Saturn’s Old Age – Reading the Riddle Right

This riddle and its answer, from the Anglo-Saxon wisdom poem Solomon and Saturn II, appear at ll. 296-317 in Krapp and Dobbie’s numbering. Like the Raging Wulf riddle earlier in the same piece (read it with translation here), it is excellent poetry. Note the possibly deliberate irony of a man called Saturn (i.e. Cronos) asking a question about the ravages of time!

Saturnus cwæð:
“Ac hwæt is ðæt wundor         ðe geond ðas worold færeð,
styrnenga ^[1] gæð,         staðolas beateð,
aweceð wopdropan,         winneð oft hider?
Ne mæg hit steorra ne stan         ne se steapa gimm,
wæter ne wildeor         wihte beswican,
ac him on hand gæð         heardes and hnesces,
micles [and] mætes;         him to mose sceall
gegangan geara gehwelce         grundbuendra,
lyftfleogendra,         laguswemmendra,
ðria ðreoteno         ðusendgerimes.”
Salomon cuæð:
“Yldo beoð on eorðan         æghwæs cræftig;
mid hiðendre         hildewræsne,
rumre racenteage,         ræceð wide,
langre linan,         lisseð ^[2] eall ðæt heo wile.
Beam heo abreoteð         and bebriceð telgum,
astyreð standene ^[3]       stefn on siðe,
afilleð hine on foldan ^[4]        friteð æfter ðam
wildne fugol.         Heo oferwigeð wulf, ^[5]
hio oferbideð stanas,         heo oferstigeð style,
hio abiteð iren mid ome,         deð usic swa.”

Translation

Note that my translation differs in a couple of places from others previously published, as detailed in the notes.

Saturn speaks:
And what is the wonder which travels the world
Proceding inexorably, beating against strongholds,
it brings tears and often breaks through our defences?
Neither star nor stone,  nor magnificent gem,
water nor wild beast can withstand it one bit.
But into its power go hard and soft,
great and small. It devours
annually many creatures that dwell on land,
fly through the air and swim in the water,
thirty-three thousand in number.
Solomon speaks:
Old age is strong enough for anything on earth
with ravaging war-shackles,
copious chains reaching wide,
with its long line, it gathers everything it wants.
It destroys the tree and breaks it into small pieces
(the trunk in its plunge disturbs the rocky valley)
It fells to the ground and then devours
the wild bird. It outfights the wolf
it outwaits the stones, it outclimbs the stile
it gnaws iron with rust and treats us the same.

Notes re translation:

[1] styrnenga is a HL, but is likely to be real. It derives from styrne (‘stern’). There are plenty of other adverbs ending in -inga/-unga. It might just be an error for styrne gangeð, but the meaning would be the same.

[2] lisseð – an imaginary hapax legomenon. Not from the non-existent lissan/lissian, subdue, but from lesan, gather (normally spelled lisð). This impostor is found in B-T as ‘lissan’, in Clarke Hall as ‘lissian’. Anlezark continues to read ‘lissian’, showing that hapax legomena die hard.

[3] The standard emendation (Krapp & Dobbie, Anlazark) of the ms. astyreð stan dene (or standene – the gap between stan and dene is very small) to astyreð standendne is unnecessary and has caused confusion over the reading of the following line. Standendne is the pres. part. of stan, ‘stand’ and is read as modifying stefn and on siðe is assigned an adverbial meaning of ‘at last’. But the ms. has standene, which easily means rocky valley (stan + denu acc. sing.) and on siðe here means not ‘at last’ (which it can also mean) but ‘on its way’ (i.e. down). So the line means:

“the trunk in its plunge disturbs the rocky valley”

[4] afilleð hine on foldan is ambiguous, as it could refer either to the previously mentioned tree, or to the subsequently mentioned bird. With the emendation to standendne and assuming natural word-order, hine seemed to refer to the tree. But if the subject of the previous sentence is the tree, it is syntactically a wrench to move back to yldo as the subject with the previous subject (the tree) as the object. What is more, the sequence ‘he fells the tree to earth and then afterwards eats the wild bird’ is weak and clumsy, as the and æfter ðam is a nonsense connector. On the other hand, ‘it brings (him) down to earth and afterwards eats the wild bird’ is more natural and syntactically logical. The initial ambiguity is resolved by the delayed referent for hine, which is a nice poetic effect.

[5] Menner, following previous would-be mutilators, wanted to amend: ‘wildne fugol. Heo oferwigeð wulf’ ; to: ‘wulf heo oferwigeð, wildne fugol’ to restore the supposedly sacrosanct poetic structure of two alliterating syllables in the first half-line and one in the second. Don’t let the fact that then next line has exactly the same 1 + 2 structure stop us – hell, let’s write it backwards just for fun! Shame that this emendation for supposed poetic reasons would completely ruin the beautiful parallelism of:

Heo oferwigeð wulf, hio oferbideð stanas, heo oferstigeð style

Luckily this horror, while noted, was not adopted by either Krapp and Dobbie or Anlezark!

Weapons For Wordsmiths

Smiths were an important part of medieval society. Wayland the Smith was a significant legendary character, although most of the stories about him have been lost.

In the list of skills and occupations in the poem The Gifts of Men we find a smith at ll. 61-66:

Sum mæg wæpenþræce,      wige to nytte,
modcræftig smið      monige gefremman,
þonne he gewyrceð      to wera hilde
helm oþþe hupseax      oððe heaþubyrnan,
scirne mece      oððe scyldes rond,
fæste gefeged      wið flyge gares.

The meaning of the word wæpenþræce in line 61 has been unclear from the start. Thorpe read wæpenþræge, but this was an error and the correct reading of wæpenþræce has been followed by most editors. I have checked the MS on the Muir DVD and there is no doubt about the reading. Bosworth-Toller has an entry for the spurious reading, translating wæpenþræge as ‘arms?’ while suggesting that it could be wæpenþræce. Clarke Hall also lists the spurious wæpenþræge and gives a meaning of ‘weapon, equipment?’. While their spelling is wrong, it is possible they are right about the meaning, which seems to be deduced from the context.

The grammatical context is not completely clear. Wæpenþræce could be the object of gefremman and modified by monige. This would make it acc. pl., but gefremman means ‘advance, aid’ (with direct object) not ‘produce’.

In any case, this reading is vigorously disputed by Krapp and Dobbie, followed by Muir, who take wæpenþræce as dative. But their cited translation: “one, in weaponed combat, for use in warfare, a skillful smith, is able to prepare many, when he makes…” will not do. While wæpenþræce can certainly mean ‘in weaponed combat’, monige cannot without any antecedant bear the reference to weapons from that position. Monige gefremman means ‘be of assistance to many (people)’, not ‘prepare many (weapons)’. If wæpenþræce means ‘in weaponed combat’, what is the antecedant of ‘for use in warfare’? If wæpenþræce is indeed dative, as seems to be the case, then it represents the means by which ‘many are advantaged’. We should read “one, with [wæpenþræce], for use in war, a skillful smith, can help many, when he makes…”. One set of possible meanings from the context are the ‘arms, weapon, equipment’ ventured in B-T and Clarke Hall.

þracu/þræcu means (1) pressure and (2) violence, and is probably related to þryccan , press, oppress, trample (c.f G. drücken). It is from this meaning of ‘violence’ that Krapp and Dobbie derive the reading ‘in weaponed combat’. So wæpenþræce would usually be read as meaning ‘weapon-violence’ or ‘weaponed combat’, but this meaning doesn’t fit here. If it doesn’t mean that, then perhaps its meaning in this context is derived from an extension of the alternative meaning of ‘pressure’.

We also find geþræc, geþrec. B-T, in addition to geþræc n. press, crowd, crush, tumult has geþræc: apparatus, adjutorium (= equipment; help, support). The first meaning is roughly synonymous with the known meanings of þracu. Toller in his Supplement elaborates on the second meaning: geþræc:– a collection of objects pressed together, a throng. I don’t see how this correctly represents the glossed meanings of equipment, help, support. Perhaps ‘supplies’ might be the connection. B-T also has: searugeþræc; n. A store of things in which art is displayed (= a dragon’s hoard).

Intriguingly, B-T has wæpengeþræc; n. A weapon :– Ofsend uoepengiðræcc (uoepen, giðræcc?) [glossing] effunde frameam. This last comes from a Northumbrian gloss. Frameam in correct Latin means spear. B-T here express doubts as to whether this uoepengiðræcc is one or two words glossing frameam. The reason the gloss was not simply gar becomes clear if we look at other glosses. Framea is glossed as both sweord (sword) and ætgære (short spear). So here uoepengiðræcc expresses this ambiguity and may perhaps be translated ‘weapon(s)’.

We also find an adjective geþracen which only appears once in an obscure gloss, geþracen hors, which has been variously explained as prepared, decked, or else strong, hardy, enduring (based on an Icelandic word). It looks like a past participle. In the OED, we find thrack (v): pack full, cram, load, first appearing in 1655. (OED Thrack) Perhaps geþracen means ‘packed’ in the sense of ‘loaded with baggage’.

Although geþræc certainly means a collection, it is not established that þræce means this. Geþræc is a neuter collective noun, while þræce is most likely the dative of the feminine abstract noun þracu/þræcu. We do find þræc- in compounds meaning the same as þracu (‘battle-‘), but þræc on its own is not attested unless present here. Clark Hall says it is usually found with the ge- prefix and it is quite likely that our word is his only possible example without.

þracu means ‘pressure’ as well as ‘violence’ and might encompass mechanical pressure. It is an abstract noun and could easily also be used to represent a process. Perhaps wæpenþræce actually refers to the production of weapons, as the metal was beaten on the forge, a process involving the application of mechanical pressure. It could be a word applied to forge- and pattern-welding. Contemporary Germans call the process of metal spinning Drücken, without any reference to turning. Note the more general term wyrcan, used at l. 63, is still used today of working with iron, c.f. the phrase ‘wrought iron’. We could translate wæpenþræce as ‘with weapon-shaping’, which suits the context.

Otherwise, we must take wæpenþræce as coming from þræc (n.), a by-form of geþræc, collection and read it as ‘with weapon-supplies’.

On the subject of smiths in general, the following passage from Ælfric’s Colloquy is rather amusing:

[Teacher:] Hwilc þe geþuht betwux woruldcræftas heoldan ealdordom?

[Pupil:] Eorþtilþ, forþam se yrþling us ealle fett.

Se smiþ secgð: Hwanon sylan scear oþþe culter, þe na gade hæfþ buton of cræfte minon? Hwanon fiscere ancgel, oþþe sceowyrhton æl, oþþe seamere nædl? Nis hit of minon geweorce?

Se geþeahtend ondsweraþ: Soþ witodlice sægst, ac eallum us leofre ys wikian mid þe yrþlincge, þonne mid þe, forþam se yrþling sylð us hlaf ond drenc; þu, hwæt sylst us on smiþþan þinre buton isenne fyrspearcan ond swegincga beatendra slecgea ond blawendra byliga?

(“What can you offer us in your smithy apart from iron fire-sparks and the din of beating sledges and blowing bellows”)

What better example of white collar professionals looking down on the grubby workers! Seems farm-stay was already popular with the urban intellectuals too. You can find the whole Colloquy beautifully laid out here:
Aelfric Colloquy Translation

If you liked my link to the OED, check out the links on my Resources page to all volumes of the whole OED in the Internet Archive.

Muspilli and The Wanderer – Where Have All The Horses Gone?

Any doubts about the antiquity of at least parts of the Elegies from the Exeter Book can be settled by a comparison of a phrase in The Wanderer with a phrase in the Old High German poem Muspilli.

The Wanderer, l. 92

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?      Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?

mearg is here translated as “horse”, in the sense of “war steed”.

Muspilli, ll. 60-61

war is denne diu marha, dar man dar eo mit sinen magon piehe?
diu marha ist farprunnan

“Where then will be the borderland, where one once fought together with kinsmen? The borderland is burnt out.”

marha is here translated as ‘mark, borderland’ (o.e. mearc), but marha or merha also means ‘mare’ (o.e. miere, ‘mare’, from mearh, ‘horse’). It seems the phrase war is marha? war is mag? was proverbial and it has been remembered here, but misunderstood.

Muspilli is a rather messy but pretty wild poem about the Apocalypse, written in the margin of a book belonging to Louis the German around 900. It has been seriously suggested that Louis himself wrote it into his own book. The poem is in old germanic alliterative metre written in a Bavarian dialect and looks like it may be of composite origin.

I have not yet been able to locate any discussion of this parallel in commentaries on The Wanderer and Muspilli, and it is possible it has not been noticed before.

The fact that the OHG passage misunderstands the phrase argues against direct borrowing. I take this as evidence that the phrase Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago? (or Hwær is) was proverbial among many Germans and so must either predate the Anglo-Saxon migration or have featured in a story which had very wide circulation, being known both in England and Germany. Either of these possibilities is of enormous significance.

Riddle 60 – The Medium Is The Message

The 95 riddles in the Exeter Book are not for the faint hearted and this humble scribe normally safeguards his mental health by staying well clear of them. But a possible connection with The Husband’s Message has forced my hand on this occasion. See my post on The Husband’s Message here.)

Riddle 60, which is found immediately before The Husband’s Message, has attracted considerable attention since F. A. Blackburn proposed in 1900 that the two pieces were actually one poem. This idea seems attractive, because both pieces seem to deal with a message of some sort. But Blackburn’s hypothesis is generally rejected today. The original with Blackburn’s emendations is as follows:

Ic wæs be sonde,      sæwealle neah,
æt merefaroþe,      minum gewunade
frumstaþole fæst;      fea ænig wæs
monna cynnes,      þæt minne þær
5
on anæde      eard beheolde,
ac mec uhtna gehwam      yð sio brune
lagufæðme beleolc.      Lyt ic wende
þæt ic ær oþþe sið      æfre sceolde
ofer meodu[drincende]      muðleas sprecan,
10
wordum wrixlan.      þæt is wundres dæl,
on sefan searolic      þam þe swylc ne conn,
hu mec seaxe[s] ord      ond seo swiþre hond,
eorles ingeþonc      ond ord somod,
þingum geþydan,      þæt ic wiþ þe sceolde
15
for unc anum twa[m]      ærendspræce
abeodan bealdlice,      swa hit beorna ma
uncre wordcwidas      widdor ne mænden.

Blackburn’s translation is as follows:

My home was on the beach near the sea-shore ;
Beside the ocean’s brim I dwelt, fast fixed
In my first abode. Few of mankind there were
That there beheld my home in the solitude,
But every morn the brown wave encircled me
With its watery embrace. Little weened I then
That I should ever, earlier or later.
Though mouthless, speak among the mead-drinkers
And utter words. A great marvel it is,
Strange in the mind that knoweth it not.
How the point of the knife and the right hand,
The thought of a man, and his blade therewith.
Shaped me with skill, that boldly I might
So deliver a message to thee
In the presence of us two alone,
That to other men our talk
May not make it more widely known.

Now the message in The Husband’s Message is carved on a tree or a mast, as is clear from the phrase se þisne beam agrof at line 13. Blackburn’s position is that the message from the Husband in the next poem is carved on a piece of wood and that the initial lines in the riddle refer to a tree. But the speaker, whatever it is, was on the sand, by the sea-wall, near the waves. Every night the dark waves played around him in a watery embrace. Here, at the edge of the sea, it is hard to see the speaker being a tree, as the tidal salt water would kill it. The description would fit a reed and one plausible explanation by Baum is that the speaker is a pen made from a reed. We will come back to this.

There are three emendations, at lines 9, 12 and 15. The change at line 15 is clear and we need not worry about it. But the other two lines are puzzling.

There are two problems with the proposed emendation at line 9. The line in the MS reads: ofer meodu   muðleas sprecan. The first problem is that there is no space after ‘meodu’ to justify adding another word. The second is that the resulting half-line only has a single alliterating word. Neither of these objections are fatal, but should lead us to look at the line again. Why do we need to change meodu to meodudrincende or meodubence (ASCP)? Presumably the first half-line is felt to be too short and the preposition ofer presents some difficulties if it only governs medu. With the acc. it can mean during, but the normal way of saying this is æt or to medu. These are reasonable points. One thing that struck me early on was that there is a word ofermede which means ‘proud’ (cf. German Übermut). If we look to line 16, we see that the message is being delivered ‘boldly’, so this would fit nicely. Note that the adjectival ending -u would have to be either f. s. nom.-acc. or n. pl. nom.-acc. Otherwise, we can stick with ofer and translate loosely as ‘over a drink’.

As for the weak alliteration and short half-line, wouldn’t it be better to look for another word starting with ‘m’? I would suggest that mæl (f. = ‘conversation’) is a pretty good candidate. In The Battle Of Maldon, we have the following line:

gemuna þa mæla þe we oft æt meodo spræcon

where mæl is found with sprecan and meodo. Mæl is also feminine, so it matches ofermedu.

Perhaps then we should emend line 9 to read:

[mæl ofermedu],   muðleas sprecan

At line 12 the MS has seaxeð, which all editors emend to seaxes. This change, while in itself quite sensible, leaves the infinitive geþydan in line 14 without a governing verb. Whatever seaxeð was supposed to mean, at least it had a verbal ending and might have governed geþydan. The only verb which can govern mec in line 12 is this geþydan, two lines later, which is acceptable but not required for the sense. Once again we have a line with only a single alliterating word in the first half. Not only that, but the repetition of ord in two successive lines seems suspect. No simple emendation will solve these last two issues, but if we change mec to meg, mæg, at least we will have a verb to govern the hanging infinitive.

So I suggest emending line 12 to read:

hu me[g] seaxe[s] ord      ond seo swiþre hond

These emendations would tidy up the grammar and metre, but they do nothing to alter the meaning, which is still far from clear.

If the speaker is a reed pen, then the reference to the seaxes ord would fit the sense, as the pen has to be sharpened, although actually ord is the point, not the blade of the knife. The second occurrence of ord would then refer to the pen’s own point. However, it seems odd that a pen is conceived as delivering (abeodan bealdlice) a message. A pen writes a message, but the letter or other written medium actually delivers it – the pen is not present at the delivery. For this reason Blackburn thought that the speaker is a letter. In order to tie this to the following poem, he had to read the first passage on the beach as referring to a tree, which is unlikely on grounds of basic botany. So Blackburn’s idea that the two poems are connected cannot be accepted. However, he still may be right that the speaker in Riddle 60 is a letter.

If we go with the reed idea for a letter, we could think of papyrus, which is a kind of reed, being transformed into paper. Now the Anglo-Saxons had some idea about papyrus, because the word is found in at least one glossary. But they almost certainly didn’t use it, as its use died out even in France by the 8th century. The Popes still used it for Papal Bulls until after the turn of the millenium, so presumably monks would have known about it. The reference to the seaxes ord, while fitting a reed pen, doesn’t really fit paper, as the text is not cut into it. There is however a word writseax, which means pen. Alternatively, we could have a pun here, as secg means both ‘reed’ (i.e. ‘sedge’) and ‘sword’. Ecg is also a synonym for ord,  seaxes ecg is the same as seaxes ord. So papyrus made from reeds is clearly a possible answer. Another similar suggestion cited by Baum, that the letter is written on kelp, is intriguing, but seems too abstruse to be an acceptable answer.

Is there any other possibility? One other idea that comes to mind is that the speaker might be a piece of whale bone, which was found washed up on a remote beach and remained lodged where it landed (minum gewunade frumstaþole fæst). Whale bone would be a suitable medium for carving messages – other kinds of bone were used for amulets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindholm_amulet).

Another intriguing possibility is the word eolhsecg, which means a kind of reed with sharp edges. The rune which is used for the sound ‘x’ has a name which is connected to this. Exactly what the rune’s name is is not clear, but it is either eol(h)x or eolhsecg. The Salzburg Futhorc has ilcs, while the Hickes version of the Rune Poem has eolhx, both genitives of eolh (‘elk’). Neither of these sources is completely reliable and the use of a genitive as a rune name has always looked a little strange.

The passage from the Rune Poem dealing with this rune joins it with the word secg:

  (eolhx) secg eard hæfþ oftust on fenne,
wexeð on wature, wundaþ grimme,
blode breneð* beorna gehwylcne
ðe him ænigne onfeng gedeð.

*breneð  = bærneð? ‘burns’ (B-T), Clarke Hall suggests “stains”

It is possible that the name of the rune, or at least an alternative name, was actually eolhsecg, not eolhx. If the rune poem or something like it was used orally as an aide-memoire for the rune names, confusion as to whether the name of the rune was eolx or eolhsecg could easily arise. I note that Toller, in his Supplement to the Bosworth-Toller Dictionary, deletes the entry for eolhx and gives the rune name as eolhsecg. The entry in Clarke Hall for eolhsecg also states that this is the name of the rune.

The interesting thing here is that, if eolhsecg is the name of the rune, then it is a perfect solution to Riddle 60. The first 6 ½ lines would refer to the reed eolhsecg, while the rest of the riddle would refer not to a letter written on papyrus, but to a letter within a letter, i.e. the rune X which has the name eolhsecg. This is a better solution than a message on papyrus because:

• The Anglo-Saxons didn’t use papyrus
• It gives a more natural sense to lines 12 and 13 (seaxes ord ond seo swiþre hond, eorles ingeþonc ond ord somod), which would refer to the carving of runes
• It explains why the speaker is being “joined” to the enterprise (þingum geþydan), as a rune would be added to other runes to spell out the message.
• It gives better sense to “on sefan searolic þam þe swylc ne conn“, as not everyone can read runes.

The only problem is that it can’t be proven that the name of the rune was eolhsecg and not eolhx. Still, I believe this is the correct solution.

So I have three suggestions for the meaning of Riddle 60:

• A letter on papyrus.
• A letter on whale bone.
• The rune  ‘eolhsecg’.

Take your pick. For my money, the last one is the winner.

It all sounds a bit like modern communications theory — either ‘the medium is the message’, or the text is speaking to us!

BTW, if you like Anglo-Saxon riddles, the complete text of  Baum’s Anglo-Saxon riddles of the Exeter Book is available on Wikisouce  here.

The Hidden Ingeld – Pt II

Read Part I here if you have not already done so.

The story of Ingeld and Freawaru

From Beowulf, we know:

—Ingeld married  Freawaru, who was a daughter of Hroðgar.

—Ingeld was a Heaðobard, son of Froda  who was killed by the Danes, when a Wiðergyld is killed on the battlefield.

—An old warrior provokes Ingeld with memories of his defeat  by Freawaru’s father.

—The ‘noble sons of the Danes’ are splendidly entertained. One of  Freawaru’s thanes is killed, “because of the father’s deeds”. Possibly he was the son of the killer of Froda or of Wiðergyld, but more likely it is her father, the king. The other of her two thanes escapes, because he knows the land.

—Ingeld’s love for his wife cools.

From Widsith, we know:

—Ingeld was defeated by the Danes Hroðgar and Hroðulf at Heorot. We don’t know if he outlived the battle, although the wording of the poem suggests this.

—From the Gesta Danorum, we learn:

—The Danish king Frotho (Froda) was killed through treachery by a Saxon named Swerting (Swertingus), who also dies.  (This treachery is not part of the AS tradition.)

—Frotho’s son Ingeld (Ingellus) became King and lived a life of gluttony, marrying one of Swerting’s daughters, given to him as a peace offering by Swerting’s sons.

—As Ingeld continued his sinful life and did not do his duty to avenge his father, the old hero Starkad appeared during a banquet that Ingeld had with the sons of Swerting, his father’s slayer. Starkad strongly admonished Ingeld and humiliated his queen who tried to calm Starkad with kindness and gifts.

—Starkad succeeded in inciting Ingeld to kill Swerting’s sons and thereafter suggested he divorce his Saxon bride “lest the she-wolf bring forth a litter like herself, and a beast spring from thee that shall hurt its own father.” However, tradition has it that he in fact had 4 sons with her. This implies that he went back to her.

Here Swerting occupies the place of Hroðgar and the brothers the place of the thanes. The sons have been added – in the English story they are not required, the father Hroðgar being still alive. In Beowulf her brothers are named and are already fated to be killed by Hroðulf. (Note the name Swerting occurs in Beowulf as an ancestor of Beowulf’s mother.)

The Exeter Book Elegies

Wife’s Lament

—The unnamed couple were happy together and swore to stay together forever. Then her husband goes away (no reason given).

—She goes looking for support (of her own accord?)

—Relatives plot to keep them apart

—He stops loving her (when?)

—He tells her to live somewhere in the place where she had few kin.  Where is this place?

http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/oecoursepack/wifeslament/notes/note15a-15b.html explains the issue thus:

‘min herheard niman’ – A major crux. The scribe wrote min her heard niman. Most editors, including ASPR and M-R, override his word division and print min herheard niman, and translate ‘take up abode in a herh’, defining herh as ‘grove, pagan shrine or sanctuary’. Leslie and Muir read min her eard niman, ‘take up abode’. Finally, Klinck takes her as an adverb and heard as an adjective, translating ‘my lord commanded, cruel, to seize me here’.

 

While the reading herheard is plausible, and the idea of a grove/temple fits the description, there are a few reasons against it:
The compound is not found elsewhere.
The verb niman doesn’t really mean live in, it means take, receive. It can mean ‘take up’ in the sense of ‘occupy’ when referring to a noun representing a position.  Note that, unlike eard, herheard couldn’t really be the object of niman, unless it really means “sanctuary”.  Examples of this use from B-T:
eard, wintersetl , setl, wicstowa niman

Perhaps the whole phrase is a scribal error for min in herhe eard niman, with the errors caused by the repeat of the letters ‘in’ and ‘e’. Accordingly, while I believe it is better to read her eard niman, it is not safe to draw any conclusions from the presence of the word her. However, on either reading, the place her lord orders her to stay in and the grove are in the same place, either because her is where she is now, or because herh = (later) bearu.

She is living in a sacred grove under an oak tree. This tree may present us with a connection with The Husband’s Message (see below).

—He goes into exile (or he comes back and she curses him from her exile)

Here we confront the difficult question of the meaning of the final lines. Are they a curse, or do they express sympathy with the husband’s current plight?  Niles makes out a powerful case that this is a curse. The trio of subjunctives scyle … sy … sy could certainly be optatives and þæt could introduce a clause of result. But why does she call him geong mon and why does she say that he habban sceal bliþe gebæro? These make it look like she feels sorry for him. And the next phrase isn’t grammatically a clause of result but a statement of fact:

Dreogeð se min wine
micle modceare;      he gemon to oft
wynlicran wic.

Her friend is very unhappy and misses his happy home.

Wa bið þam þe sceal
of langoþe leofes abidan.

And this is a general statement about separated lovers which applies to both of them. If he hates her and she is cursing him, it makes no sense.

In any case, the whole thing seems too weak to be a curse. Why doesn’t she wish he’d drop dead or something really nasty? Thorpe for one translated this as a series of questions and maybe he was onto something, even though he misconstrued the identity of the speaker.

With Thorpe, I read these passages as “must the young man forever….?” “will he always be…?”

As this is not a curse, it must be a description of the husband’s current situtation.

The geong mon is geomormod,  heard heortan geþoht, suffers from breostceare, sinsorgna gedreag,  is æt him sylfum gelong eal his worulde wyn, is ful wide fah feorres folclondes, he siteð under stanhliþe storme behrimed, is werigmod, wætre beflowen on dreorsele. He suffers micle modceare and remembers too often the wynlicran wic.

The Seafarer

This is almost verbatim the situation in lines 1-32 of The Seafarer, which perhaps paint his exile experience. For example:

hu ic earmcearig      iscealdne sæ
winter wunade      wræccan lastum,
winemægum bidroren

The Seafarer seems to many observers to be a composite,  however well articulated. It has been thought that a later christian addition begins at line 64b. But there is also a clear change at line 32, where the speaker starts to speak of the lure of the sea in a positive way. In the first part, the speaker, an exile (wræccan lastum), experiences bitre breostceare and is clearly not happy at all. Dorothy Whitelock, in the introduction to the piece in Sweet’s AS Reader alludes to the possibility of a dialogue between two different sailors, presumably an attempt to deal with the same difficulty. Perhaps the first part was borrowed from the Ingeld story.

The Husband’s Message

—The unnamed couple ruled together and promised never to part
þenden git moston         on meoduburgum
eard weardigan,         an lond bugan
(“while you two could live in the royal compound, rule the country, live in one land”)

—He had to go away because of a feud (Hine fæhþo adraf of sigeþeode)

—He knows where she is. We have no reason to believe she lives anywhere strange, but it is significant that she can hear the cuckoo singing “in the grove”. The reference to the runes being caved in a ‘tree’ could also match the oak tree in the grove in TWL.

—He has overcome his problems and has established a new life somewhere else.
Now he sends a secret message telling her to join him. Why and from whom is it secret?

—She gets a runic message written on a “tree”. The poem as it now stands is now a puzzle and the answer seems to be that the words are written on the mast of a ship. But originally, the runes could have been written on the oak tree which grows over the caves in her grove.

Note that if the runes of the husband’s message are on the mast of a ship, then she must be near a harbour.

Also, if the message is part of a ship, or the messenger has travelled extensively on ships, then the husband may have done a lot of seafaring, which matches the picture of waterlogged exile in TWL and the Seafarer.

Are the stories compatible?

All the stories are generally compatible with each other, in that we have a couple who live together happily and are then separated with the man going away.

But at first sight there are some minor difficulties.

In WL the husband first goes away and the relatives then start to plot against them, while in B-S the plot happens while the husband is at home.
ærest min hlaford gewat heonan of leodum ofer yþa gelac
ongunnon þæt þæs monnes magas hycgan …. þæt hy todælden unc

The word ærest makes it look like his departure was the start of all the problems. But these passages are actually describing the stages of her wræcsiþe. Which started when her lord left and she had to go looking for support. Any other unpleasantness, including the killing of her thanes, isn’t actually part of her exile. So from the wife’s POV, there are two plots of the relatives – first to restart the feud and second, to send her away. She only mentions the second.

Next, the two stories might differ as to when he stopped loving her. In Beowulf it must be pretty soon after he kills her thane. In TWL she says:

Bliþe gebæro      ful oft wit beotedan
þæt unc ne gedælde      nemne deað ana
owiht elles;      eft is þæt onhworfen,
is nu  ……    swa hit no wære
freondscipe uncer.      Sceal ic feor ge neah
mines felaleofan      fæhðu dreogan.

The issue is when do we place the start of ‘eft’ when the friendship was changed? We know it continues up to today (is nu). But feor ge neah seems to imply that he stopped loving her when they were still together (neah), or perhaps only that even if she was with him he would hate her.
‘Eft‘ is completely non-specific in this regard, and could refer back to the time he went away. In this case the sequences can be made to match.

When was she ordered to move? In the Saxo story, it seems she is to be sent away immediately and this seems implied in Beowulf. In TWL there are two mentions of orders to move. However, on either reading of herheard niman the two moves are the same. Either her in the first move refers to where she is now, or the herh refers to the later bearu.

In addition, when the speaker’s lord is gone, she seeks folgað, which may mean support at another court, looking for her own supporters, or even her own lord’s retinue. Maybe she was looking for her escaped thane and his men. How this fits in with the order to move to the sacred grove is not clear. But presumably she only ends up in the grove when her quest is unsuccessful. If her husband is still in exile, then he must have sent a message to her or to his kin. Perhaps becoming a priestess in the sacred grove was the best he could come up with to save her.

The current situation in TWL could correspond to the position after Ingeld’s defeat by Hroðgar and Hroðulf, where the killing of the thanes is ancient history, but the repudiation continues. If the final section is not a curse, then the young husband (this fits) is in exile, a very damp one.

Perhaps lines 1-32 of The Seafarer  paint his exile experience.  However this passage, if included, adds nothing to the structure of the story.

The story in The Husband’s Message is also compatible on the face of it.

The opening lines where the riddling speaker speaks of his childhood would most likely have been added later to frame the piece. In this regard, it is perhaps no accident that line 13 in the MS starts with a large initial letter and the word hwæt, which often starts a poem. However, the lines back to line 5b present no narrative shift. Either lines 5 to 12 have been so written to ease the transition, or the large initial may be mere coincidence. The husband had to leave his people because of a feud. The natural meaning of this is that he was feuding with someone in his country. But it could also mean that he had to leave and fight the Danes and lost, never coming back. At least a feud is mentioned here, unlike in TWL. If the riddle frame is a later addition, the original significance of the beam would have been the oak tree growing over the caves.

Putting the Pieces Together:

The speaker in The Wife’s Lament is Freawaru. She is the daughter of the Hroðgar, King of the Danes, given in marriage to Ingeld the Heaðobard, whose father was killed in battle by the Danes, together with the hero Wiðergyld .

Things go well for a while in the Heaðobard court, until Ingeld, provoked by an old warrior from among his own followers, kills one of Freawaru’s thanes. He then leaves his wife behind and goes off to fight the Danes, by whom he is defeated and subsequently goes into exile. During his exile he is a seafarer for at least part of the time.

Meanwhile Freawaru goes looking for supporters, but finds none. Ingeld, from his exile organises for her to live in the sacred grove, where she will be safe from his kin, in the same way as later cast-off queens were sent to a nunnery. She lives in a cave under an oak tree.

The story is completed in The Husband’s Message, with Ingeld sending Freawaru a secret message carved in runes on the oak tree in the grove. The message is encoded because he doesn’t want his kin to find out. He has overcome his troubles and established himself somewhere safe from the Danes. When the cuckoo sings in the grove, marking spring, she is to sail south and rejoin him.

The Hidden Ingeld – Pt I

In 797, Alcuin of York, an English religious consellor to the pious Franks, famously wrote to the Bishop of Lindisfarne, about the use of secular verse and music in the cloisters:

Verba Dei legantur in sacerdotali convivio. Ibi decet lectorem audiri, non citharistam; sermones patrum, non carmina gentilium. Quid Hinieldus cum Christo?

“The words of God should be read when monks eat together. There only the scripture-reader should be heard, not the lute-player; the sermons of the holy fathers, not the songs of the people. What has Ingeld to do with Christ?”

Apart from being excellent evidence that the harp was indeed used to accompany the recitation of heroic lays, this indicates that among the Anglo-Saxons the Ingeld legends enjoyed a preeminent status. While the Frankish clergy was successful in extirpating nearly all traces of the traditional lays from the continental domains of the Franks, at least some of the older stories have come down to us, recorded by the Anglo-Saxon clergy.

The use by the clergy of traditional verse techniques to compose pious material probably accounts for the collection and retention the secular material which has come down to us. It was probably justified as providing raw material for religious poetry. Similar clerical fulminations were directed against the reading of the secular Latin classics, but the prestige of Latin and the need to retain knowledge of the language of imperial power ensured that they survived.

Apart from the glorious Beowulf, however, it must be admitted that the pickings in terms of surviving heroic legendary material from England are rather slim. The only lengthy depiction of the once dominant Ingeld cycle is to be found in a passage in Beowulf describing his bride-to-be Freawaru and predicting a less than happy end to the story. Other than that, he is only mentioned briefly in the poem Widsið as being defeated by his enemies.

The Exeter Book, which contains Widsith, is our main source of non-religious traditional poetry outside of the Beowulf manuscript. It contains a considerable amount of religious poetry, an large number of impenetrable verse-riddles, some gnomic verse and several rather mysterious shortish poems which we know as the elegies.

Of these, both Widsith and another poem Deor contain clear references to legendary material. It also seems likely that the elegaic poem Wulf and Eadwacer is in some way related to a cycle of legends surrounding Theoderic, on the basis that the name Eadwacer is the English version of Odoacer, who was Theoderic’s enemy. More than that is impossible to know except that the poem certainly contains no references to Ingeld. So the possibility that other elegies are related to epic heroic lays is not at all far-fetched.

Might they even contain material going back to all those songs about Ingeld which were being recited in English monasteries at the end of the 8th century and so infuriated Alcuin? I suggest that parts of the Ingeld cycle do indeed survive in anonymous form in other poems in the Exeter Book, protected from clerical censorship by their obscurity. I believe that this ‘hidden Ingeld’ material is to be found in the poems The Wife’s Lament, The Seafarer and The Husband’s Message.

The Beowulf story tells how Hroðgar King of Denmark has offered his daughter Freawaru to Ingeld the Heaðobard, whose father was killed by the Danes, to settle the feud and cement an alliance. Beowulf predicts that Ingeld’s kin will not take kindly to his marrying the daughter of his father’s killer. His prediction that there will be blood spilled and that Ingeld’s love for his bride will cool is confirmed in a later Danish telling of the tale by Saxo Grammaticus (read this magnificent piece in full here). In Widsið we learn that Ingeld subsequently attacked Hroðgar in Denmark and was defeated. We don’t know what happened to him after that. But after such a defeat, if he wasn’t killed, it is certainly possible that he was on the run.

The Wife’s Lament tells of a royal couple who are separated as a result of the husband being forced to leave and pressure from the husband’s kin. She now lives alone in a sacred grove. The man is portrayed as in exile, at least partly on a ship. The first section of The Seafarer contains the lament of a man who once lived among warriors, who must now voyage as an exile on the cold seas. The Husband’s Message tells of a ruler who has overcome problems which forced him to go away on a ship and now asks his former wife to join him in his new life.

There is no doubt that the three elegies fit together quite well. The Exeter Book materials can also be viewed as a continuation of the Ingeld story in Beowulf and Widsið, with Ingeld on the run and his wife alone and desperate. By tying them all together we can develop an powerful alternative perspective for reading the Exeter Book poems.

In The Hidden Ingeld – Pt II, I discuss how each of the poems can be read so they all fit together as part of the Ingeld saga.

Here is a summary of the complete story derived from a combined reading:

The speaker in The Wife’s Lament is Freawaru. She is the daughter of the Hroðgar, King of the Danes, given in marriage to Ingeld the Heaðobard, whose father was killed in battle by the Danes, together with the hero Wiðergyld .

Things go well for a while in the Heaðobard court, until Ingeld, provoked by an old warrior from among his own followers, kills one of Freawaru’s thanes. He then leaves his wife behind and goes off to fight the Danes, by whom he is defeated and subsequently goes into exile. During his exile he is a seafarer for at least part of the time.

Meanwhile Freawaru goes looking for supporters, but finds none. Ingeld, from his exile organises for her to live in the sacred grove, where she will be safe from his kin, in the same way as later cast-off queens were sent to a nunnery. She lives in a cave under an oak tree.

The story is completed in The Husband’s Message, with Ingeld sending Freawaru a secret message carved in runes on the oak tree in the grove. The message is encoded because he doesn’t want his kin to find out. He has overcome his troubles and established himself somewhere safe from the Danes. When the cuckoo sings in the grove, marking spring, she is to sail south and rejoin him.