Anglo-Saxon Literature: The Husband’s Message

As I explained in a previous post, The Exeter Book is a manuscript dating from around 1050 AD, and contains many poems and riddles from Anglo-Saxon England. I’ve written about some of the material in the Exeter book before on the blog as part of my series on Anglo-Saxon literature, and I wanted to return to it today to tell you about the fascinating poem called The Husband’s Message.

The Husband’s Message is by an unknown author; just like the rest of the material in the Exeter Book it is anonymous. It has about 53 lines and is the sixtieth entry in the book. It follows immediately after The Wife’s Lament, and some scholars think the two poems might be linked. They speculate that The Husband’s Message could be the male side of the story of The Wife’s Lament.

Unfortunately the poem is near the end of the Exeter Book, which is a portion of the book that has been most damaged by fire, and therefore some of it, especially portions of lines 2-8, have been destroyed.

But even with that, we can still get a pretty good idea of what the poem is about. The “voice” of the poem is a piece of wood, possibly a rune-stave, which is a stick with runes carved on it. It is a message from a lord to his lady, urging her to come across the seas and follow him into exile, as he has been driven away by a nasty feud in which he obviously was the loser.  He urges her to remember the vows they have spoken, and tells her that he has made a nice life for himself over the seas, and wishes to have her at his side again, sharing in his wealth and being his lady, giving  out the gold and other booty to his warriors and loyal companions in his mead-hall.

The first two lines of the poem read:

Now in private, I will reveal

The kind of wood I grew up from as a young offspring

Right away we enter one of the scholarly controversies about this poem. There are different types of poems in the Exeter book, some are elegies, such as The Wife’s Lament, or The Wanderer but others are riddles, in which the poem is spoken from an object’s point of view, and the reader (hearer) is challenged to guess what the object is. In fact, the sixty previous entries in the Exeter Book are all riddles of this type. Because the poem starts this way, some feel that it might be a type of riddle.

The next lines, 2-8, are:

In me men . . . have other land
to establish . . .
salty seas . . .
Very often in a boat I . . . sought
where my lord . . .
over the high seas.

Drat. The ellipses are the places where the words have been destroyed by fire damage. So you can see the difficulty of determining who or what the “speaker” of the poem is, exactly. Obviously he/it has been on a boat, travelling the high seas, seeking his/its lord, or perhaps with him.

Most of the rest of the poem is legible. The next few lines make things much clearer:

Indeed, he who engraved this wood instructed me to ask
that you, adorned with jewels, yourself remember
in your mind the spoken vows
that you two often spoke in former days,
while you were permitted to occupy a home
in the cities where mead was drunk, inhabit the same land,
and show your friendship.

Aha. The speaker seems to shift slightly. Perhaps now the poem is in the voice of the person carrying the rune-stave, or whatever piece of wood that has the message carved on it. Or, it’s possible that this is still the wood itself speaking. Either way, the speaker goes on to remind the lady of the love that the two previously shared, and expresses hope and confidence that she will join him again, where he waits “beyond the ocean-path”.

It is this joyful confidence that sets this poem apart from the more gloomy nature of the elegies. The speaker lays out his case for his wife’s* return, reminding her of their love, and seems confident that she will go to him.

The final stanza of the poem contains one last surprise and mystery. Here is the text:

In accordance with the past vow of the two of you,
I hear S joined together with R
and EA and W and M to declare an oath
that he would keep the pledge
and the vow of friendship as long as he lives,
that which in former days you two often uttered.

Those letters, S,R,EA, W, and M, are not written in the Old English Latin alphabet, but are indeed Anglo-Saxon runes. We are back in riddle territory again, harking back to other poems such as X which contained runes in the midst of the poem, a puzzle to be solved. In this case, the runes stand for: sigel, rad, ear, wenn, and monn, which mean sun (or sail), road, , sea (also could be ear, or grave), joy and man (could also be the rune for day).

Are these direction for the lady, written in a code only the two of them know? Perhaps. If the husband is indeed in exile, hiding from his enemies, he wouldn’t want them to chance upon his exact location, would he? But let’s keep in mind this is not a literal letter, it’s a poem, or a riddle, and this extra puzzle at the end was part of the experience of the poem for the hearers.

These Anglo-Saxon poems are so wonderful, as they give us a glimpse of so many facets of their culture that we would not know, otherwise. And they give us a glimpse of how they think, too, with their love of puzzles and riddles, and the flair for the dramatic.

This poem is a small treasure in a whole book of treasures. I like to imagine the monk or scribe who wrote these down and preserved them in this book. We owe him (or her, if it was a nun!) a great debt!

*It’s possible the lady is not his wife, but a lover, or someone who has vowed to marry but has not done so. But the most likely description would be wife, especially when we see the picture included of the lady handing out the booty in the mead hall alongside her lord.  That is the job of the wife, the highly valued companion, not a lover or friend.

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Note: I got a lot of this information from the website Shmoop, which does a great job of analyzing poems and other works. If you want to dive even further into an analysis of  The Husband’s Message, click on the link! And don’t be scared off by fears of a “scholarly” analysis. Although they do a great job of the analysis, their style is readable and fun, and is aimed at teens. For example, here’s part of the summary of the poem:

Featured image of the Exeter Book is from exetercatherdral.com