The Husband’s Message comes immediately after riddle 60 and immediately before The

Ruin.
It is damaged, someone probably dribbled candlewax on it.
There is some debate over whether Riddle 60 and HM are two different poems or two halves
of one poem.
It is often read as a companion piece to the Wife’s Lament, possibly as the reply and
resolution to it.
HM is visually divided up in the manuscript into three sections (not stanzas). We understand
these as the same poem, but they might not be.
The second section starts with the word hwæt, which is a common way to start a poem.
However, there is repetition and motif throughout the three sections, from which we can infer
that they are the same poem.
The poem starts with a direct address by the narrator, very traditional of elegies. However,
there is also an addressee – the narrator is directly addressing somebody, as they tell is in
private.
The speaker seems to be saying that they are a tree or like a tree, but due to the fire damage
it’s difficult to say exactly what they mean. A common opinion is that the narrator is a
speaking object. In this case, we reckon that it might be a runestick.
Runesticks were sort of like early letters, a stick with runes carved on it. We see them used
for personal messages, business communique, magic spells, and all sorts of stuff.
The narrator immediately says that it has good news, so we are immediately not in usual
elegy territory.
The narrator is an intermediary between the lord and the addressee.
The poem uses the dual pronoun to talk about the addressee and whoever the lord is,
implying that they are a pair and probably married.
As such there are really three participants in this poem: the husband (master, lord), the wife
(addressee), and the runestick (narrator).
The somewhat vague ways in which the narrator describes itself links the poem to the riddle
tradition.
The narrator asks the addressee to imagine a time when things were happy and better, which
is extremely elegiac.
The reference to the cuckoo is that cuckoos were traditionally a harbinger of spring, a sign
that winter is over. Spring is associated with courtship, with happiness, with the beginning of
life again.
The runes in the poem are there to stand in for words. They are a small puzzle in of
themselves.
The solution to Riddle 60 is probably a rune-stick, and as such it is possible that Riddle 60 is
the actual start of the poem. They are certainly placed next to each other for good reason.
Is this poem an intentional companion to the Wife’s Lament?

Think about birds in the elegies perhaps?

VOIBS, by which I mean verbs
Old English verbs are inflected for:

 Person (1, 2, 3)
 Number (singular, plural)
 Tense (past [aka preterite], present [aka nonpast])
 Mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative)

Old English has no future tense, but the present tense is often used to refer to the future, or by
stating intent. This is why ‘will’ is our future marker in modern English.
Weak verbs change their ending when inflected into the past tense.
Strong verbs change their vowel when inflected into the past tense.

Mood relates the action/event described by the verb to reality:

 Indicative (statements of fact)

 Subjunctive (non-factual statements e.g. hypothesis, possibility)
 Imperative (commands)

Most of the time we are dealing with the indicative.

In modern English, the subjunctive is handled using auxiliary verbs or the indicative (often in
the past tense, even if it’s not in the past).
In Old English, the subjunctive mood has a different set of endings.
The imperative has inflectional endings for singular and plural.

Preterite-present verbs are really annoying. The present tense behaves like the past tense of a
strong verb. The past tense is weak. There aren’t many of them but the ones that there are are
annoyingly common.
Anomalous verbs are verbs which don’t conform to any of these verbs. Some involve
suppletion (the past tense is etymologically based on a different word, ie “to go” in Modern
English). Like preterite-present verbs, they’re very common.
Beholt:

Negation is accomplished by sticking the particle ‘ne’ in front of the verb. Sometimes it
forms a contraction: he is -> he nis
Old English also uses multiple negation, you can add more negatives to make it more
negative, and they don’t cancel out like in Modern English.