Anglo-Saxon Elegies

 

Anglo Saxons Elegiac Poems

These elegiac poems in general highlight personal sufferings. They are radically different from the Anglo – Saxon war poems in which vigorous actions devoid of any human sentiments are glorified. In the elegiac poems human emotion flow from the effects of war and fights, loneliness, separation, exile, passionate yearnings, etc. This indicates changes that the Anglo-Saxon poetry appears to be undergoing at this stage. Intense sentiment of loss destruction is expressed in some elegiac works such as Deor, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wife’s Complaint, The Ruined Burg, and others.

The Ruined Burg

The Ruined Burg is full of sentimental lamentation for a city that has come to ruins. It is not a Christian poem, but it is full of emotions that we do not find in any of Anglo-Saxons poems...read more

The battle of Maldon

The first mingling of the Christian prayer with the pure Teutonic passion for war and noise and arms was to met with in the Battle of Maldon. Cazamian observes that this verse has been inserted in prose chronicle ‘glorify the great victory which Athelstan, the King of Wessex and Mercia, and his brother, Edward won at Bunanburgh in 937 over Scots under Constantine and Northmen whom Aulaf led out of Ireland’...read more

The Seafarer

The Seafarer lacks clarity of thought. Hardships of life on the sea are detailed, the miseries that the poet seaman faces in winter of which the dweller in the castle knows nothing; yet he feels down to the sea and can not resist the attraction of homely life can deter him. Suddenly, from 1.64  onwards we find in this poem a “comparison between the transitory nature of earthly pleasures and the eternal rewards of religion”. Finally, the poet exhorts the people to pin their hopes on the heaven. Some scholars think that the religious section was an addition that was made later on.

The Wife’s Complaint

Personal miseries and tragic circumstances are the subject matter of another elegiac poem, The Wife’s Complaint. The narrator is a woman whose husband left her and went to the sea. His relatives imprison her in a place dug out of earth under an oak tree where she left lamenting her fate. Friendliness and forsaken she bewails her loneliness and the vows of love that have come to nothing.  

The Husband’s Message

It exists in fragments of which a good many lines are lost forever. It is believed that the poem is a sequel to The Wife’s Complaint in which “ a speech is addressed, apparently by means of a staff inscribed with runic letters, to a woman of royal rank”. The speech lays before the woman the circumstances that led the warrior out of home and he has been able to gain a position of wealth and dignity, and assures her that his love is unchange. Opinion among critics is not unanimous whether this poem is a sequel to the earlier one, The Wife’s Complaint. Some would wish to see it as an independent poem.

The Wanderer

The wanderer is also a long poem, comprising 115 lines in the elegiac strain. It deals with the sufferings of a man who has lost his lord. Lonely and companionless, he wanders about and goes to the sea seeking protection and safety. He dreams of happiness which he had lost coming back to him. But having woken up, he again comes face to face with the vast grey expanse of the sea and snow, and mediates about difficulties of life. We learn a lot about the relationship between the master and man. Some say that the poem was the work of Cynewolf, but there are few subscribers to his view.

Deor / Deor’s Laments

In Deor or Deor’s Laments, the writer laments his misfortunes which he suffered at the hands of different people. It is written in strophic form throughout which each strophe ending with a refrain, “that (trouble) was got over (or brought to an end ) ; so can this be”. A different trouble is mentioned in each strophe. The first strophe deals with what Weland suffered at the hands of Nithhad and the second strophe describes the trouble created by Weland for Beaduhild. This, some scholars claim, derives from the Old Norse poem Volundarkvida. Strophe four describes Teodric’s exile for thirty years and so on.