The Wife's Lament is one of the most popular Old English poems. It has a voluminous scholarly bibliography. It's an automatic inclusion in any anthology of Old English texts. Googling it results in multiple hits. Yet the secondary criticism of the poem is somewhat homogenous, and critics have preferred to build their literary interpretations on existing accounts of the structure of the poem rather than interrogate those structures.
So much is uncertain about 'The Wife's Lament'. Is the speaker a man or a woman? What is the speaker's relationship to the hlaford? Why is the hlaford abroad? Why do the kinsmen plot and against whom? Where is the speaker now? These uncertainties have proved troublesome because it is tempting to conclude they need to be resolved. This is partly the result of modern editorial methods. As Curry comments, 'Anglo-Saxon syntax being what it is, even a matter so small as placing a period becomes a commitment to a personal vision of the poem's speaker or the speaker's lord' (1966).
When the poem proves inexplicable in itself, it's easy to appeal to a lost tradition, bemoaning our ignorance. Malone is in 'no doubt' that 'other poems of th[is] kind were composed but they have not come down to us' (1962). Such critics try to reconstruct the mythos of Anglo-Saxon women's writing, calling in analogues from other literatures. Having reconstructed this mythos, it's tempting to assume that we are in a position to read the poem as it was read centuries ago and find it to be 'one of these works of the past which somehow speak to the present with the same powerful voice heard by their original audience' (Renoir 1977).
This 'ingenious desparation' is so objectionable because it ignores a historically valid context in which we can read the poem, the Exeter Book itself (see the section on 'The Manuscript'). This rejection of manuscript context as an aid to interpretation springs from the outmoded view of scribes as monastic interpolators and ignorant copyists. Listen to Renoir: 'following the manuscript text as it stands would have meant running the risk of trading one set of possible inaccuracies for another, since the Anglo-Saxon practice of recording poetry as though it were prose would make it difficult to refer to metrical units which must have been as significant to the original audience as they are to the modern reader' (1977).
This begs all kinds of questions, not least why the Anglo-Saxons presented their poetry as prose when they frequently presented Latin poetry as verse. Prose presentation means that the recognition of half lines is dependent on manuscript pointing and patterned word order. The poem is less a structured delineation of situation and emotion than a rolling torrent of sadness and memory.