A Tale of Two Halls: An Exploration of the Natural World in The Wife's Lament

Abstract

Abstract: Past interpretations of The Wife's Lament focus primarily on the intangibles within the poem—speech, emotion, and symbolism—to the neglect of the physical details of the natural world the Wife inhabits. One overlooked detail, in particular, is the inclusion of the oak tree that the Wife sits beneath. This paper explores the Wife's relationship to nature and how it differs dramatically from those depictions found elsewhere in the genre of Old English elegy, paying specific attention to the presence of the oak tree. The presentation of the Wife's relationship to the natural world encourages a reading of the text in which she effectively grows her grief into power, in thematic divergence from the other elegiac voices, such as those within The Seafarer and The Wanderer . In tracing the poem's narrative as well as historical evidence for the reputation and use of oak trees in the early English centuries, I show that the poem reveals a more progressive vision of female autonomy and agency, as the oak tree establishes the Wife as something akin to a lord in her own home, setting the stage for the final tension between her own hall of earth and her husband's hall of stone. In the end, the Wife emerges as a ruler in her own right under her oak tree, and from her tragic tale emerges one of the most powerful—in speech, in action, and in place—female figures in Old English literature.