‘OF THIS I can make no sense, nor am I able to arrange the verses’. This oft-repeated sentence, written by a defeated Benjamin Thorpe, refers to 117 of the most beguiling words in the Old English poetic corpus, which together are known as Wulf and Eadwacer or, hereafter, Wulf. In the almost two-hundred years since Thorpe declined to attempt to construct a translation of it, this text has proved a ‘notorious lodestone and analytical trap for critics’ which, despite a monumental collective effort to unravel these nineteen lines undertaken by both scholars and translators alike, continues to elude interpretation.

Wulf's elusiveness is a product of its ‘unusual concentration of hapax legomena, rare words, and obscure images’; of its ‘cryptic style’; and of its ‘double meanings and ambiguous terms’ which combine to create a plethora of potential meanings for many of the lines and, in turn, for the poem as a whole. These features, it seems, were ‘contrived with the specific intention of making the poem enigmatic’, much like the riddles which it precedes in the Exeter Book manuscript. It is not only in style that this poem mirrors the riddles which follow it, however; Wulf also features numerous ‘animal words like wulf and hwelp [“pup”]’, recalling ‘the personification of the non-human’, including of numerous animals, found within the riddles. Indeed, just as the animal subjects of the riddles are given voices, permitted into the human world even as they exceed it, so too in Wulf do we find a curious mixture of human and animal. Yet this poem is not merely a ‘riddle’ in which wolves and whelps are personified. Rather, like many other riddles which tell the stories of two objects in parallel, Wulf presents two interwoven stories of two different beings: the wolf and the outlaw. Just as these riddles of dual meaning provide no indication of which interpretation is literal and which is figurative, nor do they extend an invitation to find a single ‘solution’ by foregrounding one figure's identity over the other, neither the wolf nor the outlaw precludes the other in Wulf, reflecting the perceived lack of distinction between the two in medieval England.