ABSTRACT
Two women’s love songs appear in The Exeter Book. This tenth-century manuscript book contains the fullest diversity of Old English poetry written before the Normans invaded England. Despite the archaic origins of the women’s lyrics, they express emotions as freshly compelling as if they had been uttered, in a culture or a city where women’s lives might be anything but free. Against a stark setting of masculine rivalry and vendetta, the women’s solitary voices in both The Wife’s Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer mourn their separation from a cherished lover or husband. Tacitus praised the chastity and monogamy of German women, and the strength of the marriage bond. Men revered their women for their gifts of prophecy, he stated. Women are marginal in the greatest of extant Old English poems, Beowulf. In the same period in which the songs of barbarian women were being remembered, English women in monasteries were devoting their emotional energies to Christ and his works.
