SOURCE: Battles, Paul. “Of Graves, Caves, and Subterranean Dwellings: ‘Eoroscraef’ and ‘Eorosele’ in the Wife's Lament.” Philological Quarterly 73, no. 3 (1994): 267-87.

In the following essay, Battles examines references to subterranean earth dwellings in several Scandinavian and Old English works including the Volsunga Saga.

The past three decades have witnessed a bewildering variety of interpretations of the Old English Wife's Lament. We are no longer even certain that it is, in fact, the lament of a “wife”; critics have suggested that the narrator is a lordless retainer, a heathen deity, the soul yearning for the body (or the body for the soul), or a revenant. Numerous syntactical and lexical ambiguities—as well as the poem's abstract diction in general—have led to interpretations which differ dramatically even in regard to the basic facts of the poem.¹

At the heart of the debate over the general circumstances described by the poem...