"Beowulf" and Other Old English Poems

ELEGIES

ELEGIES The Old English elegies are notoriously difficult to define. Traditional elegies lament the death of a particular person and celebrate the accomplishments of that person’s life. The Old English elegies are usually dramatic monologues in which the speaker expresses some sense of separation and suffering and attempts to move from a cri de cœur to some form of consolation. The term “elegy” was not applied to these poems until the nineteenth century, and there is some debate about its usefulness as a generic marker. Nonetheless, the term serves to characterize a group of Old English poems which share some or all of the following elements: 1. An isolated or exiled speaker who laments a loss 2. Longing for earlier days of joy with loved ones 3. Bad weather reflecting the wintry storms of mental life 4. Fluctuating mental states (memory, dream, hallucination) 5. The use of reason to try to understand life’s misfortunes 6. Recognition that life is lǣne, “transient, fleeting” 7. Use of occasional proverbial wisdom to generalize one’s lot 8. Searching for consolation, sometimes finding it in religious belief Most elegies move from a personal lament to at least an attempt at consolation. This movement may derive in part from the influence of The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, a sixth-century Latin work that was translated into Old English and probably widely known (see, for example, Lumiansky, 104 ff.). If we look at the relationship between lament and 144 | EL E GIE S consolation in the four elegies included here, we find some telling differences , particularly with respect to their endings: A. The speaker in “The Wanderer” tries to use reflection and generalization to come to a sense of consolation and a belief in providential order, but the religious argument seems finally less compelling than the articulation of personal sorrow. The power of the poem lies more in its images of loss than in its crafted consolation. B. The speaker in “The Seafarer” seems wise and controlled right from the beginning. He is probably meant to be a pilgrim who chooses exile, unlike the wanderer who is forced into exile by fate. He wanders for the purpose of understanding the instability of this world and believing in the permanence and order of the next. The philosophical argument and the consolation are more powerful than the sense of isolation and loss. C. The speaker in “The Wife’s Lament” is more isolated than the other two. She doesn’t know why her husband has left her. She wants to generalize her suffering and sorrow to include everyone, most especially her absent husband, and in this her consolation seems to mask a complaint or curse. D. The speaker in “Wulf and Eadwacer,” like her sister in sorrow in “The Wife’s Lament,” seems to have less access to the tools of philosophical reflection than the male elegiac speakers. Her poem ends not with a sense of resolution or consolation but with an apparently unsolvable riddle. THE WANDERER “The Wanderer” is a powerful and puzzling poem. It has intrigued critics and inspired poets like Auden and Tolkien to echo its elements in their own works. It is a poem of complex consciousness. The wanderer, who is the narrator of the poem, reflects upon his past, lamenting his loss of king and kin. Mitchell and Robinson point out his vulnerability as a lordless exile in Anglo-Saxon society: THE WANDERER | 145 The wanderer who speaks the monologue is in the worst possible circumstances for an Anglo-Saxon warrior in the heroic age: he is a retainer who has lost his lord and comrades and who therefore finds himself with no place in society, no identity in a hostile world. He is a man in extremis, alone with his memories and naked to his enemies. This plight moves him to strenuous and painful reflection. (2007, 280) The speaker’s task is to move through both physical and mental wandering to arrive at a sense of resolution and recovery—to find his wiser self and to locate a new philosophical or religious “homeland.” The narrator moves back and forth between personal sorrow and gnomic generalizations about the nature of life. By shifting from first-person lament to third-person description or reflection, he both generalizes his own condition and establishes some distance between the suffering man and the reflective man. As his mind moves back...