The trails we cannot follow : tracks and non-pursuable spaces in Beowulf and Wulf and Eadwacer

This thesis considers the literal and figurative tracks of two Old English poems, Beowulf and Wulf and Eadwacer, in conversation with a larger corpus of medieval texts. I approach these tracks as traces, and examine what and who are defined in their absence in these texts. Building on scholarship on postcolonial and ecocritical approaches to early medieval England, I explore the connection between figures of alterity and tracks in early English texts. In my first chapter, I engage the role of known and unknown tracks in Beowulf in conversation with a recent scholarly concern for the poem’s connection between place and secrecy. I offer the importance of Grendelkin as figures defined by their tracks, and therefore storied as figures departing the land, or in need of removal, which holds both anti-Indigenous and metaphysical resonances. In my second chapter, I focus on the role of traces and acts of salvaging in Wulf and Eadwacer. I argue that the poem construes two of its characters as figures of alterity, by defining them in their absence. In regards to the character Wulf, I connect this observation with the scholarly debate on whether Wulf is an exile or dead, making his “widlastum” [far-tracks] literal or metaphysical. By comparing the unnamed female speaker to other medieval women who speak from the margins, I argue that she is just as oriented towards ‘elsewhiter’-ness as Wulf and is therefore possibly also speaking from beyond the grave.