Our Giedd

Translation of "Wulf and Eadwacer" by Zoe Lee Mitchell

Part I: My Mother’s Song

Lēodum is mīnum swylce him mon lāc gife;
willað hȳ hine āþecgan gif hē on þrēat cymeð.
Ungelīc is ūs.
Wulf is on īege, ic on ōþerre.
Fæst is þæt ēglond, fenne biworpen.
Sindon wælrēowe weras þǣr on īge;
willað hȳ hine āþecgan gif hē on þrēat cymeð.
Ungelīce is ūs.
Wulfes ic mīnes wīdlāstum wēnum dogode,
þonne hit wæs rēnig weder ond ic rēotugu sæt,
þonne mec se beaducāfa bōgum bilegde,
wæs mē wyn tō þon, wæs mē hwæþre ēac lāð.
Wulf, mīn Wulf! wēna mē þīne
sēoce gedydon, þīne seldcymas,
murnende mōd, nales metelīste.
Gehȳrest þū, Ēadwacer? Uncerne earne hwelp
bireð wulf tō wuda.
Þæt mon ēaþe tōslīteð þætte nǣfre gesomnad wæs,
uncer giedd geador.

Part II: Translating Mother’s Riddle

She said:
To my putrid people it is like a battle prize
They wish to gorge him if he goes to their gang
She said: He is unalike us
He [Wulf] is on an island I [She] on another
Fast is that island fixed by fen
They are godless gunmen there on said island
They wish to gorge him if he goes to their gang
She claimed: they are unalike us
Confessed: my wishes followed Wulf’s wanderings like a dog
when it was rainy weather I sat rotting and wailing
Then the battle-born bull binded me to his arm
I felt tender there as I did contempt
She cried
Wulf, my Wulf! My want of you
Renders me sick with your seldom visits
A mourning mind fed plenty of morsel
A scream:
You hear me, Eadwacer [my father? her captor]? our accursed whelp
Wulf bears to the wood.

She sings how so: easily torn is that which could never be sewn
the riddle of us two as one.

Part III: In Her Memory, A Grandchild’s Song

The green-eyed water absorbs us. We drink the stories it whispers like song.

Time and time again, we’ve listened for the twists and turns of a tale. We mark the dead-ends
where some, like her, were left. When the icy blue of the fenland warms to green, then grass,
we see abandoned thrones of tree. Yellow bells bloom at their feet, saturated by the moon’s
tide. We wonder if her limbs ever embraced them.

Farther away, past our village rooftops and to the woods, a wolf howls. He sings the same story
as the water, but he sings it like lament, wishing that island fixed by fen had crumbled quick.

Unalike are we–

The blossoms of her dreams: those at the edge of forests and those across the fen-born sea.
Though we both watch the marsh rise and vanish, never is there enough time to cross.
It’s said that is why they brought us there. How then were we brought here?

The gap in the story, through which morning smoke billows. They only ever speak of a war from
which we bear their scars. A war he bore, a war she paid for, passed down through every tear
inflicted and plunged into water, drunken by us wondering if it ever truly finished.

Through the wind we hear the echoes of a cry, fierce and somber, in words we should know but
cannot revive.

willað hȳ hine āþecgan

gif hē on þrēat cymeð

willað hȳ hine āþecgan

Would she come to receive us?
Did she wish for our return?
Or has she labeled us as them

godless men
carnage-covered
wretched warriors
blood-battered
the þrēat

So unalike are we now

A threat that would not save her. A threat that could not understand. In the confines of that cage,
she sung herself to sleep with nothing left. Exile’s emotion, she sung to shackles and she sung
to walls and she sung to her putrid, putrid people who would not hear her song. And she sung to
her bloodstained whelp on that day she asked nature to whisk it away.

Now on this far island, through memory and rain, we find refuge among ruin. In the roaring basin
of our rivers, in the branches of our oak, can we finally wander, can we listen.

They say that then, wolves and humans were kindred.
Wulf, mīn Wulf, she cries.

He howls back as we outlive them.

"Wulf and Eadwacer" is an Old English poem by an unknown author. Zoe Lee Mitchell translated the famously difficult-to-interpret poem in 2025. Here, the translation is woven throughout the piece.