Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons^™

More than a decade ago, Kemp Malone asserted that The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer are two surviving examples in Old English of Frauenlieder or, as I shall prefer to call them, "women's songs" Malone's argument, insofar as it applies to The Wife's Lament, has been forcefully challenged by Rudolph C. Bambas and Martin Stevens, both of whom question the assumption that the feminine forms in the poem point to a woman speaker. My paper will not once again sift the linguistic evidence to attempt to argue this matter one way or another, but rather, accepting Malone's belief …