Storm-thoughts and ice-songs: A creative-critical response to Old English eco-poetry

Abstract This article looks at how ecocritical readings of The Wanderer , The Wife’s Lament , and Exeter Book riddles can inspire an ‘ecocreative’ way of rewriting and reimagining Old English verse. My creative-critical response shows how the self is shaped by environments in these poems; demonstrates that nature can reshape the roles allotted to men and women within society; presents poetic speech as both a human and nonhuman phenomenon; and situates the personal human loss of the elegies within the inhuman temporal perspectives of the riddles. I put these critical interpretations into creative practice by translating the speeches of the wanderer, wife, wind, water, and ice into one another and creating a more ‘ecological’ lyric voice that is at once human and more-than-human. My new creative-critical approach plays across the generic, gendered, and ontological boundaries set in place by previous scholarly, editorial, and translational practices. In the process, I remake these Old English texts as contemporary, polyphonic ecopoems.