ABSTRACT
Various stories have been found to map on to this poem about love. The departed husband could be the gadabout Ecgtheow in the background of Beowulf, for example (Biddle 1997). The Wife may be dead, speaking from beyond the grave, as a valkyrie does in the Norse Helgakviða Hundingsbana II ‘Second Lay of Helgi Hundingsbane’ (Johnson 1983; see also Lench 1970). Or she may be the mound spirit of the old religion whose devotee, by becoming Christian, has abandoned her (Doane 1966), or an English version of Gerðr, the coerced giantess in The Lay of Skírnir whom Freyr is due to love and leave in nine days’ time (Orton 1989; Luyster 1998; see Gods of the Vikings). It is even possible to match the Wife’s emotions with the vehemence of Brynhildr’s lost love for Sigurðr when the young prince stays with her after fi ghting the dragon Fáfnir. The Wife’s Lament could thus be read as an English variant on the Germanic legend of Sigurðr’s ‘prior betrothal’ with Brynhildr (see The Fragmentary Lay of Sigurðr and The First Lay of Guðrún). This seems less likely, but it is intriguing, nonetheless, that The Wife’s Lament allows such possibilities. Sigurðr goes off with promises to return, which he forgets by drinking a potion from Guðrún’s mother. Sigurðr’s initial absence could be read into the situation of The Husband’s Message, as is the present editor’s view, but a mapping of Sigurðr’s ‘prior betrothal’ on to The Wife’s Lament seems less certain. This is so if we remember that the speaker meets her man before she moves to her protective enclosure.
