A Poem of the Cross in the Exeter Book: ‘Riddle 60’ and ‘The Husband's Message’

Abstract

To propose a unified religious allegory in what hitherto has been accepted rather generally as two distinct Old English poems, and universally as secular poetry carrying no meaning beyond the literal, is to risk being categorized as a ‘pan-allegorist’ in literary theory and an evangelist in temperament. Let me begin, therefore, by protesting that if the corpus of Old English poetry should ever be unmasked as a series of impeccably Christian allegories, no one will be more astounded or dismayed than I. It would be difficult to deny, however, that the great scholars who laid the foundations for our study of this poetry were, in most instances, more interested in Germanic antiquity than in Latin Christianity; and that as a result, a disproportionate number of our own major discoveries are likely to come out of the once-neglected Patrologia Latina. If this observation is accurate, we may do well to suspend temporarily our belief in certain universal negative conclusions—like, for example, the familiar pronouncement that Old English poets characteristically do not employ allegory—and to inquire whether some of the ‘secular’ poems that have puzzled us for so long may not become less puzzling in the light of early Christian thought. Much as we may revere the spirit of Germanic antiquity, we shall do it small service by attributing to it attitudes or works that it might not have cared to claim.

Eleventh-Century Drag Acts? Three Old English Poems at Exeter Cathedral

“…It might be argued that the manuscript presentation of The Husband's Message forecloses interpretations of the poem as a unified text in the fashion that I have described; certainly, its mise en page has been interpreted otherwise (e.g. Kaske 1967;Goldsmith 1975). But divisions between items are also unclear elsewhere in the Exeter Book, and it seems probable that, like their modern counterparts, medieval readers will actively have reinterpreted the manuscript's disposition of its materials.…”

The least elegiac of the elegies: A contextual glance atThe Husband's message

“…(II, met. vii, [15][16]. 9 In fact, the similarity becomes even more obvious when we juxtapose the lines from The Wanderer to an Old-English version of Boethius' poem:…”

“…But then, The Husband's Message is different and seems accordingly to warrant both Robert E. Kaske's view that "though certainly one of the more memorable pieces of Old English poetry, it is in some ways one of the most baffling" 15 and, even more, Greenfield's opinion that it "is the least elegiac of the elegies, and perhaps cannot be properly so classified". 16 In its barest outline, it tells of a message sent to a prince's daughter by a man with whom she presumably exchanged some kind of vows before he was driven away by a feud; he now lives elsewhere in what appears to be a state of opulence and security, and he urges her to join him overseas so that he may make good the oaths which he swore in days of old.…”