When words are inadequate but words are all we have

Yesterday evening I received a message via Twitter from a lovely fella who always reads and comments on my meagre musings.  He goes by the name of @Huscarl1066.  In his DM, he said he wasn’t ignoring my recent posts, but that he didn’t feel up to tweeting at the moment, for his gorgeous wife had just passed away.  What can one say?  Words sometimes seem so useless, don’t they?

Nevertheless, they're sometimes all we have.  So I hope that, here, some words of another husband may prove beneficial, perhaps of some comfort, sometime in the days to come for @Huscarl1066.  I know he loves the history of the Anglo-Saxon era, so here I leave him some words, like a message-bearer, from one of the period’s loveliest poems.

The Husband’s Message is a poem about an exiled man who has been separated from his beloved wife, his dearest friend.  Though he now is a wealthy man in the land to which he was exiled, none of his wealth compares to the desire he has to be reunited with his beloved.

The narrator of the poem is the husband’s message bearer, and so we hear the words he speaks to the wife.  I have adapted the translation by S. A. J. Bradley.



The Winchester Psalter. David playing the harp. British Library, Royal 2A XXII (Winchester or St Albans, c.1200), folio 14v. Image: Public Domain

Look to the ocean, the domain of sea-men.
Take to the ship, go southward hence.
Meet the man beyond the ocean’s way.
Go where your lord is expecting you.

No worldly wish greater in his thoughts –
according to what he told me –
than that it be realized for him
that the all-wielding God
should grant that you two together
may distribute treasure, bossed circlets,
to men and to comrades.

He has plenty of burnished gold,           though his domain is held
within another country,
a lovely land of trusty heroes.

Though to there was my lord impelled by need.
He launched his ship upon the stirring waves,
journeyed alone upon the sea-road,
swirling round the ocean currents,
desperate for the onward way.

But now your man has prevailed above the feud
and has no need of desirable things.
Not of horses nor treasures
Nor the pleasures of mead
Nor the noble stores of wealth upon this earth.
           
O prince’s daughter, if he may possess but you
in accordance with that ancient vow
of the two of you.