4 - Trauma and Apocalypse in the Eco-elegies

Summary

Abstract

The Wanderer and The Ruin are productively read as eco-elegies: explorations of changing relationships within the Earth community. The Wanderer offers its audience an exemplary portrait of natural depression, a human pattern of exile, emotional trauma, and acceptance which relies on identification with the Earth community as a way of healing. The poem affirms the idea that other-than-human elements of Earth community can actively improve the mental state of their human neighbors and reconcile apocalyptic loss. The Ruin contrasts this apocalyptic imagery with an imagined future where the Earth community responds to, but ultimately outlasts, the destruction of human societies. These eco-elegies encourage audiences to consider the long view of Christian history, pacifying anxieties about human relationships with other-than-human.

Keywords: exile, sailing, architecture, dream vision, eschatology, ecopsychology

The riddles of the Exeter Book form a mostly coherent generic group: grammatical, structural, and syntactic similarities across the collection enable scholars to think broadly about “the Exeter riddles” as a unit, as I have just done. Scholars have traditionally written with similar certainty about “the Exeter elegies,” another generic group within the manuscript that is usually taken to include Deor, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wife's Lament, The Husband’s Message, The Rhyming Poem, Resignation, The Seafarer, The Wanderer, and The Ruin. In her definitive edition, Anne Klinck writes that Old English elegies are united by their use of “a lyrical-reflective mode” and structural features such as “a monologue, personal introduction, gnomic or homiletic conclusion, and the ordered repetition of words and sounds, amounting occasionally to refrain or rhyme.” She argues that, above all else, “the concept of ‘elegy’ in an [early medieval English] context provides us with a convenient locus for particular themes: exile, loss of loved ones, scenes of desolation, the transience of worldly joys.”

Klinck does not explicitly state, perhaps because it seems obvious, that with the possible exception of the penultimate entry, this thematic definition centers human experience: exile from human society, loss of human life, and the reactions of emotional humans to understanding of their own transience.