The Wife’s Lament

This poem from the Exeter Book is spoken by a woman whose husband has been outlawed because of his involvement in a feud. She followed him into exile, but for unknown reasons her husband’s kinsmen schemed to separate them, with the result that she now finds herself living in a remote and desolate place with dark, pagan associations. Here she laments her own emotional torment, but also that of her husband, whom she imagines suffering from cold and loneliness.

Such is the dominant interpretation of The Wife’s Lament, but the text contains a number of ambiguities, and is in fact a good example of how an editor can steer a reader's interpretation by including or omitting a comma, or placing a sentence break here or there. The edition in Pope and Fulk 2000 provides an excellent guide to the various ways in which the poem can be read.