nales meteliste. Gehyrest þu, Eadwacer? Uncerne earne hwelp bireð wulf to wuda. þæt mon eaþe tosliteð þætte næfre gesomnad wæs, uncer giedd geador.
What We Love About This…
After centuries of contention and study, we still have no clear picture of the story behind this short first-person Old English lyric, but its power is undeniable. It sits alongside a collection of riddles and other enigmatic lyrics in its manuscript, The Exeter Book, a major collection of vernacular poetry from early medieval England. As was conventional in this period, the author of Wulf and Eadwacer is anonymous (even the title is a modern intervention).
An unnamed female voice speaks to us with a mix of anger, desire, disgust, and perhaps even despair, of a man known to her people, whom she calls Wulf (wolf), her sometime clandestine lover. Someone else, Eadwacer (a guard? a husband? both? Wulf himself?), is also addressed in her outpouring and may be the implied addressee of the full poem: ‘Do you hear?!’ she provokes him. But she is alone when she makes this speech, full of ‘ifs’, comparisons and crucial differences. The lyric is threaded through with a tone of dark irony and understatement, and the repetition ‘Unlike (ungelic) it is for us’ sets up the leaden sadness of the final lines. Translating this line into Modern English is difficult: it could also read, ‘we are unalike’, or even ‘too alike’. Does she mean that she and Wulf are different from each other? Or together different from everyone else?
The poem is beguiling in its apparent simplicity, moving between different levels of signification with each line, never making the ‘real story’ clear. The ‘cub’ or ‘whelp’ the speaker refers to may even represent her lost child: it was common in this period to refer to deaths in metaphor, to say that someone had been ‘borne away by the wolf’. But ‘Wolf’ is also the name of her outlaw lover—the poet seems to be asking us to think very carefully about what is real and what is symbolic.
To Read Alongside…
Many writers have translated and adapted this poem, such as Paul Muldoon, Bernard O’Donoghue, Roy Liuzza and Fiona Sampson. Amongst them, Kerry Carnahan’s ‘Wulf and Eadwacer/Daylight Is Our Evidence’ (The Boston Review, 2017), uses the poem to explore the twin horrors of violence against women and white supremacism. ‘Ungelic is us’ becomes for Carnahan—defiantly, mournfully—‘I'm nothing like you’.
For us, this poem also chimes with the famed and blighted passion of Cathy and Heathcliff. Here, from Chapter 15 of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, is Cathy’s storming rebuke:
" ‘You and Edgar have broken my heart, Heathcliff! And you both come to bewail the deed to me, as if you were the people to be pitied! I shall not pity you, not I. You have killed me—and thriven on it, I think. How strong you are! How many years do you mean to live after I am gone?’ Heathcliff had knelt on one knee to embrace her; he attempted to rise, but she seized his hair, and kept him down."
Folk lore and fairytales across the centuries are full of wolves and women, or girls, in stories that blend themes of predation, shrewd evasion, disguise, abandon and seduction. Angela Carter responds to this rich stock of story in her various retellings of Red Riding Hood in The Bloody Chamber (1979): ‘The Werewolf’, and ‘Wolf-Alice’, ‘In the Company of Wolves’. In the last, the heroine deliberately chooses the attractions of the murderous wolf—notice the chilling final image:
‘sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.’
Finally, you might enjoy our newsletter featuring a riddle from the Exeter Book, and a bigger selection of Exeter riddles in Ten-Minute Book Club, LitHits’s sister project.
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