The Old English Poems The Husband's Message and The Wife's Lament have come from what is called the Exeter Book, a collection of Anglo Saxon poems collected around the first part of 100 AD by monks. There is an argument if the Riddle 60 is its own poem or related to The Husband’s message as they have similarities about writing on wood. The first part of The Husband’s message has been lost to time, and therefore the speculation that Riddle 60 is the true preamble. Both poems talk about a tree or wood conveying a message between two people. It most likely is a secret code, as only the two intended are supposed to understand the conversation. This theory of secrets might be contradicted by The Husband’s message where it has been delivered by a messenger, depending on how personified one interprets the wood in that poem. A person could have read to the wife or simply delivered the wood that holds the writing.
The Husband wants to know if the wife has been loyal to him, as he is to her. He continually reminds her of the many oaths they made to bind them in love. He insists that everything would be normal for them if he wasn’t exiled because of a feud with powerful people. He calls her “The bracelet-adorned one,” to bring to mind a physical representation of the love vows. This is probably similar to a wedding ring that is used for the same, although far more official, purpose. Those who wear a ring are promised exclusively to love one individual. Of course, that doesn’t mean the relationships remain strong or permanent. He goes further by setting up a kind of long term test, almost begging her to travel when the cuckoo bird signals the season to go by sea. He wants her to leave the safety of shore and find him on a trip in the open waters. It is the ultimate test to determine if the love of his life is still true to him.
After all he has done, there is no reason for her to doubt the love he holds for her after all these years. That is, if what the message says can be believed. There are a few hints that his own loyalty and love for her is in doubt. Nothing of personal property, other than the wood message, has been sent to her as a token of continued love. Perhaps he thought sending anything of value would get lost or stolen after a long voyage. He claims the reason to send for her after all this time is how rich he has become. They can now as a couple do anything together, including buy off friends and loyal supporters. He tells her that, even with all the wealth amassed after all these years by fighting his enemies and winning, that riches don’t matter, He says only her love and loyalty, matched by his own for her, are what matters. Perhaps it was not safe for him to send for her before, but he could have asked her to travel much sooner if the love was that strong. Even the message bearer hints at the questionable nature of his reason to send for her with the words “he instructs me to say,” how much he wants and loves her. Obviously the husband instructs the messenger to say a lot of things, but that moment of most emotional pleading is what stands out as needing instructed. He ends in an oath using a code of letters to once again provide evidence his love was never broken. Yet, the husband left his wife behind and didn’t seek her for long enough that he created a new life. Perhaps his loneliness or a marriage requisite for greater power is what drives him to send for her over what has to be treacherous waters for uncertain love.
The place of The Wife’s Lament in the Exeter Book gives no hint any real relationship between the two poems exist, but many critics do see familiarity between them. They both talk about a husband that leaves a wife for distant lands, and the impact it has on the relationship. There are strong differences, but mostly because of the point of view. The husbands was him having left the wife alone. The wife is the one who was left behind to fend for herself. From the start of the wife’s poem, “Sorrowfully I sing the song of woe,” there is a different mood and set of emotions from the other one. She isn’t begging for his return, giving in to the fact he has left her for good. There is no hope of reuniting.
She too is in exile, the same as her husband. The difference is her exile is not just geographical, but social and emotional. His leaving was not an adventure and treasure seeking outcome for her, but isolation and perhaps doom. She is stuck in a land, by the husband’s command, where she has very few family and friends. Worse yet, his own family members are not happy about the union. They seek to split them apart as a couple, and more than likely succeeding.
Here is where the ambiguity of her condition really shows up, because her exile might be more than based on where she lives. She could even be a ghost, having been murdered. The love of the husband is more specifically, instead of hinted at like the other poem, pointed out to have been lost. At first the love was promised that it would never be broken “nothing less end our love,” than death. That didn’t turn out that way as “Alas all is changed.” Later on in the poem we learn that her relationship to the husband is as if it never existed. He is described as angry and filled with murderous thoughts. Did he kill her in the end and force her to wander the world? She is living in a cave to look out into the world of the living, only to ponder under a tree. Perhaps under a tree is where her body has been hastily buried, leaving her with no true home. Caves have also since ancient times been considered the entrance to the afterlife where the dead go for final rest. But the murdered cannot rest, and the wife states she wanders the world looking for her love, then always return to the tree and the cave.
Where the husband’s message ends with an oath to demonstrate loyalty, the wife’s lament ends in a curse. She wants him to remember her for his whole life. It doesn’t matter if his behavior is careless about her departure and separation. She wants him to wander the world alone and never be happy. He can remember when life was much better, but cannot have that same peace ever again. She wants him to wander the earth, feel sorrow, remember better times, and have loneliness the same as herself. Assuming she has been murdered and is dead, her cures could imply wanting him dead in the same manner.
Long distance relationships are hard to maintain even in the modern era. Imagine what it would be like when it took months or years to travel from one place to another. For most people they lived and died within a few hundred miles distance, leaving for longer trips only as soldiers or by command of a Lordship. What these poems reflect is the burden of love, or the loss of it, when the couple cannot be together for any reasons. The saying “absence makes the heart grow fonder” is refuted by writers of these two poems. When two people are away from each other, and the longer they are gone, the harder it is to maintain emotional bonds. Modern technology helps bridge that gap to a degree.
Comment if you believe the wife was murdered, or is that too literal a reading?
Did the husband’s message have any truth that he still loved and was loyal to the woman he left behind?
Is it easier to have long distance relationships in the modern world?
