The Husband's Message: an allegorical sea journey*

The Husband’s Message is the monologue of a messenger conveying a lord’s love message to his wife. The literal meaning of the poem seems to be, at fi rst glance, quite clear; however, the presence of some runes and an unexpected division into three sections require more attention. The aim of the present article is to investigate these peculiar aspects according to the methodology of Material Philology in particular. The analysis of the context of the Exeter Book and of the graphic cues characterizing the poem enables us to suggest a possible function for the tripartite layout of the text and to clarify the meaning of the runic message at the end. Moreover, the relation between The Husband’s Message and the closest poems in the codex can shed new light on the meaning of the text revealing a possible, further allegorical level of interpretation. This perspective is also supported by textual analysis: various elements appear to be related to biblical symbols and seem to suggest that the sea journey described in The Husband’s Message could be construed allegorically as the process of conversion every Christian should undergo in order to gain eternal salvation. 1. The critics and The Husband’s Message Traditionally categorized as an elegy 1 , The Husband’s Message presents some remarkable complexities on different levels. First of all, the tripartite structure of the poem seems quite unusual, but the reason for this layout in the Exeter Book 2 is not clear. The identity of the narrator is still a mystery owing to a large hole on the manuscript page in which are lost most of the lines in the fi rst section of the poem. Moreover, the interpretation of the secret message shaped by the runes at the end of the text is still a crux. The earliest editors were particularly attentive to the problem of the division of The Husband’s Message into three parts and recognized that the presence of three capital letters throws some doubt upon the unity and the integrity of the text. Whereas Grein’s edition (1857-1858) considered The Husband’s Message as a single text starting from l. 1, Thorpe (1842: 470-475) edited ll. 1-12 as a riddle and ll. 13-54 as a ‘fragment’, thereby underlining the similarity between the fi rst section of the poem and Riddles 30b and 60