If you are just here for stories of monsters and love, I recommend skipping this chapter...as the title says, this is an academic paper based on my retelling of the Old English poems, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer. It's dry and informative, and if you love nerdy word stuff, you'll probably get a kick out of seeing how I changed the enigmatic poems of tragic love into a sci-fi short story.

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Transformative Retelling of Old English Poems:

Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife's Lament

The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, two Old English poems found only in the Exeter Book, and reprinted in A Guide to Old English (Mitchell and Robinson), "present themes of loss, suffering and impermanence of human ties through a woman's voice" (Fell 186). However, both poems remain perplexingly ambiguous about the exact nature of the relationships between the female speakers and the male characters, as well as the details of the events described, and settings. Reasons for this might be that the original audience possessed contextual knowledge for the poems, or, as Jones suggests concerning Wulf and Eadwacer, the poem relies on a text unknown to us for clearer interpretation (323). For this project, I have chosen to merge The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, and transpose the characters and events into a science-fiction-based short story. I argue that by creating a retelling dependent on context and intertextual references for comprehension, I can maintain and explore the key characteristics of the poems, namely ambiguity, emotional suffering of a female protagonist, and disrupted social ties, in a modern, science-fiction short story.

Before discussing these three characteristics, though, I will explain how I transferred the poems to a science-fiction context and added modern intertextuality. Concerning the change from poetic narration to science fiction, I relied on the concept of the separation between a physical state and an emotional one. As Fell explains, "physical suffering is not what the poems are about. The preoccupation is with emotional deprivation, the loss of those things which put joy into life, usually expressed in terms of human relationships" (187). This distinction between physical and emotional, or mental, is represented by virtual reality in the story. Virtual reality, a well-known playground for the science-fiction genre, creates a paradox of users being connected and disconnected at the same time, and also allows me to explore the concept of "wurldrice" in the plural. In addition to the differentiation of planes of reality, intertextual references throughout the story may change how a reader interprets the text. Movie-goers should recognize world building inspiration from films such as The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski), Inception (Nolan), eXistenZ (Cronenberg), Ready Player One (Spielberg), and 12 Monkeys (Gilliam). Likewise, gamers may identify similarities in the construction of the virtual world with Second Life (Linden Lab). Readers of pop-culture will also understand the protagonist's cry, "Watchman! Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" as a reference to the super-hero graphic novel, Watchmen (Moore), which questions the role of power in flawed heroes. However, the most obvious intertextual reference is Frankenstein, by Mary W. Shelley, when the protagonist suggests that she and the man are both the creators and the monsters of their own making, and they are brought to life through a spark. While the short story may be read as a self-contained text, clues to better understanding it can be gleaned from the many intertextual references, as well as the context of a future setting.

As mentioned above, "The Wife's Lament is perhaps the most enigmatic of the small number of Old English elegies which has been preserved" (Short 585), and "the underlying story" of Wulf and Eadwacer, another elegiac poem, "seems totally obscure" (Fry 248). For the retelling, I have attempted to recreate the feeling of an ambiguous, obscure text in two mirroring ways: by leaving the setting descriptions vague, and by giving an abundance of conflicting labels to the man being sought.

The setting of the story alternates between the hostile, natural landscape inspired by the poems, and a vague, urban one. The protagonist walks through an unnamed "City", described metaphorically as a "grid of predictability". She calls the "Grove" a "grafted grey area", which does not know rules exist. Specific words from The Wife's Lament are integrated in the urban landscape, such as "bearwe" (26), "actreo" (27), "bitre burgtunas brerum" (31), which become the "Grove", the sign of the oak tree, and the barbed wire that scratches the protagonist. Also, "stanhliþe storme behrimed" (48), influences the description of the desolate, ice-rimmed hillside in the world within the virtual world. When the protagonist uses the "sphere", her mind splits and she is "the floating eye in the system's veins", also a metaphorical description. This moment corresponds to the line "Wulfes ic mines widlastum wenum dogode", (9), from Wulf and Eadwacer, which seems to suggest the speaker seeking Wulf (the man) in the wide tracks of her mind or imagination. Additional words from Wulf and Eadwacer include: "iege" (4) "fenne biworpen" (5), and "wuda" (16), for the island where the man is hiding, the code which is like a swamp, and the woods as the "wilds" in the story.

The man, however, is overly described, in acknowledgement to the numerous translations possible of the original poems. The protagonist insists he has "followers" and that he is their "guiding light, their god", giving his role a religious connotation. Indeed, she even proclaims enigmatically, "my god". The two of them are "mad scientists" and "Frankensteins", meaning monster and creator, and she likens him to a "wolf". In addition, the protagonist explains that they were "friends", "partners", "lovers", and then he became a "leader" of followers—possibly her leader, as well. After she sees his image on the rocky hillside, she calls out "watchman" and implies he is a guardian leading his followers to their deaths, thereby becoming a murderer. After these many descriptions, he finally appears unconscious, lying prone in a pod, leaving his true identity difficult to define.

As mentioned earlier the poems are also similar in that they both focus on the emotional suffering of separation and loss, specifically of a female speaker. As with most Old English texts, the authors of The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer are unknown, but the poems are grouped under the larger category of women's poetry, or frauenlieder, for their "female-voice lyrics" (Desmond 574). To establish the gender of the protagonist of the short story, the games evangelist calls her "daughter, while the noodles vendor uses the pronoun "she". While her gender is not otherwise emphasized in the story, the leadership within the company appears to make decisions for her, which parallels the "monnes magas hycgan" (The Wife's Lament 11), or the man's plotting kinsmen. Assuming this near-future business is modeled after the present-day ones, then the board would be primarily male, putting the protagonist of the short story in a gendered position of lesser power.

The Wife's Lament describes emotional suffering with "geomorre" (1), "wræcsiþa" (5), "uhtceare" (7), and "longade" (14). These words are evoked in the retelling by the panic the protagonist feels when waking before dawn. They also influence the concept that suffering and longing are attached to the mind, and therefore follow her to the virtual world. In the first sentence, the protagonist mentions she has "nothing and no one left". This phrase suggesting a void around her occurs several times in connection to the man, especially his promise that "nothing and no one" would come between them. On the island where he stayed, "nothing and no one" is there. Another motif occurring in relation to the protagonist's suffering is barbed wire, inspired by "bitre burgtunas brerum", and having a distinctly violent connotation. The protagonist sees barbed wire almost creeping over her door to the cellar where she waits for the man, and mentions it is there from a "past skirmish". Additionally, she imagines the man's followers allowing themselves to die in the real world where barbed wire covers them like funeral shrouds. Last, she evokes the feeling of barbed wire in her body when she remembers how it felt to be loved, mixing pain and pleasure. This confliction is also seen in Wulf and Eadwacer, where emotional suffering can be seen in the line, "wæs me wyn to þon, wæs me hwæþre eac lað" (12).

Many parts of the original poems clearly show or suggest broken social ties between the different actors. The protagonist of the story states the theme of betrayal quite succinctly when she says, "Promises were made, promises were broken". In The Wife's Lament, the female speaker bemoans her separation from the man with "þæt wit gewidost in woruldrice" (13). However, broken ties include a wider sense of society as well, as seen in the line "Ærest min hlaford gewat heonan of leodum" (6) to establish the man being a leader of people he has abandoned, and "hygegeomorne / mod miþendne, morþor hycgendne" (19-20), for the man's heart concealing murder. However, the most telling phrase from Wulf and Eadwacer would be "ungelic is us" (3, 8), to show how the man and woman are both different, or separated from others, but also profoundly different from one another in their desires. The original phrase is ambiguous, and I have used it to show the paradoxical connection and disconnection within the relationship as the man betrays the protagonist's trust more and more.

Fell explains that the woman in The Wife's Lament ends her tale with "those are always unhappy who endure longing for a loved one" and ending which would be "equally appropriate to the woman in Wulf and Eadwacer" (186). The enduring longing stems from the disrupted social ties, and therefore there is no release from the desire of what has been promised in the story. When the protagonist goes to the Grove, she remembers he told her to wait for him there, but never returns. She remarks he said other "inconsequential things like we're in this together. We're the architects of our world", sarcastically exposing his betrayal of her trust. Their creation, itself, is centered on disrupted social ties, as users go there for escape, but often engage in violent activities resulting in an avatar's death. Additionally, "bubble heads" go deep in the system, seeking the freedom the man has tried to create, but they lose all sense of reality and physical sensation. In fact, the man has made promises of happiness and lasting connection, not only to the protagonist, but to the entire world, and is now giving them pain and death instead.

To conclude, the elegiac poems, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, make a fascinating template for a story set in a very different context. This is due in part to their enigmatic nature, but also their profound treatment of human relationships and emotional suffering. By transposing the characters and events into the context of virtual reality, and linking it to other well-known science-fiction media, I explored how context and intertextuality change a reader's understanding and perceptions of a story. Hopefully, I was able to maintain the central themes of emotional suffering and disrupted social ties, as well as key characteristics such as ambiguity and the viewpoint of a female protagonist while telling a modern, and thought-provoking tale.

Works Cited

Cronenberg, David. Existenz. Miramax Films, 1999.

Desmond, Marilynn. "The Voice of Exile: Feminist Literary History and the Anonymous Anglo-Saxon Elegy." Critical Inquiry, vol. 16, no. 3, Apr. 1990, pp. 572–90. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1086/448547.

Fell, Christine. "Perceptions of Transcience." The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, edited by Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 172–89.

Fry, Donald K. "'Wulf and Eadwacer': A Wen Charm." The Chaucer Review, vol. 5, no. 4, 1971, pp. 247–63. JSTOR.

Gilliam, Terry. 12 Monkeys. Universal Pictures, 1995.

Jones, F. "A Note on the Interpretation of 'Wulf and Eadwacer.'" Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, vol. 86, no. 3, 1985, pp. 323–27. JSTOR.

Linden Lab. Second Life. Havok, 2003.

Mitchell, Bruce, and Fred C. Robinson. A Guide to Old English. 8th ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Moore, Alan. Watchmen. DC Comics, 1986.

Nolan, Christopher. Inception. Warner Brothers, 2010.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein - Third Edition. Broadview Press, 2012.

Short, Douglas D. "The Old English 'Wife's Lament': An Interpretation." Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, vol. 71, no. 4, 1970, pp. 585–603. JSTOR.

Spielberg, Steven. Ready Player One. Warner Brothers, 2018.

Wachowski, Lilly, and Lana Wachowski. The Matrix. Warner Brothers, 1999.