son, a SCOP telling her tale, and a fi gment of the speak-
er’s overheated imagination.
The general subject matter has also been the subject
of numerous investigations, and many different sug-
gestions have been made. These have ranged from the
standard (the poem is about a love triangle) to the
unlikely (the poem is about a female dog’s daydream)
to the mundane (the poem is about a wart) to the
bizarre (the poem is about a female zombie). The mul-
tiplicity of the available interpretations has resulted in
years of lively discussions about the poem, if nothing
else.
Because of the recent rise in feminist criticism, criti-
cal attention has been drawn back to “Wulf and Ead-
wacer.” While the author’s gender is unknown, the
speaker’s is not; therefore, the poem becomes an
important artifact of the Anglo-Saxon feminine voice,
perhaps even linked to the Frauenlieder tradition of
Germanic women’s songs. Most importantly, it pre-
serves a feminine literary aspect that provides another
viewpoint to the predominantly phallocentric, male-
dominated Anglo-Saxon corpus. Feminist critics have
further pointed out that many of the earlier interpreta-
tions and translations have, essentially, erased this
feminine voice, subsuming it into the male heroic tra-
dition, denying the inherent sexuality of the speaker
herself. For example, while the poem bears no title in
the manuscript, the one assigned to it refl ects on the
two men and says nothing about the speaker herself.
More research in this direction is sure to be forthcom-
ing and should provide even more intriguing possibili-
ties about this enigmatic poem.
See also ANGLO-SAXON RIDDLES, CHARMS, OLD NORSE /
ICELANIC EDDAS AND SAGAS.
FURTHER READING
Adams, John F. “Wulf and Eadwacer: An Interpretation.”
MLN 73, no. 1 (1958): 1–5.
Baker, Peter S. “The Ambiguity of Wulf and Eadwacer.” Stud-
ies in Philology 78, no. 5 (1981): 39–51.
Davidson, Arnold E. “Interpreting Wulf and Eadwacer.”
Annuale Mediaevale 16 (1975): 24–32.
Giles, Richard R. “Wulf and Eadwacer: A New Reading.”
Neophilologus 65 (1981): 468–472.
Suzuki, Seiichi. “Wulf and Eadwacer: A Reinterpretation and
Some Conjectures.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 88, no. 2
(1987): 175–185.
WYATT, SIR THOMAS (1503–1542) Thomas
Wyatt was born in 1503 at Allington Castle in Kent.
His father, Sir Henry Wyatt, was a faithful supporter of
the Tudors, and his son benefi ted from this in his own
career at court, which began early. Wyatt studied for a
time at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he would
have been exposed to the new humanist learning. As a
gentleman poet and scholar, he probably wrote for his
own and others’ enjoyment in the hours he could spare
from his duties as a courtier and ambassador.
Wyatt married Elizabeth Brooke around 1520, but it
seems to have been an unhappy union, and the couple
lived apart after the birth of their son, Thomas Wyatt the
younger, in 1521. Wyatt’s commissions and appoint-
ments show him to have been a favorite of both HENRY
VIII and Thomas Cromwell. However, the uncertain
machinations of court politics saw him imprisoned in
the TOWER OF LONDON in May 1536 in a wave of arrests
following the downfall of Henry’s second queen, Anne
Boleyn. Although he survived, Wyatt never again felt
secure at court. His “epistolatory SATIREs” to Sir John
Pointz and Sir Francis Bryan (probably composed
between 1536 and 1542) examine the courtier’s rela-
tionship to the court from a position of stoical detach-
ment and personal alienation.
After 1536, Wyatt was sent on diplomatic missions
to the emperor Charles V in an attempt to keep France
and Spain from uniting politically against England.
These were diffi cult years for the poet, who spent much
time away from home and narrowly avoided death in
the Tower again in January 1541. He died prematurely
from fever in October 1542 in Sherborne, Dorset.
Wyatt’s poems, which were never published during
his lifetime, were preserved by his friends and contem-
poraries in several coterie collections. The chief of
these are known as the Egerton, Devonshire, Blage,
and Arundel-Harington manuscripts. Due to the man-
ner in which his poems were transmitted, the extent of
Wyatt’s canon has frequently been disputed. The
Egerton manuscript is generally taken to be the most
authoritative source as it belonged to the poet himself
and includes poems copied or edited by him. How-
ever, a number of poems of uncertain authorship have
also been ascribed to Wyatt by some editors on the
basis of probability.478 WYATT, SIR THOMAS