Death and the Landscape of The Fortunes of Men

Lindy Brady

Published online: 28 November 2013

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract The grisly fates catalogued in the first half of the Old English gnomic

poem The Fortunes of Men have been fruitfully read within a broader Germanic

literary context. This article notes that these grim deaths also share a common setting

in the natural landscape. While this pattern initially appears to underscore the familiar

bleakness of the natural world in Anglo-Saxon literature, this article argues that the

more significant danger in each of these fates is the expulsion from human society

which stands at its root. The Fortunes of Men uses the illusion of a dangerous natural

world to link together deaths for which other men are ultimately to blame.

Keywords The Fortunes of Men � Old English poetry � Gnomic poetry �Landscape � Fate

The Old English gnomic poem known as The Fortunes of Men couples a series of

grisly fates in its first half with the ‘‘gifts of men’’ catalogue of early Germanic

nobility in its second.1 While the deaths in the earlier portion of the poem have been

fruitfully, if not yet wholly conclusively, studied within a Germanic literary context,

this essay will argue that the vast majority of these deaths are also linked by their

shared location on the Anglo-Saxon landscape, a setting which appears to

underscore the cruelty and inconstancy of the natural world in its capacity as an

L. Brady (&)

Department of English, University of Mississippi, Bondurant Hall, P.O. Box 1848, University,

MS 38677-1848, USA

e-mail: lmbrady@olemiss.edu

1 The poem is found only in Exeter Cathedral Library, MS 3501. All citations are by line number to

Krapp and Dobbie (1936), and all translations my own, with punctuation amended. This poem is also

known by the equally appropriate title The Fates of Men; for the sake of clarity, I refer to it by its title in

the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records.

123

Neophilologus (2014) 98:325–336

DOI 10.1007/s11061-013-9375-z

agent of destruction. Yet underneath these outwardly simple scenes of a threatening

natural landscape, I argue, stands the culpability of the human society which is

fundamentally accountable for these deaths, all of which occur in isolation and

therefore could only have been brought about by expulsion from civilization onto an

unforgiving landscape. Nearly every scene illustrated in the poem’s first half falls

this pattern, in which grisly circumstances connect brutality to an unwelcoming

natural world, yet the deeds of men are at the core of each grim fate. The Fortunes of

Men creates an illusion of natural agency that masks the societal culpability at the

heart of these dark fates.

The Fortunes of Men is aptly characterized by Hill (2012) as ‘‘one of the stranger

and less discussed wisdom poems in Old English’’ (213). Most studies that have

touched upon this poem have considered it alongside other wisdom literature, a state

of affairs which Howe (1985) attributes to a critical discomfort with poems that

seem ‘‘embarrassingly crude and simplistic in their structure’’ (12–13).2 Certainly,

the poem’s two halves are jarringly incongruent, and it is thus unsurprising that a

significant proportion of the criticism on The Fortunes of Men has turned to the

question of unity: was the poem written as a cohesive whole, or is there an older

Germanic core onto which was later appended a more positive Christian coloring?

Isaacs (1975) and Swenson (1991) have argued the former—in sum, that ‘‘a

Christian poet has awkwardly re-worked and colored a heathen fragment’’ (124)—

while Dammers (1976) sees ‘‘a didactic Christian poem unified through complex

artistry’’ (461), and Jurasinski (2007) suggests that the poem was written as a unified

whole during the Benedictine Reform.3

Setting aside the nearly impossible task of dating individual sections of The

Fortunes of Men, this study adopts the methodology of those who have, in light of

the striking disunity between the two halves of the poem, treated each as worthy of

study in its own right.4 Those studies which have focused on the unusually grim

fates depicted in the poem’s first half have noted patterns of commonality that link

these seemingly diverse scenarios. Shippey (1976) has found ‘‘an element of

indignity, as people, instead of dying bravely or gallantly, die in disgrace or through

clumsiness, or do not die at all but survive to know their own pain and weakness’’

(11); Swenson (1991) sees ‘‘modes of ritual killings, each of which is evidenced

elsewhere as an element of the early Germanic culture’’ (127); and Hill (2012) has

recently argued for ‘‘a kind of catalogue of the grievous fates which can befall a

young man and most of them are modes of death which cannot be avenged for one

or another reason’’ (214). To these shared patterns in the presentation of these

deaths, the motivation behind them, or the impact left in their aftermath, this essay

2 While I am sympathetic to Howe’s belief that these poems deserve more critical attention than they

have perhaps received, I cannot agree with his premise that the Old English corpus of wisdom literature

originates not in Germanic but in Latin literary tradition—see Harris (1987). On wisdom literature see

Shippey (1976), Howe (1985), Hansen (1988), Larrington (1993), Poole (1998), Cavill (1999), and

Harbus (2002).3 Conner (1993) has proposed a unified tenth-century date for both the Exeter Book manuscript and its

contents; for one of many refutations of this argument, see Gameson (1996).4 Hill (2012), Swenson (1991), Isaacs (1975), and Tripp (1983). Russom (1978) has focused on the

common Germanic literary motif of the ‘‘gifts of men’’ found in the poem’s second half.

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seeks to raise an important connection between the locations where each of these

deaths takes place—namely, upon the natural landscape of Anglo-Saxon England.

Within the corpus of Old English literature—in which so many deaths occur in

violent battle, and thus at the hands of other men—this seems an unusual pattern.

Yet nearly every one of the darker fates depicted in the first half of The Fortunes of

Men is linked to the landscape in some significant way. Whether a man is eaten by a

wolf on the moors, falls from a tree in the forest, is swept away by a storm, wanders

the wilderness as an exile, or swings from the gallows while a raven plucks out his

eyes; the natural world is represented as an active agent of either death or

desecration of the body.

At first glance, this bleak landscape appears to reinforce a familiar understanding

of the natural world Old English poetry—in the words of Neville (1999), a symbol

of ‘‘fear and emptiness’’ and ‘‘an appalling human absence’’ (38). Yet while these

fates may take place upon the landscape, these deaths are not natural, but odd and

isolated. These grim fates could befall only those upon whom society has turned its

back—or turned upon and attacked—and their location masks the role of society in

driving these doomed men to the wilderness in the first place. The near-equivalency

between landscape and death in The Fortunes of Men creates an illusion that

displaces the agency for these fates onto the natural world from the human society

that ultimately bears responsibility for them. Being outside of society is not

tantamount to being safe from it.

The Fortunes of Men opens with a snapshot of a child’s birth and upbringing that

is both intimately connected to what follows in its allusion to the natural world, yet

stands apart for its reference to God:

Ful oft þæt gegongeð, mid godes meahtum, þætte wer ond wif in woruld cennað bearn mid gebyrdum ond mid bleom gyrwað,tennaþ ond tætaþ, oþþæt seo tid cymeð, gegæð gearrimum, þæt þa geongan leomu, liffæstan leoþu, geloden weorþað. Fergað swa ond feþað fæder ond modor, giefað ond gierwaþ. God ana wat hwæt him weaxendum winter bringað! (1-9)

[It happens very often that a man and woman, through God’s power, bring

forth a child into the world by birth, and adorn him in colors, encourage and

amuse him, until the years go by and the time comes that the young limbs, the

lively appendages, become fully grown. Thus the father and mother carry him

and lead his footsteps, provision him and equip him. God alone knows what

the winters bring to him in his growing.]

Swenson (1991), noting (among other evidence) that God is mentioned in these

initial lines but nowhere else in the poem’s first half, argues that The Fortunes of

Men contains two older, formerly distinct, catalogues, one on deaths and the other

on gifts, onto which have later been added suitable lines of introduction and

conclusion:

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The Fates of Men, as þula, is not monolithic, and, like many catalogues, shows

evidence of having been created through a process of accretion and

interpolation. This genre is particularly susceptible to interpolation and

continuation, so that poets of later times, adding items from their world, reveal

something about their reception of the items before them and, in their

additions, develop a context which at times revalorizes the previous items;

their contribution is an interpretive appropriation of the previous, an attempt to

incorporate the earlier, and possibly alien, into the world as received/perceived

by the current poetic subject. (126)5

I think it is important to note that regardless of whether or not Swenson’s arguments

about the relative stages of this poem’s composition are correct, God is indisputably

absent between lines ten and fifty-seven. This omission makes it difficult to support

readings such as that of Howe (1985) which argue that the poem demonstrates ‘‘the

presence and efficacy of divine order in the lives of men’’ and ‘‘reenacts that journey

of a man’s soul to God which is itself the poem’s religious teaching’’ (104, 116).6

Anglo-Saxon poets who wanted to discuss a soul’s journey to God were quite

capable of doing so. What the first half of The Fortunes of Men presents,

unavoidably, is a series of grim fates alongside which God receives no mention.

Yet while the absence of God in the poem’s first half is a suggestive hint that

its opening may not have always traveled with the catalogue of deaths in the lines

that follow, what is perhaps even more interesting about the beginning of The

Fortunes of Men is the thematic cohesion that persists within the poem as it

stands. Hill (2012), among others, has fittingly encapsulated the poem’s first half

as ‘‘an affecting account of the process of the birth of a child, and the tribulations

and worries which parents feel as they raise a child to maturity’’ (213).7 But

moreover, these lines construct a vision of a society that nurtures juxtaposed

against a natural world that threatens, foreshadowing what is to come. This loving

childhood is a microcosm of the benefits gained by belonging to a community:

food, clothing, companionship, emotional support, knowledge, and direction. Yet

each of these positives in the poem’s opening will be later reiterated as a stark

loss, for these are the very advantages of human society which dissipate in the

harshness of exile. The threat of the natural world looms in the lines ‘‘God ana

wat/hwæt him weaxendum winter bringað,’’ as the use of ‘‘winter’’ to signify the

later stage of life also encapsulates that season of the year, the time of greatest

harshness, bleakness, and danger from the natural world. These opening lines,

then—in which human society protects while the natural environment threatens

harm—presage what is to come.

The initial fate depicted in The Fortunes of Men—death at the jaws of a wolf in

the wasteland—is the first in a series of deaths which are linked directly to the

natural world and so appear to underline its savagery and capricious character. This

5 Drout (2006, 2010) argues for a similar (though less complex) structural division.6 Similar points are made by Smith (2012), who writes that the poem serves as ‘‘affirmation of divine order

through the evidence of apparent disorder and disequilibrium’’ (78), and Drout (2010), who takes the lines

‘‘God ana wat / hwæt him weaxendum winter bringað’’ as ‘‘the main point of the poem’’ (130).7 See also Thompson (2004) (191).

328 L. Brady

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scene sets the grim tone of those which are to follow:

Sumum þæt gegongeð on geoguðfeore þæt se endestæf earfeðmæcgum wealic weorþeð. Sceal hine wulf etan, har hæðstapa; hinsiþ þonne modor bimurneð. Ne bið swylc monnes geweald! (10-14)

[It happens to one in his youth that his end becomes woeful, that of a

miserable man. A wolf, a gray hunter of the heath, shall eat him; his mother

mourns his passage. Such is not man’s to control.]

The wolf’s description as a har hæðstapa links both his identity and this grisly fate

to the danger of the wilderness, a danger which the poem appears to suggest man is

powerless against in line 14b with its assertion that ‘‘ne bið swylc monnes

geweald.’’ As Shippey (1976) has aptly noted,

The whole poem invites the paraphrase: ‘‘These are the fortunes of men. There

is nothing to be done about them.’’ (11)

This despondent outlook echoes the traditional understanding of the natural world in

Old English poetry as a powerful force outside the control of men. As Neville

(1999) writes,

the representation of the natural world reveals the human condition to be a state

of subjection to forces beyond its control and endurance. The depiction of

nature’s power—however accurate, complex, original, traditional or derivative

it might be—serves to reflect and point to humanity’s powerlessness. (52)

Indeed, most readings of The Fortunes of Men have found precisely such

powerlessness. Raw (1978) has argued that ‘‘the main theme of The Fortunes of

Men is man’s helplessness’’ (73), and Hill (2012) sees men further incapacitated in

the face of unattainable vengeance (217). While I agree with such assessments, I

would argue that the ability to legally enact vengeance and the assignation of

culpability are distinct from one another, and that behind this seemingly

straightforward representation of the dangers of the natural world lies an indictment

of the society ultimately responsible for this death.

In other words, behind this death stand the circumstances that permitted it to

occur. The poem’s emphasis on the youth (geoguðfeore) of this doomed soul and his

mourning mother not only tie these lines back to the poem’s opening, but also

emphasize the shocking and unnatural nature of a young death. The verb etan (to

eat) leaves ambiguous whether the wolf has killed the boy himself or merely

desecrated the corpse, yet either case, it seems, shifts ultimate responsibility back to

human society. A corpse implies death at the hands of men, most likely in warfare,

as supported by the wolf’s frequent presence in the Old English ‘‘beasts of battle’’

tradition.8 Yet the wolf’s characterization as a har hæðstapa implies more agency

on the part of the animal and isolation on the part of the victim, suggesting that he is

8 See Magoun (1955), Bonjour (1957), and Griffith (1993).

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actually killed by a wolf alone on a moor. But here too the ultimate responsibility

lies with men, as only an exile or an outlaw would travel alone through the

wilderness and risk its dangers in the absence of companions. Only society’s

expulsion of this fated one from itself could have brought about a death dependent

upon isolation.

A similar vignette of a man killed by wolves appears in Maxims I, which directly

follows The Fortunes of Men in the Exeter Book. It is worth comparing the two, as

Maxims I even more explicitly links a man’s existence in the natural world with the

absence of the human society which put him there:

Wineleas, wonsælig mon genimeð him wulfas to geferan,felafæcne deor. Ful oft hine se gefera sliteð; gryre sceal for greggum, græf deadum men; hungre heofeð, nales þæt heafe bewindeð, ne huru wæl wepeð wulf se græga, morþorcwealm mæcga, ac hit a mare wille. (146-51)

[A friendless, miserable man takes wolves as his companions, very crafty

beasts. Very often that companion tears at him; there shall be terror because of

the gray one, a grave for the dead man; it [the wolf] grieves in hunger, not at

all does it circle in lamentation, not in the least for the slain does the gray wolf

weep, for the murdering of men, but it always wants more.]

Maxims I links death to the marginal, dangerous natural landscape in its portrait of a

solitary man in the wilderness, the misery of his isolation underlined by the

wretched irony of his position: bereft of human society and so desperate for

companions as to enter into the company of the wolves who will turn on him. Yet

here too, this man’s untimely death could only have come about as a result of his

isolation through forced expulsion from society, a point reinforced by the grotesque

parody of mourning enacted by the wolves who circle around the ‘‘grave’’ (what can

only be a dishonored scattering of bones) not in lamentation but in hunger, and

grieve not for the loss of their companion but for the loss of their food.

Swenson (1991) has argued that these odd fates depict ‘‘modes of ritual killings’’

(127). Whether or not these deaths can be characterized so precisely, her comments

are helpful in elucidating the relationship between society at large and these doomed

individuals. The Fortunes of Men, she writes, describes

possible fates of an individual excluded from society, an outcast deemed a

criminal, a sacrifice, or a scapegoat. Whether outlawed or simply killed, the

person becomes isolated, a creature society uses to help define its borders. (127)

Yet while the isolation of these deaths enables civilization to define its borders,

these fated individuals are both expelled from and defined by society. Though they

stand apart from humankind, they would not exist if not for the society which has

positioned them in opposition to itself. The interdependence of society and these

fates suggests that line 14b, ‘‘ne bið swylc monnes geweald’’ [such is not man’s to

control], which has been understood as the poem’s unifying principle, might

actually have a tinge of irony behind it. While The Fortunes of Men has been read as

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one of many examples of a conventional Anglo-Saxon attitude towards fate that

views men as incapable of effecting change, in this poem, no one controls the fates

of men but other men themselves.

Significantly, a considerable proportion of the fates in the first half of The

Fortunes of Men fit the same pattern—grim details link violence to a hostile

landscape, yet the actions of men stand at the heart of each unfortunate lot. The next

extended scene of death, a notoriously enigmatic description of a fall from a tree,

creates a similarly strong link between the natural world and gruesome demise:

Sum sceal on holte of hean beame fiþerleas feallan; bið on flihte seþeah, laceð on lyfte, oþþæt lengre ne bið westem wudubeames. þonne he on wyrtrumansigeð sworcenferð, sawle bireafod, fealleþ on foldan, feorð biþ on siþe. (21-6)

[One shall fall from a high tree in the forest. Though featherless, nevertheless

he will be in flight. He flies through the sky until he will no longer be a fruit

hanging from that tree-branch. Then he descends, unconscious, to the root—

bereft of his soul, he falls to the ground, and his soul will depart forth.]

These lines depict the forest as a foreboding source of death, at least in the case of

this fate if not more broadly, and thus appear to caution against the dangers of the

natural world. Yet as Isaacs (1975), I think correctly, notes,

unlike mountains, trees never seem to be climbed simply because they are

there. One climbs a tree to see, to get, or to get away from … (fill in the

appropriate object). (363)

As Swenson (1991) notes, these ‘‘allusive’’ lines have been understood to reference

‘‘a variety of activities, including: house-building, watching for enemies, gathering

falcons, and Christ’s ascending the cross,’’ to which Isaacs (1975) adds Germanic

shaman initiation ritual and Swenson (1991) ‘‘ritual death’’ more broadly defined

(127). Yet whether or not this passage reflects ‘‘a non-Christian sensibility’’ of ‘‘early

Germanic culture’’ as Swenson (1991) argues (126), its cryptic qualities mask the

absurdity of assigning blame for this death to the natural world when human agency

placed this man in the tree and thus bears responsibility for his deadly fall.

This scene of a plunge from a tree is immediately followed by another unlucky

fate set within an unforgiving landscape. While this man does not die, his torments,

it seems, are no less severe:

Sum sceal on feþe on feorwegas nyde gongan ond his nest beran, tredan uriglast elþeodigra, frecne foldan; ah he feormendra lyt lifgendra, lað biþ æghwær fore his wonsceaftum wineleas hæle. (27-32)

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[One must, in necessity, go by foot across distant paths and carry his own

provisions; tread wet paths of foreign peoples, dangerous territory. He

possesses few living patrons—a friendless man will be unwelcome every-

where because of his misfortunes.]

The pathos of these lines is rooted in their bleak characterization of the hardships

that the natural world necessitates—travel by foot, distant paths, lack of resources,

washed-out trails, and dangerous territory. Yet such details, in their very absence of

the material comforts that define civilization, underscore the ultimate cause of this

fate—isolation produced by expulsion from society. References to walking and

bearing provisions point out that this man is part of no company, while his journey

across far paths and foreign lands in the absence of kin or companions suggests a

sentence of exile or outlaw has been imposed upon him by the society which he can

no longer rejoin. Indeed, such details recall the poem’s opening lines, as the image

of loving parents providing for a child and guiding his footsteps stands in stark

contrast to this solitary figure who walks alone. Thus while the danger of this scene

appears rooted in the geography of exile—unknown paths too narrow or treacherous

to travel with a horse and an unfamiliar, barren landscape of feorwegas—human

action and expulsion from society stand at the heart of this unfortunate fate.

Neville (1999) has noted the connection between exile and the natural world in

Old English poetry, writing,

as exile is the reverse of society, it is unsurprising that representations of the

natural world feature prominently in descriptions of it. Exile draws attention to

the sharp divisions between the outside and the inside, for exiles are forced to

step outside the protective boundaries and definitions of human society into

the unmastered natural world. Their state there is precarious and miserable, for

exiles lose everything: lost in the natural world, they lose their status as

members of society, a status which confers upon them both power over others

and the right to protection from those more powerful… in Old English poetry

such absence and reversal are characteristically described through reference to

the natural world, the negative landscape in which human constructions lose

their power. (84–85)

Indeed, The Fortunes of Men appears to engage in this construct in its opposition of

the natural world and human society. Yet this poem does not characterize all

mankind as powerless, only the figure of the exile, because the community that

expelled him, by so acting, retains control over the outcome of events—a point

strengthened by the poem’s observation that exile reinforces its own condition, as a

companionless man is unwelcome among others and therefore even more likely to

be prevented from rejoining society. Though the danger of these lines initially

appears to stem from distant paths and a barren landscape, exile from civilization

stands at the heart of this unfortunate fate.

The poem’s next extended scene of gruesome death, which lingers over the

desecration of a corpse hanging from the gallows, quite clearly connects vivid

imagery of the natural world as a force of destruction with a death whose ultimate

responsibility lies at the hands of men.

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Sum sceal on geapum galgan ridan, seomian æt swylte, oþþæt sawlhord, bancofa blodig, abrocen weorþeð. þær him hrefn nimeþ heafodsyne, sliteð salwigpad sawelleasne; noþer he þy facne mæg folmum biwergan, laþum lyftsceaþan, biþ his lif scæcen, ond he feleleas, feores orwena, blac on beame bideð wyrde, bewegen wælmiste. Bið him werig noma! (33-42)

[One shall ride on the broad gallows. He remains in death until his bloody

body (his soul-hoard, his bone-chamber) becomes destroyed. There the dark-

coated raven takes his eyeballs, tears at the soulless one. Neither is he able to

protect himself with his hands from that evil, from the hateful scavenger. His

life will be departed and he devoid of feeling, deprived of life. He endures his

fate pallid on the gallows, enveloped by the mists of death. His name will be

cursed.]

While the horror of these lines stems from the violence not of death but of its

aftermath, this fate again links isolation from society, the savagery of the natural

world, and a grim end. A wilderness setting is evoked by imagery of the forest

where ravens circle and trees and gallows are interchangeable—the corpse sways

from a galga (gallows) which is also called a beam, paralleling an earlier fate in

which the same word denotes the tree from which the doomed man falls to his death.

Echoing the separate set of earlier lines in which an exiled man is devoured by a

wolf, the ravens that tear at this corpse further indict nature as the agent of

destruction. Yet only a man could hang another from the gallows. While the grim

nature of this fate is underscored by these allusions to the harsh environment of the

natural world, its cause can only be expulsion from human society.

My argument that The Fortunes of Men displaces human agency for its gruesome

fates onto the natural landscape is strengthened by two groupings of brief deaths

which are more overtly tied to the hands of men. The first of these occurs early in

the poem, after the scene of the wolf:

Sumne sceal hungor ahiþan, sumne sceal hreoh fordrifan,sumne sceal gar agetan, sumne guð abreotan. Sum sceal leomena leas lifes neotan, folmum ætfeohtan, sum on feðe lef, seonobennum seoc, sar cwanian, murnan meotudgesceaft mode gebysgad. (15-20)

[One shall be destroyed by hunger, one shall be swept away by a storm, one

shall be destroyed by a spear, one shall be killed in battle. One shall, lacking

light [i.e. blinded], for the span of his life, grope about with his hands. One

shall, lame in his foot, his sinews damaged, lament his pain, mourn his fate,

afflicted in his mind.]

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These more succinct deaths are no less gruesome, yet their various outcomes are

more overtly wrought by mankind. While deaths that occur because of weather or

lack of natural resources again appear to put the natural world at blame, the role of

men as the cause of the other injuries in this passage is clear-cut. Indeed, so too is

human agency directly responsible for the deaths in the final passage of the poem’s

first half, in which men who have drunk too much mead are unequivocally blamed

for their own downfall. Lines 48–57 assign sole responsibility for death in a drunken

quarrel or the lifelong degradation of abject alcoholism to the man who drinks too

much, for ‘‘hine to sylfcwale/secgas nemnað’’ [56, men call him a self-slaughterer].9

Here too exists the inverse of the earlier powerlessness that underlies ‘‘ne bið swylc

monnes geweald’’ [14b, such is not man’s to control], as men are held solely

accountable for the consequences of their own bad decisions.

Finally, the poem’s list of grisly fates that might befall the hapless soul concludes

with a somewhat enigmatic description of a man burnt in a fire. Not only does this

doomed man’s end, too, appear to more overtly link death to human society, but

these lines subtly echo and circle back to the poem’s opening. The figure of a

mother with her child is repeated—but the grief of mourning stands in opposition to

earlier scenes of tenderness, just as fire counters the earlier imagery of winter:

Sumne on bæle sceal brond aswencan,fretan frecne lig fægne monnan; þær him lifgedal lungre weorðeð, read reþe gled; reoteð meowle, seo hyre bearn gesihð brondas þeccan. (43-47)

[Flames shall envelop one in a fire; a dangerous inferno, savage red embers,

consume the doomed man; there separation from life happens quickly to him.

The woman mourns, she who sees her child engulfed by flames.]

Fire, a destructive agent of the natural world, is here named as the cause of this

man’s death rather than simply the means by which his body is destroyed. Yet this

fire appears neither natural nor accidental, for the passage’s repeated emphasis on

the savagery of the flames coupled with an image of a woman in mourning—which

echoes, in certain ways, the memorable figure of the Geatish woman with bound

hair who sings a lament over Beowulf’s death (Fulk et al. 2009, 3150-3155a)—are

suggestive of a funeral pyre rather a natural death.

It seems that for one to be simultaneously killed by and mourned within flames

would be mutually exclusive conditions. While multiple interpretations of this fate

suggest themselves, including a man burnt to death in a locked house, as is an entire

family’s notorious fate in Njals Saga (Sveinsson 1954 and Magnusson 1960), it is

difficult to elucidate precisely which is being referenced. Swenson (1991) has

argued that these lines are ‘‘a clear description of death by burning,’’ ‘‘an ancient

and widespread form of ritual killing’’ that ‘‘originated as a mode of destroying

witches and poisoners’’ (132). While it is difficult to find within these lines a clear

9 Howe (1985) takes sylfcwale literally as suicide (122–124); for refutation of this point, see Harris

(1987).

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link between burning and the supernatural, as Swenson (1991) argues—that fire

destroys the boy, making it ‘‘unlikely that the person will walk after death’’ and

unable to ‘‘linger as a ghost able to participate in society’’ (132)—the mourning

woman makes clear that regardless of the precise circumstances behind this death,

human society stands at its heart. While fire may be a destructive force of nature, it

is also a tool that men have learnt to control, and indeed, a comfort that stands at the

heart of civilization—until it is used as an instrument of destruction. Here too,

human agency is ultimately to blame.

The first half of The Fortunes of Men appears to depict a grim, unfeeling natural

landscape as the cause of gruesome and isolated deaths—a landscape where terrible

events happen, but ‘‘ne bið swylc monnes geweald’’ [such is not man’s to control].

Yet as I have argued, there is more to this disarmingly simple poem than first meets

the eye. Behind each grim fate set on the bleak landscape stands the agency of

mankind, displacing responsibility from the natural world to which it initially

appears to be linked. The Fortunes of Men may appear—or perhaps even desire—to

depict a world in which the fates of men are beyond their control, but its deaths

come so directly as a result of human action that it is difficult to assign blame

anywhere else. The poem’s first half thus portrays a world in which men do wield

ultimate influence over the fates of others, yet it seems an even bleaker state of

affairs than events beyond men’s control. While fate may be callous in its

capriciousness; fate suffered at the hands of other men appears to be the cruelest of

all.

Acknowledgments An early version of this paper was given at the 38th Annual Conference of the

Southeastern Medieval Association, and I would like to thank everyone in the audience for their helpful

feedback. I am very grateful to Frederick M. Biggs for invaluable suggestions which have greatly

improved this essay.

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