Old English Elegy Critics Flashcards
When were the two poems copied?
Both the didactic long poem The Wanderer and the emotional monologue The Wife’s Lament are contained in The Exeter Book, which was copied between approximately 950 and 970
They are both elegies?
It is important to note that ‘elegy’ is a generic term which has been applied to these Old English poems by modern critics, as the term only developed in the 16th century to describe a funeral song or lament. Therefore, these poems are united under the same category due to their exploration of similar themes and focusses.
A summary of The Wife’s Lament?
Anne Klinck - the poem is spoken by ‘a living woman lamenting her confinement in the wilderness and her separation from her living husband’
The Wife’s Lament - what the epithet ‘wineleas’ supports?
The sense of separation that the critic Alan Renoir saw as essential to the poem (1975)
The Wife’s Lament - hostility of environment is emphasised by ‘eordhscraefe’?
Treharne translates this as ‘earth-cave’, it can also mean ‘a tomb’ or ‘a grave’,6 perhaps foreshadowing her coming death in this desolate setting. Some critics have engaged in far-fetched speculation that the speaker is actually dead, and narrating from beyond the grave
The Wife’s Lament - counter to the speculation that she is dead?
Klinck - ‘the poet meant to mystify; the woman’s circumstances are disturbing largely because they are strange and undefined’
How is the wife’s lament narrated?
The poignant testimony of a sorrowful wife, which may have been influenced by the letters of unhappy women in Ovid’s Heroides, is highly personal.
How is the wife’s lament highly personal?
In the fifty-three lines of the poem, ’ic’ occurs fifteen times, ’me(c)’ eight times, some form of the first-person possessive adjective eleven times, and the dual first-person pronoun five times
The Wife’s Lament - the final line of the poem emphasises her negative internal mental state?
American psychologist Daniel Schachter - depressed patients ‘tend to encode (and therefore retrieve) everyday episodes through a negative filter that confers a kind of repetitive and pervasive drabness on all their experiences’
What do both speakers exhibit?
the types of memory dysfunction associated with emotional duress, comorbid with the depression that often accompanies alienation and isolation.
Deprivation formula in The Wanderer?
Deprivation is a highly important feature of the exile state in Old English elegies, and the chief formula of the exile convention is an A-verse consisting of the property removed together with the past participle of a verb of deprivation
This is paralleled in The Wanderer’s expression ‘éðle bedǽled’
Feature of both speakers?
Simon Nicholson contends that the speakers of both poems exhibit the characteristics of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
The Wanderer - sorrow characterises his internal mental state?
In this repetition of amygdala memories ‘emotion might be remembered in the form of intrusive fear and recurrent images of the trauma (flashback) or as persistent anxiety (free-floating anxiety)’ (Payne)
The final lines of the Wanderer?
The monologue comes to a close with the line ‘fofre to Fæder on heofonum’, conveying the idea to its contemporary Christian audience that fate is predetermined by a monotheistic God, and one must suffer to reach eternal life.
