The Voice of Exile: Feminist Literary History and the Anonymous Anglo-Saxon

Elegy

Marilynn Desmond

Critical Inquiry, Vol. 16, No. 3. (Spring, 1990), pp. 572-590.

Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0093-1896%28199021%2916%3A3%3C572%3ATVOEFL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q

Critical Inquiry is currently published by The University of Chicago Press.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained
prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in
the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/journals/ucpress.html.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For
more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

http://www.jstor.org
Tue Mar 27 22:35:27 2007
The Voice of Exile: Feminist Literary History
and the Anonymous Anglo-Saxon Elegy

Marilynn Desmond

lndeed, 1 would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many

poems without signing them, was often a woman. lt was a woman
... who made the ballads and the folk-songs, crooning them to her
children, beguiling her spinning with them, or the length of the
winter's night.
This may be true or it may be false-who can say?
-VIRGINIA WooLF, A Room ofOne's Own (1928)

The voice that broke the silence of the forest was the voice of
Anon. Sorne one heard the song and remembered it for it was later
written down, beautifully, on parchment. Thus the singer had his
audience, but the audience was so little interested in his name that
he never thought to give it .... Anon is sometimes man; sometimes
woman. He is the common voice singing out of doors, He has no
house.
-VIRGINIA WooLF, "Anon" (1941)

For J.J. Wilson.

An earlier version of this paper was read at the 1986 meeting of the Modern
Language Association, in a section entitled "Feminist Approaches to Medieval Litera-
ture," chaired by Sylvia Tomasch. 1 wish to thank the Berg Collection at the New York
Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations, for permission to examine the
Virginia Woolf papers and Quentin Bell for permission to quote from unpublished manu-
scripts. 1 am grateful to a number of exacting and encouraging readers: Christine Conti,
Joseph Church, Suzette Henke, Gerald Kutcher, Laura Morland, and Patricia Speyser.
With this essay, 1 would like to acknowledge a long-standing debt to J. J. Wilson, founding
editor of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany.
Critica/ Inquiry 16 (Spring 1990)
© 1990 by Tbe University of Chicago. 0095-1896/90/ l 605-0004$01.00. AH rights reserved.

572
 Critical Inquiry Spring 1990 573

This first remark is taken from a text so central to current feminist

discourse that a battle currently rages over how to read it; the second
remark is taken from a posthumously printed text that ought to be
much more central to feminist discourse than it currently is. 1 Though
the suggestion that A non was a woman has been repeated often enough
to become a slogan, the theoretical implications of this assertion have
not been fully realized, especially for medieval literature-a literature
full of anonymous texts, in particular, anonymous lyrics voiced by
women, attested to in every medieval language, literature, and culture. 2
These frauenlieder pose a unique set of rhetorical and ideological possi-
bilities for the feminist reader. In spite of Virginia Woolf's demand that
we consider the possibility that Anon was a woman ("This may be true
or it may be false-who can say?"), feminist scholars have yet to reclaim
the corpus of anonymous poetry-medieval or modern-for the
history of female culture. For instance, Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar's Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English,
an attempt to develop a canon of English women writers, contains not a
word of unsigned writing. 3 But when feminists exclude anonymous

1. See Elaine Showalter' s critique of the androgynous vision of A Room of One's Own
in A Literature of Their Own: British Women N1JVelists from Bronte to Lessing (Princeton, N .J.,
1977), pp. 282-89. For a defense of Woolf's position, see Toril Moi, Sexual/ Textual Poli-
tics: Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York, 1985), pp. 1-8; hereafter abbrevi-
ated STP. For a description of Woolf's "Common History" book, see Brenda R. Silver's
excellent introduction to "' Anon' and 'The Reader': Virginia Woolf's Last Essays," Twen-
tieth Century Literature 25 (Fall/Winter 1979): 356-68; hereafter abbreviated "LE."
2. The existence of frauenlieder as a significant genre of medieval poetry was
proposed by Theodor Frings, Minnesinger und Troubadours, Deutsche Akademie der
Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Vortrage und Schriften, vol. 34 (Berlin, 1949). The scope of
this proposal was enlarged by Leo Spitzer, "The Mozarabic Lyric and Theodor Frings'
Theories," Comparative Literature 4 (Winter 1952): 1-22. Kemp Malone proposed that The
Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer be read in this context; see Malone, "Two English
Frauenlieder," Comparative Litera tu re 14 (Winter 1962): 106-17. Clifford Davidson
expands the early English frauenlieder to include the erotic "women's songs" of the
Cambridge Songs; see Davidson, "Erotic 'Women's Songs' in Anglo-Saxon England,"
Neophilologus 59 (July 1975): 451-62. For a collection of essays onfrauenlieder, see Vox
Feminae: Studies in Medieval Woman's Song, ed. John F. Plummer (Kalamazoo, Mich.,
1981).
3. See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by
Women: The Tradition in English (New York, 1985). This anthology is admirable in severa)
respects and will have a lasting impact on the currículum in American institutions of

Marilynn Desmond is an assistant professor of English, general

literature, and rhetoric at the State University of New York-Bing-
hamton. She is the author of Reading Dido: Textuality and Sexuality in the
Late Medieval Reception of Aeneid 4 (forthcoming); her current work is a
study of ekphrasis in late medieval literature.
574 Marilynn Desmond The Voice of Exile

poetry from the history of women's writing, they implicitly capitulate to

masculinist assumptions about literature, authority, and history. Stand-
ard literary history, moreover, explicitly appropriates anonymous
poetry to a masculine point of view.
Two Anglo-Saxon frauenlieder-The Wife's Lament and Wulf and
Eadwacer-illustrate the fate of the female-voiced anonymous lyric in
current literary histories. These two elegies belong to a corpus of medi-
eval vernacular poetry that is almost completely anonymous: Anglo-
Saxon poetry essentially constitutes a large unsigned collection of poetic
texts. The Anglo-Saxon elegy4-represented by a group of ten anony-
mous poems in The Exeter Book as well as two elegies embedded in the
narrative of Beowulj-is completely removed from the authority of
authorship. The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, as anonymous,
female-voiced lyrics, have occasionally disturbed the patriarchal sensi-
bili ties of modero scholars and editors, who have reacted with
appropriate phallic authority by emending the texts and producing
elaborate allegorical readings, thus silencing the female speakers of
these two poems and erasing women from Anglo-Saxon literary history.
These critics characteristically support such textual appropriations by
their assumptions, sometimes only implicitly expressed, that within the
structures of Anglo-Saxon culture women were essentially mute. 5 Such

higher education. Any anthology, however, by its very existence invites a critique of its
own principies of inclusion and exclusion. Though this article engages in a critique of The
Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, 1 am far from critica! of the enterprise as a whole.
The canon of women writers needs constant attention and assessment, especially in early
Iiteratures where women's writing is difficult to trace. For a consideration of sorne of the
problems inherent in selecting and presenting an anthology of women's literature, see the
special issue of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 5 (Fall 1986), devoted to the publication
of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, especially the review essays by Sandra A.
Zagarell and Lillian Robinson, pp. 273-84 and 289-301 in that issue. The two anony-
mous frauenlieder considered in this article, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, ha ve
occasionally been included in anthologies ofwomen's poetry, and scholars have occasion-
ally suggested female authorship for these two poems. For relevant bibliography, see
Susan Schibanoff, "Medieval Frauenlieder: Anonymous Was a Man?" Tulsa Studies in
Women's Literature l (Fall 1982): 189-200.
4. For a general discussion of the Anglo-Saxon elegy as a genre, see Anne L.
Klinck, "The Old English Elegy as a Genre," English Studies in Canada 10 (June 1984):
129-40. See also Matti Rissanen, "The Theme of 'Exile' in The Wife's Lament," Neuphilolo-
gische Mitteilungen 70 (Mar. 1969): 90-104.
5. The most recent editor-critics to propose emendations to change the gender of
the speaker in The Wije's Lament were Rudolph C. Bambas ("Another View of the Old
English Wife's Lament," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 62 [Apr. 1963]: 303-9)
and Martín Stevens ("The Narrator of The Wije's Lament," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 69
(Mar. 1968]: 72-90). Though these two proposals are based on different evidence, both
Bambas and Stevens argue that Anglo-Saxon culture would probably not foster or under-
stand female-voiced poetry. Bambas, for instance, introduces bis argument with the
assertion: "the only matters worth celebrating in verse are the affairs of heroic war
chiefs" (Bambas, "Another View of the Old English Wife's Lament," p. 303). Both propos-
 Critica[ Inquiry Spring 1990 575

proposals, though they never receive a consensus among scholars, illus-

trate the precarious position of the female-voiced medieval lyric,
whether English or Continental, within the ideological constructs of
"literary history." Essentially based on a masculine ideology that usually
presents itself as neutral, literary history has generally excluded, mini-
mized, or appropriated the roles of women in language-as subjects,
authors, voices, or characters. Consequently, literary historians tend to
write from the same position as other historians: the "perspective of the
authoritative male subject-the single, triumphant consciousness," as
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese characterizes "official" history. 6 Indeed, the
standard literary histories for the Anglo-Saxon period do little to
acknowledge the presence and tremendous importance of women in
Anglo-Saxon culture, as authors, characters, or voices. 7 Recently, such
traditional approaches ha ve been critiqued by a series of books and arti-
cles that emphasize the uniquely Anglo-Saxon construction of gender
and its representation in Anglo-Saxon literature. 8 In this process of re-
visioning Anglo-Saxon culture, feminist literary historians must not
orphan these two frauenlieder and leave them to be appropriated by the
canonical view of the Anglo-Saxon elegy.

als were effectively defeated by Angela M. Lucas in "The Narrator of The Wife's Lament
Reconsidered," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 70 Gune 1969): 282-97. However, a recent
scholar has attempted to generate support for the view of the speaker as a thane. Jerome
Mande! terms Bambas's proposals "credible and attractive," and finds in Stevens's argu-
ments comforting evidence that "it is not necessary to view the speaker as a woman"
(Mande!, Alternative Readings in Old English Poetry [New York, l 987], p. l 54). Though
Mandel's arguments do not merit comment, his approach illustrates the continua! attrac-
tion that the masculine speaker holds in the context of a masculinist critica! tradition.
The original editor of The Exeter Book, Benjamin Thorpe, suggested an emendation of
minre sylfre to minne sylses; having changed the gender of the speaker to a male, he titled
the poem "The Exile's Complaint" (Thorpe, Codex Exoniensis. A Collection of Anglo-Saxon
Poetry, from a Manuscript in the Library of the Dean and Chapter of Exeter [London, l 842], p.
441). This proposal was restated by L. L. Schücking in 1906 in "Das angelsachsische
Gedicht von der 'Klage der Frau,'" Zeitschrift fur deutsches Altertum und deutsche Litteratur
48 (l 906): 436-49.
Only one critic has claimed that the speaker of Wulf and Eadwacer is amale. Norman
E. Eliason presents what can only be a perverse and willful misreading of the poem in
order to make the speaker male. He asserts that "the poem is a private communication
addressed to a colleague, ruefully but playfully protesting about the mishandling of their
poetry" (Eliason, "On Wulf and Eadwacer," in Old English Studies in Honour ofjohn C. Pope,
ed. Robert B. Burlin and Edward B. Irving, Jr. [Toronto, l 974], p. 228). For proposals
that the speaker of the poem is a bitch ora wolf, see note 36.
6. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Placing Women's History in History," New Left Review
133 (May-June l 982): 29.
7. The standard Anglo-Saxon literary history for a generation has been Stanley B.
Greenfield, A Critica[ History of Old English Literature (New York, l 965); hereafter abbrevi-
ated CH. This text was recently revised as Greenfield and Daniel G. Calder, A New Critica[
History of Old English Literature (New York, l 986); hereafter abbreviated NCH.
8. A number of recent books attempt to place women in Anglo-Saxon history; in
the process, such books demonstrate how thoroughly women have been erased from the
576 Marilynn Desmond The Voice of Exile

The feminist approach, especially among Anglo-American critics,

depends on constructing reading strategies for any given text according
to the gender of the author. Once authored, the text is either resisted
or reclaimed: the feminist reader must situate herself outside the
patriarchal biases of the male-authored text (the feminist critique), and
she must recuperate the female-authored text from its marginal posi-
tion in the culture and the canon (gynocriticism). 9 The current feminist

standard literary histories. An irnportant contribution to this enterprise is Christine Fell,

Women in Anglo-Saxon England (Bloornington, lnd., 1984); hereafter abbreviated W. Fell's
treatrnent of early English rnonasticisrn illustrates the gaps and silences in the New Critica[
History. Michael Lapidge, the author of the first chapter of the New Critica[ Histor;· on the
Anglo-Latín background, ignores the participation of wornen in the "textual cornrnuni-
ties" of Anglo-Saxon rnonasticisrn. His description of Latín training and literacy ornits ali
rnention of wornen, and he represents the Latín rnonastery culture as an exclusive rnale
world (see NCH, esp. pp. 6-7). Fell suggests an altogether different picture; she states that
"frorn the time that Christianity carne to England rnen and wornen shared equally, not
only in conversion to the new faith, but in the learning that accornpanied it" (W, p. 109).
Other historians have noted the significance of fernale literacy in this period. For exarn-
ple, C. P. Worrnald suggests that "throughout rnuch of the period, wornen were often
better educated than rnen" (Worrnald, "The Uses of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England
and Its Neighbours," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, no. 27 [ 1977]:
98).
One exarnple of Lapidge's erasure of wornen frorn his description of rnonastic
history concerns Aldhelrn's De Virginitate. Lapidge acknowledges that Aldhelrn addressed
this text to Abbess Hildelith and the nuns at Barking Abbey, yet he <loes not rernark on
the fact that these nuns rnust have been able to cornprehend a Latín text characterized by
its "long, alrnost Joycean, sentences studded with obscure vocabulary, interlaced word
order, bíblica! símiles, and alliteration" (NCH, p. 11). Lapidge sirnply discusses the
"English readers" of this treatise without regard to gender. Fell notes the irnrnediate
influence Aldhelrn's treatise had on its fernale audience: "Eighth-century letter-writers,
such as the nun Leoba, show thernselves rnuch influenced by his style and vocabulary" (W,
p. 110). Lapidge rnentions only one Anglo-Latín wornan writer, Hygeburg, whose saint's
Iife Lapidge terrns "eccentric" (NCH, p. 14). He ornits any notice of the other wornen
writers of the period discussed by Fell: Eadburg, Bucge, JElflred, and Berhtgyó (W, pp.
111-14), in addition to Leoba. Fell's Women in Anglo-Saxon England, published two years
before the New Critica[ History, is listed in Greenfield and Calder's bibliography, yet seerns
to have had little irnpact on their "standard history."
Fell's study also rereads the corpus of vernacular literature to illustrate the signifi-
cance of wornen in Anglo-Saxon culture. Her survey of Anglo-Saxon literature is an
excellent antidote to the literary history presented in the New Critica[ History. One could
easily proceed through A New Critica[ History chapter by chapter to dernonstrate the ways
in which it consistently rninirnizes the irnportance of wornen in the world represented by
Anglo-Saxon literature. Two recent books irnplicitly critique this rnasculinist bias: Jane
Chance clairns that her study "supplernents the work of earlier schólars" in order to
represent the significance of the cornplex role wornen perforrn in the heroic world
depicted in Anglo-Saxon literature (Chance, Woman as Hero in Old English Literature
[Syracuse, N.Y., 1986], p. ix). Likewise, Helen Darnico, Beowulf's Wealhtheow and the Val-
kyrie Tradition (Madison, Wis., 1984) analyzes the background and irnplications of
Wealhtheow in Beowulf.
9. See Showalter, "Toward a Ferninist Poetics," in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays
on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Showalter (New York, 1985), pp. 125-43. ·
 Critical Inquiry Spring 1990 577

agenda (in North America at least) tends to privilege reclamation, since

it provides access to women's experience and history. French feminism,
concerned as it is with écriture féminine and féminité, addresses itself a
little less directly to the gender of the author, since male writers such as
Jamesjoyce, Stéphane Mallarmé,Jean Genet, and Antonin Artaud may
use language as women do, to construct "texts against the rules and
regularities of conventional language." 1º Yet these constructs ulti-
mately return to the gender of the author, as Catharine Stimpson
emphasizes: "A mate writer may speak of, for, to, and from the femi-
nine. He cannot speak, except fictively, of, for, to, and from the
female." 11 Resistant and skeptical though it may be to the concept of
authorship, feminist scholarship generally remains bound to the histori-
cal identity and gender of the author.
Despite its vitality and variety, and the number of fine essays by
feminists on medieval literature, contemporary feminist theory has yet
to fully address the particularity of medieval literature. Feminist liter-
ary theory is largely grounded in a study of modern literature-a
literature in which the modes of production, circulation, and reception
mark it as an altogether different enterprise from the historically
recoverable aspects of medieval texts and audiences. The anonymity of
so much medieval literature illustrates just one example of these differ-
ences: the anonymous medieval lyric comes to the modern reader
unauthored. Such poetry presents a unique set of textual possibilities
within the constructs of literary history: as "fatherless" texts these lyrics
require no "serious act of insubordination" in order to be adapted to a
feminist perspective. 12 For the feminist reader, medieval frauenlieder
provide the opportunity to short-circuit issues of historical gender and
focus instead on the gender of the text.
In order to recuperate these two representatives of medieval
frauenlieder, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, a feminist poetics
must acknowledge the medieval altitudes toward authority and author-
ship that allow the medievalist to privilege the voice of the text over the

10. Ann Rosalindjones, "Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l'Écriture

jéminine," in The New Feminist Criticism, p. 363. For further discussion ofFrench feminism,
see also Jones, "lnscribing Femininity: French Theories of the Feminine," in Making a
Dijference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn (London and
New York, 1985), pp. 80-112; Elaine Marks, "Women and Literature in France," Signs:
Journal ofWomen in Culture and Society 3 (Summer 1978): 832-42; New French Feminisms:
An Anthology, ed. Marks and lsabelle de Courtivron (Amherst, Mass., 1980); and STP, pp.
89-173.
11. Catharine R. Stimpson, "Ad/d Feminam: Women, Literature, and Society," in
Literature and Society, ed. Edward W. Said (Baltimore, 1980), p. 179.
12. Nelly Furman, "The Politics of Language: Beyond the Gender Principie?" in
Making a Dijference, p. 71. Furman also comments: "for the textual reader, ... the ques-
tion is not whether a literary work has been written by a woman and reflects her experi-
ences of Iife, or how it compares to other works by women, but rather how it lends itself
to be read from a feminist position" (Furman, "The Politics of Language," p. 69).
578 Marilynn Desmond The Voice of Exile

historical author or implied author. The modero concept of author-

ship, derived from a modero concept of the text as private property,
valorizes the signature of the author and the author's presumed control
over and legal responsibility for his or her text. With reference to
modero literature, contemporary theory has interrogated this "author-
function" quite aggressively in an attempt to pry the text away from the
author and to valorize the functions of the reader, as Roland Barthes's
"Death of the Author" illustrates, 15 or to reconsider the privileges of
the subject, in order to "seize its functions, its intervention in discourse,
and its system of dependencies," as Michel Foucault's essay "What Is an
Author?" proposes. 14 Foucault's proposals conceroing the place of the
subject and the author-function directly challenge modero assumptions
about the text as the property of an author: "We can easily imagine a
culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an
author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and regard-
less of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive
anonymity. "15
Yet a f eminist literary history need not rely on the theoretical
constructs of such contemporary theorists as Barthes or Foucault in
order to construct a strategy for narrating literary history that incorpo-
rates alfthe possibilities of anonymity. Nearly five decades ago, Woolf,
now recognized asan important architect of modero feminist theory,
spent the last months of her life writing what she called a "Common
History" book, an attempt like the contemporary efforts of Erich
Auerbach or Erost Robert Curtius to create a history of letters in intel-
lectual defiance of what appeared to be the certain doom of European
culture. 16 That her suicide left her "Common History" book unfinished
has meant that the completed sections, a first chapter entitled "Anon"
and part of a second chapter, remained unprinted for four decades;
consequently, her envisioned work on literary history has not been able

13. See Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," Image, Music, Text, trans.
Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), pp. 142-48.
14. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:
Selected Essays and Interoiews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Bouchard
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), p. 137.
15. Ibid., p. 138. Indeed, Foucault does press bis argument to the limits of its impli-
cations for the subject, and he ends bis essay with a question that challenges the voice of a
text as well as its author: • 'What matter who's speaking?'" (Foucault, "What Is an
Author?" p. 138). Nancy K. Miller engages directly in the implications of this position for
feminist theory. She states: "What matter who's speaking? I would answer it matters, for
example, to women who have lost and still routinely lose their proper name in marriage,
and whose signature-not merely their voice-has not been worth the paper it was writ-
ten on" (Miller, "The Text's Heroine: A Feminist Critic and Her Fictions," Diacritics 12
[Summer 1982]: 53).
16. As Silver comments: "By February 1941, while Woolfwas finishing revisions of
her novel [Between the Acts] in the midst of an increasing threat of invasion, the fight
 Critical lnquiry Spring 1990 579

to take its place beside the monumental texts Mimesis and European
Literature and the Latin Middle Ages that testify to the impulse of her age
to preserve cultural identity through the act of writing literary history
in the face of fascism. Asan English female writer, Woolf sought her
identity in a different territory altogether than that of Continental
intellectuals such as Curtius and Auerbach. The existing text of the
"Common History" book is a subversive, potentially revisionist literary
history. In the chapter entitled "Anon," Woolf meditates impressionis-
tically on the implications of anonymity in the literary production of
early English literature. Though acquainted only with post-Conquest
poetry, 17 Woolf aptly characterizes the pervasive "voice of Anon" in
medieval poetry: "Y et during the silent centuries before the book was
printed his was the only voice that was to be heard in England. Save for
Anon singing his song at the back <loor the English might be a dumb
race, a race of merchants, soldiers, priests; who left behind them stone
houses, cultivated fields and great churches, but no words" ("LE,"
p. 383).
In Woolf's vision of history, the printing press introduced the
brand of patriarchal authority responsible for modern literature and
modern history: "Caxtons printing press foretold the end of that anony-
mous world; It is now written down; fixed; nothing will be added; even

against oblivion had entwined itself with the progress of her 'Common history book'"
("LE," pp. 358-59). Silver quotes from an early draft of "Anon": "'Only when we put two
and two together ... two pencil strokes, two written words, two bricks do we overcome
dissolution and set up sorne stake against oblivion'" ("LE," p. 358). Compare this to Ernst
Robert Curtius's statement of purpose: "When the German catastrophe carne, 1 decided
to serve the idea of a medievalistic Humanism by studying the Latin literature of the
Middle Ages" (Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R.
Trask [New York, 1953), p. viii); and Erich Auerbach's "Epilogue": "l may also mention
that the book was written during the war and at Istanbul, where the libraries are not well
equipped for European studies .... 1 hope that my study will reach its readers-both my
friends of former years, if they are still alive, as well as ali the others for whom it was
intended. And may it contribute to bringing together again those whose !ove for our
western history has serenely persevered" (Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality
in Western Literature, trans. Trask [Princeton, N.J., 1953), p. 557). Earlier, in Three
Guineas (1938), Woolf considers the painful contradictions faced by the "daughters of
educated men" when called on to help preserve a culture that has essentially excluded
them. In "Anon," Woolf visibly attempts to negotiate sorne of the complex and difficult
issues concerning gender and culture so powerfully articulated in Three Guineas.
17. As Silver notes, Woolf's source for text and commentary on medieval poetry
was E. K. Chambers and F. Sidgwick, Early English Lyrics: Amorous, Divine, Moral and Triv-
ial (London, 1907) ("LE," p. 402). This anthology contains no examples of Anglo-Saxon
poetry. Chambers and Sidgwick's brief commentary on Anglo-Saxon poetry does not
mention The Wife's Lament or Wulf and Eadwacer, but it does propose that there is a tradi-
tion of folk poetry sung by women (Chambers and Sidgwick, Early English Lyrics, pp. 272-
73, 261), which may have directed Woolf's thinking in terms of gender and anonymity.
 580 Marilynn Desmond The Voice of Exile

if the legend still murmers on" ("LE," p. 385). In an early draft of this
essay, Woolf dramatically portrays the intrusion of the press:

Anon died round about 1477. It was the printed book with the
author's name attached that killed him. After that the audience
was separate from the singer. And with ftim Anon died that part of
the song that the audience sang, the voice that supplied the story,
filled in the pauses, and added sometimes a nonsensical chorus.
After that the song was attached to the singer. The singer was
separate from the audience. Anon is Geoffrey, or John or Peter.
He lives in a house, has features of his own and behind him looks
back at the past. 18

Woolf envisions an anonymous poetic world that included the participa-

tion of both men and women ("Anon is sometimes man; sometimes
woman") while the literature of a print culture ostensibly authorizes
male poets: Geoffrey, John, or Peter. Compared to Woolf's earlier
comments on anonymity and gender in A Room of One's Own ("I would
venture to guess that Anon ... was often a woman"), her meditation on
gender and anonymity in "Anon" would appear less explicit or polemic.
Nonetheless, throughout various drafts of "Anon," Woolf visibly ques-
tions modero assumptions about anonymity, authorship, and authority.
In her narrative history of early English poetry, the voice of the name-
less singer belonged to both women and men. Even her concession to
the conventional representation of a person of unknown gender by the
masculine pronoun "he," a practice in place in early drafts of "Anon,"
was not made without resistance. One of the earliest, handwritten
drafts of "Anon" records her attempt to use "he or she" as dual refer-
ents for the nameless, androgynous singer; however, both pronouns are
crossed out. Yet a few lines later, Woolf wrote "He She had an audi-
ence. But no name." 19 Although she eventually chose not to defy the
conventional use of the masculine pronoun to represent both genders,
the early drafts of "Anon" show Woolf's struggle to find a language
with which to challenge literary history as the authorized history of the
male subject.
Woolf's brief essay "Anon" anticipates contemporary theoretical
concern with authority and authorship, and thereby provides feminist

18. I have taken this version from the earlier drafts of "Anon" in the Berg Collec-
tion, New York Public Library, titled [Anon.]. Typescript fragment, unsigned, dated 24
Nov. 1940 (with the author's ms. correction), folder #9, p. 3, quoted with permission.
Silver quotes a later, rearranged version of these lines ("LE," p. 403).
19. "Anon." [holograph fragment], Berg Collection, New York Public Library.
Unsigned, dated 24 Nov. 1940, folder #l, p. 2. Earlier on the same page she makes a
similar attempt-"but he 01 shc has" (quoted with permission). On the issue of grammati-
cal gender, see Monique Wittig, "The Mark of Gender," in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Miller
(New York, 1986), pp. 63-73.
 Critica[ Inquiry Spring 1990 581

literary historians with a methodology for challenging the patriarchial

implications of "authorship." By going beyond her earlier revisionist
suggestion that "Anon ... was often a woman," Woolf challenges the
authority of modero concepts of authorship: "Anonymity was a great
possession .... It allowed us to know nothing of the writer" ("LE," p.
397). Indeed, in the early drafts of "Anon," which document her
discomfort with the conventional use of the masculine pronoun to
represent a person of unknown gender, W oolf explicitly challenges the
accepted notion that masculine authority is inherent in anonymous
authorship. Though subsequent drafts attest to her self-censorship on
this point, her final formulations nonetheless suggest that anonymous
poetry should not be read in the context of modero notions of author-
ship. In order to exploit the opportunity offered by anonymous poetry,
the feminist literary historian need only read the anonymous medieval
Jrauenlieder in the context of medieval attitudes toward authorship.
Once freed from the modero concept of authorship, the anonymous,
female-voiced medieval lyric will occupy a central position in a feminist
vision of literary history. The Anglo-Saxon elegy, as a group of anony-
mous texts including The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, invites
such historical re-visioning.
Authoritative authorship in the Middle Ages is largely the product
of the Latín tradition; the medieval concept of the auctores, enshrined
as it is by the commentary tradition, testifies to the tremendous author-
ity accorded to Latín texts and classical authors. 20 The corpus of Anglo-
Latin literature is predominantly a "signed" corpus, including the
signatures of a significant number of women who wrote in the standard
genres of Latín prose, such as letters and saints' lives. The vernacular
prose tradition in early medieval England, a manuscript tradition fed by
a healthy monastery culture, reflects essentially the same assumptions
about tradition and authority as <loes the Latín tradition. But the secu-
lar, vernacular poetry of early medieval England contrasts markedly
with the authoritative tradition of the monastery and the commentary.
The Anglo-Saxon poetry preserved in manuscripts represents a perfor-
mative, rhetorical poetics that brackets the authority of the poet's
signature (in ali but the instance of Cynewulf) and emphasizes the pres-
ence of the nameless scop who assumes responsibility for the poetic text.
The unnamed scop who performs in Beowulf, for instance, linguistically
reconstructs Beowulf's battle with Grendel the morning after the
monster has been defeated:

Hwilum cyninges pegn,

guma gilphlreden, gidda gemyndig,

20. On the medieval construct of authorship, see A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of

Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1984), and Gerald
 582 Marilynn Desmond The Voice of Exile

se 0e ealfela ealdgesegena
worn gemunde, word o}>er fand
s<>Oe gebunden; secg eft ongan
siCI Beowulfes snyttrum stynan,
ond on sped wrecan spel gerade,
wordum wrixlan.
[ll. 867b-74a]
[At times the King's thane, a poetry-knowing man, mindful of
songs, he who bore in his mind many old traditions, found other
words, truly joined: this man undertook, afterwards, to recite skill~
fully the expedition of Beowulf, to utter successfully an apt story,
to weave his words. ]21

Beowulf's story will circulate with the sort of anonymity that privileges
the performative skills of the scop and his rhetorical presence as witness
to the event behind the story. The only Anglo-Saxon poet who "signed"
his poetic productions was Cynewulf, whose runic signatures dramati-
cally represent the poet as a Christian in need of prayers. Cynewulf
<loes not represent himself as an "author" in the modern sense of the
concept; rather, his "signature" directs his audience toward a contem-
plation of God as authority, to whom ali Christians-poets and
audience alike-must appeal. Likewise, Caedmon's name survives not
as a signature presented by a poet, but as a character in Bede's narra-
tive. Indeed, Bede's description of Caedmon's poetic production
presents the scop asan inspired instrument of divine authority. 22
Widsith and Deor, the "names" of two scopas in The Exeter Book
elegies, illustrate the rhetoricity of the Anglo-Saxon elegy. The names
"Widsith" [the Far-Traveler] and "Deor" [Beast/Dear/Bold] are not
signatures of the poet or the performer but labels for the particular
function of the poetic voice in each poem. "WidsiCl maClolade" ["The
Far-Traveler spoke"] introduces a fictitious catalogue of the speaker's
travels over the course of severa) centuries. The name "Deor," claimed
by the speaker of Deor with the words "Me wres Deor noma," denotes
the speaker's function as a court poet, a function the speaker describes:

Bruns, "The Originality of Texts in a Manuscript Culture," Comparative Literature 32

(Spring 1980): 113-29.
21. Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. Fr. Klaeber, 3d ed. (Boston, 1950), p. 33.
Ali translations from the Anglo-Saxon are my own.
22. Cynewulf's name, represented in runes, appears in the concluding Iines of
juliana, Elene, Christ //, and Fates of the Apostles. This signature does not provide a histori-
cal or biographical identity for the author; instead, the signature represents the poet in
rather conventional terms. See Calder, Cynewulj(Boston, 1981), pp. 12-18. For a detailed
exploration of the relationship between the poet's presence and the runic signatures, see
Dolores Warwick Frese, "The Art of Cynewulf's Runic Signatures," in Anglo-Saxon Poetry:
Essays in Appreciationfor John C. McGalliard, ed. Lewis E. Nicholson and Frese (Notre
Dame, Ind., 1975), pp. 312-34. Frese concludes by suggesting that "we must entertain
 Critica[ Inquiry Spring 1990 583

l>ret ic bi me sylfum secgan wille,

pret ic hwile wres Heodeninga scop,
dryhtne dyre. Me wres Deor noma.
[11. 35a-37b]
[I will say this about myself, that for awhile 1 was a scop to the
Heodeningas, dear to my lord. My name was Deor (Beast/Dear/
Bold).] 25

The "names" of these two scopas thus characterize the thematic focus
and social purpose of their poems: both "Widsith" and "Deor" exem-
plify an author-function that is oral and performative. The name of the
scop is a rhetorical aspect of the text rather than a historical signature;
as such, the name itself represents the legendary status of a scop as a
recorder and transmitter of tribal and historical tales. Thus the Anglo-
Saxon elegy is the product of a vernacular culture that privileged the
performative qualities of the text-its rhetoricity. Compared to
modern culture, which valorizes the creative genius of the author of the
text (which has enormous implications in a patriarchy), medieval
vernacular culture valorizes the performance of the text, which
perhaps accounts, at least partially, for the pervasive anonymity and
sparse manuscript history of Anglo-Saxon poetry.
The anonymity of the Anglo-Saxon elegy thus emphasizes the
voice represented by the text as an index to the possibilities for produc-
tion and recuperation of poetic meaning. Whereas the gender of the
author becomes insignificant in such a context, the gender of the
speaker becomes all-important. The grammar and narrative context of
both The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer record female voices. 24

the further, and surprising, possibility that perhaps these signature portions alone are ali
that is authentically 'Cynewulfian' in the signed poem" (Frese, "The Art of Cynewulf's
Runic Signatures," p. 333). This bold suggestion might make Anglo-Saxon poetry even
more anonymous!
Caedmon's name is preserved in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
Bede refers to Caedmon by name only when he quotes the direct address of the messen-
ger who appears to him in his sleep. The messenger says: "Caedmon, sing me something"
["Caedmon," inquit, "canta mihi aliquid"], thereby providing modern editors and readers
with a title andan author for an otherwise anonymous poem. See Bede's Ecclesiastical
History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969),
pp. 416, 417.
23. Deor, The Exeter Book, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie
(New York, 1936). For the range of possible meanings of Deor, see An Anglo-Saxon Diction-
ary, ed.Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller (Oxford, 1964), s.v. "Deor." As Eliason
notes, "Deor, like Widsith, is a name which the poet presumably coined, in this instance
rather wittily, 1 suggest, deriving it from the adjective deore (used in the same line, where
it appears, however, in its later West-Saxon guise as dyre) and thus calling attention to his
former, more fortunate lot" (Eliason, "Two Old English Scop Poems," PMLA 81 Uune
1966]: 191 n. 34).
24. The opening lines of The Wife's Lament ("le pis giedd wrece bi me ful
584 Marilynn Desmond The Voice of Exile

We must place these two speakers in a historical context: these two

poems must be read as texts that encode a female voice within a patriar-
chy, particularly the Anglo-Saxon patriarchy, a Germanic culture
notable, like other Northern cultures, for the autonomy, responsibility,
and legal protection available to women. The Anglo-Saxon woman, like
the women in Germanic society that moved Tacitus to comment, 25 was
demonstrably much freer than her post-Conquest counterpart. Anglo-
Saxon social structures encouraged women to occupy significant
positions within the hierarchical structures of the culture. The married
couple, like the comitatus, formed an important unit within the cultural
design. Since every member of Anglo-Saxon culture was measured by
his or her social bonds within the kinship networks of the community, a
woman's marriage clearly defined her relationship to the community.
Aristocratic Anglo-Saxon women could hold and bequeath property;
the most suggestive example of this right is the morgengifu, a financia}
payment made by the husband to the wife at the time of their marriage.
Christine Fell describes the morgengifu: "This could be a very substan-
tial amount in money and land, and it is paid not to the father or kin,
but to the woman herself. She then has personal control over it, to give
away, to sell or bequeath as she chooses" (W, pp. 56-57). 26 Women
could also hold land and property in addition to the morgengifu, a right
protected by laws and attested to by Anglo-Saxon wills. 27
In addition, surviving documents suggest that widows in particular
received a marked degree of legal protection; consequently, during this
period, "the most favored women in England were not wives or unmar-
ried daughters, but widows." 28 However, unmarried women as well as
widows appear to have enjoyed sorne freedom, and possibly even

geomorre, / minre sylfre sia") contain two feminine adjectives (geomorre, minre) anda
feminine pronoun (sylfre). The speaker in Wulf and Eadwacer refers to two men, Wulf and
Eadwacer, by name, thus creating a narrative context that directly implies a female
speaker. In addition, the adjectives reotugu (1. 10) and seoce (l. 14) denote a female
speaker.
25. Tacitus reports that the advice (consilia) and opinion (responsa) of Germanic
women is accorded respect (Tacitus, Germania, ed. T. E. Page [Cambridge, 1958], ch. 8).
He describes the assumptions behind the Germanic marriage in chapter 18, where he
characterizes the marriage ceremony as a ritual that emphasizes the participation of the
wife in the marriage: "she is thus warned by the very rites with which her marriage begins
that she comes to share hard work and peril, that her fate will be the same as his in peace
and panic, her risks the same" (Tacitus, Germanía, pp. 289-91 ).
26. Much of my general assessment of the position of women in the Anglo-Saxon
period is indebted to Fell's research.
27. See Marc A. Meyer, "Land Charters and the Legal Position of Anglo-Saxon
Women," in The Women of England Jrom Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present: Interpretive Biblio-
graphical Essays, ed. Barbara Kanner (Hamden, Conn., 1979), pp. 57-82, and Klinck,
• Anglo-Saxon Women and the Law," Journal ofMedieval History 8 Qune 1982): 107-21.
28. Theodore John Rivers, "Widows' Rights in Anglo-Saxon Law," American jour-
nal ofLegal History 19 (1975): 208.
 Critica[ Inquiry Spring 1990 585

control, in the negotiation of a marriage contract, and at least in Kent

in the seventh century, a married woman could legally divorce her
husband. 29 Overall, the aristocratic Anglo-Saxon woman, as defined by
her legal and economic status, seems to have enjoyed a significant
degree of autonomy, though she never at any time achieved complete
equality with men. so Within the domestic world of the manor and the
estate, the Anglo-Saxon noblewoman had substantial responsibilities,
and thus power. Nevertheless, the dominant ideology of the Germanic
culture was martial and masculine, as the heroic comitatus vividly repre-
sents. To the degree that her marriage provided her with a measurable
amount of financial and legal protection within the domestic institu-
tions of her culture, the Anglo-Saxon woman of noble birth was, like
any retainer, a participating member of the social hierarchy. But her
gender essentially excluded her from occupying equally with men the
central positions of power within the heroic world of the comitatus. As a
subordinate member of her society, the Anglo-Saxon woman, of any
rank, was constructed as "other." Both aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture
account for the particular characteristics of the voices in these two
poems: the social organization that allowed an aristocratic woman a
fairly generous range of legal rights and protection, and the clarity with
which her participation within her culture was circumscribed.
The Anglo-Saxon elegy as a genre provides a language of exile
most appropriate to the gender of these two female speakers. The
rhetorical structure of the elegy allows the exile to describe his or her
position in language that denotes his or her identity in the social frame-
work of Anglo-Saxon culture. The ten elegies in The Exeter Book share
several features: the speaker usually describes a past irrevocably gone, a
past in which the speaker occupied a meaningful position within the
social framework of the community. The speakers of The Wanderer and
The Seafarer, for instance, are lordless thanes who represent their exile
in terms of the empty hall and the absent ring-giver. The female speak-
ers of The Wife' s Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer represent their exile by
defining their situation within their marriages. But the speakers in
these two poems also exploit the full resonance of the cultural "exile" of
the female speaker in Anglo-Saxon society. Asan exile from the center
of power and the central sources of identity in her culture, each speaker

29. On the degree to which women could control their destinies by exercising
autonomy in the choice of a husband, see W, pp. 57, 74-88; Klinck, "Anglo-Saxon
Women and the Law," pp. 113-14; Lorraine Lancaster, "Kinship in Anglo-Saxon Soci-
ety, l," Britishjournal of Sociology 9 (1958): 230-50, and Lancaster, "Kinship in Anglo-
Saxon Society, II," Britishjournal of Sociology 9 (1958): 359-77; Rosalind Hill, "Marriage
in Seventh-Century England," in Saints, Scholars and Heroes: Studies in Medieval Culture in
HonoroJCharles W.Jones, ed. Margot H. King and Wesley M. Stevens (Ann Arbor, Mich.,
1979), pp. 68-75; and Damico, Beowulf's Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition, p. 192 n.
20.
30. See especially Klinck, "Anglo-Saxon Women and the Law," p. 118.
586 Marilynn Desmond The Voice of Exile

describes her geographical isolation and emotional deprivation in terms

that effectively express her "otherness."
The speaker of The Wife's Lament defines herself and describes her
suffering by naming her husband; she refers to him by terms that have
a specific set of legal and social connotations in the Anglo-Saxon world:
hlaford [lord], leodfruma [chieftain], wine [friendly lord],frea [lord of a
people], andfreond [friend]. None of these terms specifically denotes a
husband, and most are only seldom used to refer to a man's position in
his marriage. 31 Rather, these terms are used most frequently to refer to
a man's position within the martial or political spheres of heroic society.
The wife uses these terms to represent her position as retainer to her
husband/lord. Such language expresses the subordinate position of a
married woman in the intimate, domestic, public, and social context of
her world. In addition, the speaker of The Wife's Lament describes her
geographic and emotional separation from her husband. She repre-
sents her position in a language that articulates her current state-that
of exile-in terms of her emotional and social deprivation and vulnera-
bility, due to the absence of her spouse. She has no faithful friends
(holdra freonda, WL, l. l 7a), since her separation from her husband
removes her from the kinship network that should provide protection
for her. The poem is filled with expressions of longing-longing for
her spouse and longing to be reintegrated into the social framework of
her world. Her exile is effectively described by her lonely dwelling in
the earth-hall (eor sele, WL, l. 29a), a representation of her exile from
the great hall of banquets and boasts so central to the Anglo-Saxon
culture and poetic imagination. Likewise, she contrasts her situation as
a woman alone at dawn to the comfort enjoyed by lovers lying in their
beds:

Frynd sind on eorpan,

leofe lifgende, leger weardiao,
ponne ic on uhtan ana gonge
under actreo geond pas eoroscrafu.
[WL, 11. 33b-36b]
[There are friends on earth, lovers living, keeping their bed, while
I go alone at daybreak, under the oak tree through these earth
caverns.]

31. Hlaford strictly rneans "lord" in its social irnplications (The Wife's Lament, The
Exeter Book, 11. 6, 15; hereafter abbreviated WL). As R. F. Leslie notes, "hlaford . .. is the
technical terrn for the relationship in which a noblernan stands to his retainers, and in
the Anglo-Saxon Laws the status of a wife is similar to that of a retainer" (Leslie,
"Introduction," in Three Old English Elegies: The Wife's Lament, The Husband's Message, The
Ruin, ed. Leslie [Manchester, 1961], p. 5). Leodfruma has the political irnplications
expressed by Bosworth and Toller: "A prince, chieftain, king" (An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary,
 Critica/ Inquiry Spring 1990 587

In voicing the poem, she seeks consolation in language; as comfort, she

attempts, like other exiles, to construct a linguistic representation of
the world from which she has been exiled. Yet her language defines her
as a subordinate if not marginal member of her culture, a cultural exile
whose very expressions define the cultural reality of her marginality
and her otherness.
The female speaker of Wulf and Eadwacer is likewise defined by her
marriage. Her social identity, though, is made problematic by her
geographical and emotional separation from her lover, Wulf: "Wulf is
on iege, ic on o erre" ["Wulf is on an island, 1 on another"],5 2 and the
suffocating closeness of her marriage to Eadwacer:

}:>onne mee se beaducafa bogum bilegde,

wres me wyn to pon, wres me hwre}:>re eac lao.
[WE, 11. lla-12b]
[When the battle-ready one embraced me in his arms, to a degree,
that was a pleasure to me, yet it was also hateful to me.]

Her desire for Wulf, a desire not sanctioned by the social or legal struc-
tures of her culture, makes her an exile, an exile from herself as much
as from her community and marriage. She characterizes herself as
emotionally dependent on the outlawed Wulf, who in his absence
dominates her consciousness in much the same way as the absent
husband inhabits the language of the wife in The Wife's Lament:

Wulf, min Wulf, wena me }:>ine

seoce gedydon, }:>ine seldcymas,
murnende mod, nales meteliste.
[WE, 11. 13a-15b]
[Wulf, my Wulf, hopes of you, your seldom comings, have made
me sick, mournful in mind, not lack of food.]

The elegy concludes with the speaker's expression of the inadequacy of

her language and her consciousness to represent and thus preserve her
illegitimate desire: "l>ret mon ea}:>e tosliteo }:>rette nrefre gesomnad wres, /

s.v. "Leodfruma"). Frea typically, in its secular sense, designates a man who holds a
specific position as lord of a people; wine likewise denotes lord or friendly lord (see W, p.
68). For a fuller discussion of these terms in this poem, see my article, "The Wife's Lament
and the Discourse of Gender," in Feminist Approaches to Medieval Literature, ed. Sylvia
Tomasch (forthcoming). See also Chance, Woman as Hero in Old English Literature, p. 91,
and A. N. Doane, "Heathen Form and Christian Function in 'The Wife's Lament '"
Mediaeval Studies 28 (1966): 77-91. '
32. Wulf and Eadwacer, The Exeter Book, 1. 4a-b; hereafter abbreviated WE.
588 Marilynn Desmond The Voice of Exile

uncer giedd geador" ["One easily tears asunder that which was never
joined, our song together"] (WE, 11. I 8a- I 9a).
The rhetoricity and anonymity of Anglo-Saxon poetry ascribe
significant cultural authority to the voice of these two elegies. Scholars
continually remark on the rhetorical power and lack of consoling vision
in The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer. As Greenfield comments
on The Wife's Lament: "Of all the Exeter Book elegies, The Wife's Lament
is the most devoid of consolatory hope" (CH, p. 226; NCH,
p. 294). The exiled speakers of the other elegies characteristically find
in the language of exile a mixture of memory and desire that allows for
an expression of hope, however ephemeral or abstract. Thus the
Seafarer consoles himself with thoughts of praise and glory, and the
Wanderer sees himself as an integral part of a transitory world, the
consolation for which is faith in God. The female exile expresses no
philosophical basis for hope: hers is an exile so pervasive, an exile so
thoroughly inscribed in her language and in her culture, that her
elegiac vision cannot include expressions of consolation.
The secondary literature on these two poems attests to the elusive
yet compelling quality of these two female voices; The Wife's Lament and
Wulf and Eadwacer have proven to be the two most perplexing and diffi-
cult elegies in The Exeter Book. Critics have long sought for, and have
failed to achieve, sorne sort of authoritative closure for these two
elegies. Both poems are full of confusing, even troubling, allusions, and
both lack a recognizable narrative or logical framework. Scholars have
unsuccessfully sought a legendary narrative to provide the context of a
well-known story in which to read these two poems. 33 They ha ve

33. At the turn of the century, for instance, Rudolf Imelmann proposed that The
Wife's Lamen/ and Wulf and Eadwacer, along with severa! other elegies, be read as part of
an "Odoaker Cycle" (Imelmann, Die altenglische Odoaker-Dichtung [Berlín, 1907)). William
Witherle Lawrence argued that Wulf and Eadwacer was adapted from Old Norse (Law-
rence, "The First Riddle of Cynewulf," PMLA l 7 [ 1902]: 247-61). William Henry
Schofield attempted to read Wulf and Eadwacer within the narrative context of the
Volsunga Saga (Schofield, "Signy's Lament," PMLA l 7 [1902]: 262-95). A. C. Bouman
read the poemas a complaint voiced by Beadohild in Volume's Legend, as told in
VQlundarkvioa (Bouman, "Leodum is minum: Beadohild's Complaint," Neophilologus 3 3
[ 1949]: l 03-13). For other discussions of a narrative context for Wulf and Eadwacer, see
P. J. Frankis, "Deor and Wulf and Eadwacer," Medium ..Evum 31 (1962): 161-75, and Ruth
P.M. Lehmann, "The Metrics and Structure of Wulf and Eadwacer," Philological Quarterly
48 (Apr. 1969): 151-65.
The proposed narrative contexts for The Wife's Lament include the Offa cycle (Edith
Rickert, "The Old English Offa Saga, 11," Modern Philology 2 Uan. 1905 ]: 321-76, esp. pp.
368-76, and Lawrence, "The Banished Wife's Lament," Modern Philology 5 Uan. 1908]:
387-405); a well-known Scandinavian version of the Constance saga (Robert P. Fitzger-
ald, "The Wife's Lament and the 'Search for the Lost Husband,' "journal of English and
Germanic Philology 62 [Oct. 1963]: 769-77); andan epic about Sigeweard (Bouman,
Patterns in Old English and Old lcelandic Literature [Leiden, 1962)).
 Critical Inquiry Spring 1990 589

proposed that Wulf and Eadwacer be read as a riddle, 54 a charm against

warts, 55 or even as a poem about dogs or wolves. 56 The allegorists have
been attracted to The Wife's Lament: they have read the poemas a curse
made by a cast-off heathen minor deity, 57 oras an expression ofyearo-
ing for the reestablishment of the union between Christ and the
church. 58 Such readings not only display the ingenuity of modero critics
but also demonstrate their desperate need to achieve closure in the act
of reading these two haunting, troubling poems. Feminist theory
provides several models for activating the possibilities of these two
poems as women's language once we have reclaimed the speakers. The
modero reader might read these poems for their anthropological
potential to represent female experience within a cultural context, in
Elaine Showalter's terms. 59 One such feminist reading of Wulf and
Eadwacer has been proposed by Dolores Frese. 40 Or we might wish to
investigate the "revolutionary" potential in the language of these two
poems, to consider the possibility that the "abrupt shifts, ellipses, breaks
and apparent lack of logical construction" represent "a kind of writing
in which the rhythms of the body and the unconscious have managed to
break through the strict rational defences of conventional social
meaning" (STP, p. 11).
It is essential that we listen to these gendered voices, for the anony-
mous nature of these two poems does not muffle or mute their
rhetorical power. These are not the voices cloaked in anonymity that
Lawrence Lipking attempts to appropriate: "Anon was a woman, as
scholars have lately been reminding us, and much of the best literature
by women has come down to us draped in a veil. ... A woman's poetics

34. For twentieth-century interpretations of Wulf and Eadwacer as a riddle, see

Frederick Tupper, "The Cynewulfian Runes of the First Riddle," Modl'rn Language Notl's
25 (Dec. 1910): 235-41, and H. Patzig, "Zum ersten Ratsel des Exeterbuchs," Archiv: Für
das Studium Der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 145 ( 1923): 204-7. Tupper answers the
riddle as "Cynewulf," Patzig as "millstone."
35. Donald K. Fry, "Wulf and Eadwacer: A Wen Charm," Chaucer Review 5 (Spring
1971): 247-63.
36. W. J. Sedgefield suggests that the poem is voiced by "a female dog of aroman-
tic temperament" (Sedgefield, "Wulf and Eadwacer, • Modern Language Review 26 Uan.
1931 ]: 7 4). This approach has recently been resuscitated by Peter Orton, who proposes
that ¡he poem is literally about wolves (Orton, "An Approach to Wulf and Eadwacer,"
Proceedings of the Royal lrish Academy [ 1985 ]: 223-58).
37. See Doane, "Heathen Form and Christian Function."
38. See M. J. Swanton, "The Wife's Lament and The Husband's Message: A Reconsi-
deration," Anglia 82 (1964): 269-90, and W. F. Bolton, "The Wife's Lament and the
Husband's Message: A Reconsideration Revisited," Archiv 205 ( 1968): 3 3 7-51.
39. See Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," in The New Feminist Criti-
cism, pp. 243-70.
40. Frese, "Wulf and Eadwacer: The Adulterous Woman Reconsidered," Religion
andLiterature 15 (Winter 1983): 1-22.
590 Marilynn Desmond The Voice of Exile

will be attuned to voices that it cannot name, so close to inner voices

that at times they may sound like one's own." 41 The voice of exile in
these poems is not a veiled, inner voice but a public rhetorical one, "the
common voice singing out of doors," echoed by Woolf ten centuries
la ter: "Again if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden split-
ting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from
being the natural inheritor of that civilisation, she becomes, on the
contrary, outside of it, alien and critical. "42 Indeed, if we read these two
poems as women's language, we do more than simply open upa space
for a female voice; we also begin to envision a feminist literary history
that might include medieval texts and culture. Gilbert and Gubar's
Norton Anthology of Literature by Women presents Julian of Norwich
(1342-1416) and Margery Kempe (c.1373-c.1440) as the beginning of
the female literary tradition in England. Both Julian and Margery are
remarkable for the rhetorical power of their marginal voices, but such
voices should not be decontextualized so that they become disembodied
voices speaking to feminists from the very end of the Middle Ages.
Rather, English literary historians might date the beginning of
women's language, if not women's literature, not in the fifteenth
century with Margery andJulian, but five centuries earlier in the heroic
world of Anglo-Saxon England.

41. Lawrence Lipking, "Aristotle's Sister: A Poetics of Abandonment," Critica[

Inquiry l O (Sept. 1983): 72. For a discussion of Lipking's strategies of appropriation, see
Joan DeJean, "Fictions ofSappho," Critica[ Inquiry 13 (Summer 1987): 787-805.
42. Virginia Woolf, A Room ofOne's Own (San Diego and New York, 1957), p. 10 l.