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As Though “Wit” Never Were: The Dual Pronoun as Interpretive Crux in The Wife’s Lament

The cryptic speaker of the Old English poem we call The Wife’s Lament has long been the subject of speculation. She is painted as hopeful,1 mournful,2 vindictive;3 her song is a lament by a dead woman,4 a curse by a living woman5—or, perhaps, not a woman’s song at all.6 For some, she evokes erotic longing; for others, bitter regret. In many ways, however, this plethora of interpretations demonstrates the limitations of a narrative-driven analysis when that narrative remains unclear; barring future manuscript discoveries (or time travel), our speculations regarding the “true” nature of the Wife’s circumstance must remain exactly that. What we are left with is the poem itself: a concrete manifestation of language and syntax that presumably has, beyond the unknown specifics of the narrative, a discrete rhetorical structure that remains intact. In this paper I aim to move beyond the identity of the Wife as speaker towards an exploration of The Wife’s Lament as speech—to examine the impact rather