Rereading The Wife’s Lament with Dido of Carthage: The Husband and the Herheard
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This is an interesting paper, I think, but has some pretty severe flaws. The big issue is with its structure: it is not clear to me why the author essentially wrote three mini-essays and then jammed them together. It would have been better to have submitted the mini-essays as separate papers. Beyond this, Part I strikes me as overly speculative (too many conjectures; the Dido comparison seems pretty forced; etc.); Part II on oaths should try to contextualize the OE material a bit more broadly (note, for instance, James Cathey's work on rad in Old Saxon) and needs to argue in more detail for its conclusion (and I still see the Dido comparison as pretty forced); Part III is either too short or too long (either it should be expanded into a more general discussion of the topic or reduced to a few sentences). My recommendation is that the author should be encouraged to develop the three mini-articles into three longer articles that treat the material in more detail. The essay should also be carefully edited, as some of the rhetorical devices are a bit over the top.
Author Response
Author thanks the reviewer for the valuable comments.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This essay reconsiders the classification of the husband in The Wife's Lament as "cruel" by placing the Wife's earth-dwelling into the context monastic cave-dwellings. To achieve this, the author places the Wife's woe into the context of a more overt curse, the curse uttered by Dido in the Aeneid. The author then goes on to discuss the nature of oaths in Early English society and examines the language in the poem that his often used to gesture to the husband's "cruelty." Finally, the writer considers archeological evidence of cave-dwellings.
While this study is sometimes bogged down by the number of disparate secondary sources that are needed to produce the study, ultimately this essay is a valuable contribution to the study of a notoriously elusive poem. The study is at its best during its consideration of the archeological context of religious cave dwellings; this discussion is unique and helps broaden the discussion of the Wife's earthen accommodation.
I should note a minor error on page 8 of the PDF document. Here, the author italicizes "the" rather than the title "Wanderer." Additionally, it would be beneficial to provide an additional subheading between the discussion of earth-dwellings in Old English literature and the return of the discussion to Dido of Carthage.
Finally, I should note that the author uses “Anglo-Saxon” throughout the document. I would like to point out that the use of the term “Anglo-Saxon” is moving out of favor in Early Medieval Studies in favor of terms like “Early English”, “Pre-Conquest England” and “researchers of Pre-Conquest England.” While I will not mandate the substitution of these terms, I do believe it important that the author be made aware before stepping into a potential minefield.
Author Response
Author thanks the reviewer for the valuable comments.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
See attached file.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Author thanks the reviewer for the valuable comments.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
The author argues that The Wife’s Lament is not show-casing a female persona who has been hard-done-by by the male authority figure. In this reading, she may curse him at the end, but within an implied plot in which he has treated her well by placing her in the cave setting for her protection. A lot depends on assumptions about underlying oaths. The writer suggests the priority of oaths made in the public space of the hall over the mead cup vs any other oath, including vows of marriage. This is useful material to bring forth in relation to the poem, and so worth publishing, even as I’m not clear why the alternative (laid out at n. 44 to be dismissed) isn’t equally convincing. The whole essay presents a speculative reading of the back-story to the poem which is reasonably credible, if not necessarily more convincing than other suggested readings.
What is new here derives from a recent/on-going archaeological project devoted to rock-cut structures in cliff faces in the Midlands of England, with a suggestion that many date back to early medieval times (and occasionally earlier) and were used as hermitages. While this, too, presently seems rather speculative, it is fascinating for those interested in early medieval England and does make for a wonderful new way of thinking of the Wife’s imagined quarters. There are a couple of difficulties for making the connection – the writer suggests that the Christian-crafted examples were imagined by the poet as being in olden days pagan shrines since that seems to run counter to the evidence for most of the surviving examples, and a literalistic reader might wonder why such rock-appearing structures would be described as an eorð-scræf or eorð-sele, i.e. earthy. Still, this suggestion, and this report and illustrations, will be much appreciated by readers of the special issue. This is clearly worth publishing.
There are a couple of odd elements to the tone that the writer might want to smooth out. The piece opens pushing hard on an argument contrary to Niles’s reading of the poem – which seems a bit strange in a festschrift for Niles, if certainly permissible. Subsequent elements build on many of Niles’s suggestions, including his central (debatable) premise that the woman is cursing. I wonder if the writer would want to flag appreciation of Niles’s readings a little more.
More important, while rehabilitation of the husband is a perfectly reasonable case to try to make, it is a bit over-argued here. Calling a critic’s contrary case “defamation” of the husband is needlessly inflammatory language (about Klinck, p. 4) which suggests a non-scholarly register. It is, after all, a poem. And it is rather noticeable that critics who get a savaging in this essay are women. I’m not suggesting that the writer should savage male critics for balance, but perhaps soften a little the adversarial language in disagreeing with those who have speculated on other readings.
There are a few signs of incompleteness and typos which need attention, as well as some significant mangling by the production crew. Block quotations are malformed throughout, causing incomprehensibility for prose quotes and a bit of a mess for some of the verse ones. There’s a couple of incomplete references marked X. And there’s a number of typos, including occasional but recurring Worchestershire for Worcestershire, while I think n. 70 is probably referring to overhangs rather than overhands.
And so, I think it would be fair to say that I wasn’t entirely convinced by the argument of the essay, but that I think it is entirely worth publishing and bringing into the scholarly domain. My suggestions for revision are really just those very slight ones about tone. With those shifts, I think this will be well received.
Author Response
Author thanks the reviewer for the valuable comments.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
I shall be blunt in this report, as I believe that the author will be better served by candor than by obfuscation. First, I still do not think that the essay is structured properly. Yes, the mini-essay structure is now explicitly explained as an homage in footnote 9, but I would contend that a Festschrift would be the appropriate place for such an homage, not a refereed journal. Second, this structure causes, in my view, a number of other issues. To give three, the section on oaths takes us very far afield -- why not just give one example and a few references and make the connection between that kind of oath and The Wife's Lament; the section on caves is largely irrelevant (though interesting), as the point is that there were cave dwellings during the relevant time period, not the various types of caves and most of the rest of the material it covers; and the structure makes the entire essay seem somewhat forced. I understand that the author is interested in these things, but again, a lot of it just does not go in the essay. The rhetoric still needs to be adjusted, the Hamlet quotation is an example of the author's attempts to appear learned (as the reference is unnecessary), and I would still like more on Dido, especially because she's in the title of the essay. I would therefore still encourage the author to split this paper up and expand and then publish the mini-essays separately.
