Tales of Monsters and Angels

Academic write-up on (Blank)

If you are just here for stories of monsters and love, I recommend skipping this chapter...as the title says, this is an academic paper based on my retelling of the Old English poems, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer. It's dry and informative, and if you love nerdy word stuff, you'll probably get a kick out of seeing how I changed the enigmatic poems of tragic love into a sci-fi short story.

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Transformative Retelling of Old English Poems:

Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife's Lament

The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, two Old English poems found only in the Exeter Book, and reprinted in A Guide to Old English (Mitchell and Robinson), "present themes of loss, suffering and impermanence of human ties through a woman's voice" (Fell 186). However, both poems remain perplexingly ambiguous about the exact nature of the relationships between the female speakers and the male characters, as well as the details of the events described, and settings. Reasons for this might be that the original audience possessed contextual knowledge for the poems, or, as Jones suggests concerning Wulf and Eadwacer, the poem relies on a text unknown to us for clearer interpretation (323). For this project, I have chosen to merge The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, and transpose the characters and events into a science-fiction-based short story. I argue that by creating a retelling dependent on context and intertextual references for comprehension, I can maintain and explore the key characteristics of the poems, namely ambiguity, emotional suffering of a female protagonist, and disrupted social ties, in a modern, science-fiction short story.

Before discussing these three characteristics, though, I will explain how I transferred the poems to a science-fiction context and added modern intertextuality. Concerning the change from poetic narration to science fiction, I relied on the concept of the separation between a physical state and an emotional one. As Fell explains, "physical suffering is not what the poems are about. The preoccupation is with emotional deprivation, the loss of those things which put joy into life, usually expressed in terms of human relationships" (187). This distinction between physical and emotional, or mental, is represented by virtual reality in the story. Virtual reality, a well-known playground for the science-fiction genre, creates a paradox of users being connected and disconnected at the same time, and also allows me to explore the concept of "wurldrice" in the plural. In addition to the differentiation of planes of reality, intertextual references throughout the story may change how a reader interprets the text. Movie-goers should recognize world building inspiration from films such as The Matrix (Wachowski and Wachowski), Inception (Nolan), eXistenZ (Cronenberg), Ready Player One (Spielberg), and 12 Monkeys (Gilliam). Likewise, gamers may identify similarities in the construction of the virtual world with Second Life (Linden Lab). Readers of pop-culture will also understand the protagonist's cry, "Watchman! Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" as a reference to the super-hero graphic novel, Watchmen (Moore), which questions the role of power in flawed heroes. However, the most obvious intertextual reference is Frankenstein, by Mary W. Shelley, when the protagonist suggests that she and the man are both the creators and the monsters of their own making, and they are brought to life through a spark. While the short story may be read as a self-contained text, clues to better understanding it can be gleaned from the many intertextual references, as well as the context of a future setting.

As mentioned above, "The Wife's Lament is perhaps the most enigmatic of the small number of Old English elegies which has been preserved" (Short 585), and "the underlying story" of Wulf and Eadwacer, another elegiac poem, "seems totally obscure" (Fry 248). For the retelling, I have attempted to recreate the feeling of an ambiguous, obscure text in two mirroring ways: by leaving the setting descriptions vague, and by giving an abundance of conflicting labels to the man being sought.