ABSTRACT
In two areas the text of this poem is irretrievably damaged by the burn that ate into the back of the Exeter Book. The elongated burn-hole is bigger over this text than others, because The Ruin, as the text that follows The Husband’s Message, is closer to the end of the book. Consequently, The Ruin lives up to the name it acquired when it was fi rst edited in the nineteenth century. The poem’s merits lie in the force of description, which compresses long decay into violent action rather like ‘The lament of the last survivor’ in Beowulf, lines 2247-66. The poet’s focus is specifi c, as if he has a real town in mind, although the drama with which his civilisation falls and rises as he moves to and fro, from past to present, also owes something to the Bible, particularly Revelations. The image of a lost city is better known in two memorable vignettes from The Wanderer, in lines 75-80 and 86-7, but there is one clear phrasal connection with The Seafarer as well. Altogether the poem is thematically close to these works, albeit the other ‘elegies’ are intellectually more challenging. The directness of the imagery makes it easier to classify this poem as a riddle than Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wanderer, although from time to time they drift near to that defi nition. If a riddle, the solution of The Ruin may be ‘Bath’, which would have been visibly closer to its late imperial Roman state in the period in which the poem was composed, probably before the mid-tenth century when the baths would have silted up. The poet’s dialect may have been Mercian, even from the ninth century, and it is worth noting that in two places his language resembles that of Cynewulf ’s Christ II (Klinck 1992: 16, 62).
