Grounding Grief: The Role of Landscape Imagery in Female-Voiced Old English Laments
I present an interpretation of the expressions of grief in the female-voiced Old English poems Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife’s Lament that do not adhere to the heroic ideal of war and death predicated by Anglo-Saxon society. Unable to look to tribal history and legend resulting from this ideal as a means of providing comfort for the loss of husbands and lovers, the female voices of these poems instead respond to representations of their physical landscapes as a source of solace. In this thesis, I analyze the role of language and social norms in maintaining gendered experiences of grief and argue that these gendered experiences directly influence how the images of the natural environment ground each speaker’s grief in a way the heroic culture cannot.