HUSBAND’S MESSAGE, THE

(The Lover’s Message)

(10th century)

The Husband’s Messageis an OLD ENGLISH lyric poem preserved in the 10th-century manuscript known as the EXETER BOOK, a large collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The poem is often paired withThe WIFE’S LAMENT, because like that poem it deals with the separation of a husband and wife. Whereas the speaker ofThe Wife’s Lamentis a woman expressing anguish over her husband’s absence,The Husband’s Messageis sent by a man giving his wife reassurances of their coming reunion. Despite the coincidental similarities, though, there is no reason to believe that the two poems were intended to be companions.

Although the poem has been damaged by a fire that scorched the later pages of the manuscript, enough is intact to clarify the poem’s situation.One of the remarkable aspects of the poem is that its speaker is, in fact, a staff that the husband has sent, carved with runes that reveal his message to her. Giving voice to inanimate objects was a familiar device in Old English RIDDLES. The first part of the poem, where most of the fire damage has occurred, is clearly the personal history of the staff, in which it establishes its credentials as a messenger, speaking of how it has traveled with its lord (the woman’s husband) in many foreign lands and has come by ship to bring her a message from him.

The message describes the husband’s state: Though a feud has driven him from his home and wife to live in exile, he has found a new home among strangers and now has accumulated some wealth and property. Therefore he is sending for his wife, and the signal for her to board ship and come to him will be the first cry of the cuckoo. In the last section of the poem, the husband gives a runic signature, which is his pledge to keep the promises he made to her in their youth. The runic message has been the subject of some critical speculation, but the point seems to be that only the wife receiving the message would understand it.

■ Alexander,Michael, trans.The Earliest English Poems. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1966.

■ Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds.The Exeter Book. Vol. 3, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. New York: Columbia University Press, 1936.