ABSTRACT
There is little agreement to date on what the story could or should be. One big puzzle is that the last four lines of the poem can be set out in the Norse metre ljóðaháttr; not only this, but the preceding poem, which has a refrain, is divisible into four stanzas of another Norse metre, fornyrðislag. Old English verse is not stanzaic, but Old Norse verse is. One solution thus argued is that it is a riddle composed in the Danelaw for an English-speaking audience of Danish descent, who may have guessed the solution to be Signý of the Vllsungs (North 1994). Elsewhere the Exeter Book offers texts that seem to spring from York or elsewhere in the Anglo-Scandinavian north of England (The Rhyming Poem is one), and Sigmundr is known to Anglo-Saxons already as Sigemund, his son as Fitela, in Beowulf, lines 875-900. Signý is married to a man, a king naturally, who has killed her father and brothers. She safeguards her brother Sigmundr, who hides out in the woods, for a day of vengeance, yet cannot provide him with a suffi ciently worthy assistant until, in disguise, she conceives this man as child from Sigmundr her own brother. Sinfjltli grows up to be a monster in human form, and he and his father turn into werewolves while they train in the arts of vengeance. This vengeance is about to be accomplished at the end of the poem. There are other interpretations, but as Wulf and Eadwacer follows Deor and precedes the fi rst 59 Riddles of the Exeter Book, it is possible that it resembles one poem in heroic content and the other poems in riddling form.
