/lit/ - Literature

What's lit's take on this poem?
>"Wulf and Eadwacer" is an Old English poem of famously difficult interpretation. It has been variously characterised, (modernly) as an elegy, (historically) as a riddle, and (in speculation on the poem's pre-history) as a song or ballad with refrain. The poem's complexities are, however, often asserted simply to defy genre classification, especially with regard to its narrative content. The poem's only extant text is found within the tenth-century Exeter Book, along with certain other texts to which it possesses qualitative similarities.
>some argue the character of Wulf is the speaker's child and not her lover. In this instance, she could be lamenting after her son, hoping that he was okay, or mourning his death. One scholar says: "In Wulf and Eadwacer a woman finds herself in a situation typical of Old English poetry, torn between conflicting loyalties. Many commentators see this particular situation as a sexual triangle, with Wulf the woman’s lover and Eadwacer her husband. If so, then Wulf and Eadwacer is not typical, because most Old English loyalty crises occur within the family group…It is…true that romantic or sexual love was not the literary commonplace before the twelfth century it has been since; other loves took precedence…The situation in Wulf and Eadwacer is far more typically Anglo-Saxon than as usually interpreted, if the speaker is understood to be the mother of the person she addresses as Wulf, as well as of the ‘whelp’ of line 16."[7] his argument that Wulf is actually the narrator’s son gives a different depth to the elegy—it becomes a poem of mourning for her son that seems to be exiled or dead. [8]

Could it be intended as more of a riddle than is assumed by these modern takes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wulf_and_Eadwacer#Text_and_translation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hk63dYO9xo

>>14173529
>I actually have eleven copies
>not just reading the same old beat up copy like a preacher with his dusty bible
never gonna make it

best hardback edition?

>>13813934
Who?

>>13296307
>tfw been NEET 3 years
>still only 19 since I finished school early
>still well below acceptable age for this lifestyle
>parents don't need much rent from me because we're lower class, even manage to save much of my neetbux every week
oh yeah