Wulf and Eadwacer

Wulf and Eadwacer is one of the most enigmatic Old English poems, since the story it alludes to is not known to us. It has given rise to many theories, of which perhaps the most widely credited is that the speaker (a woman, as rēotugu in l. 10 tells us) is being held prisoner on an island by Eadwacer, while Wulf (her lover or husband) is in exile, perhaps being hunted by the speaker's people. For accounts of the scholarship on the poem, see Anne L. Klinck, The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study (Montreal, 1992) and Bernard J. Muir, ed., The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry (Exeter, 1994).