Kudrun and The Wife's Lament.

The article discusses the various interpretations and attempts to identify the narrative context of the Old English poem known as The Wife's Lament. Scholars have used Old Norse and Middle High German sources to understand the nature of the poem's speaker and the narrative it alludes to. The article proposes that the Middle High German epic of Kudrun can provide insight into the predicament of the speaker in The Wife's Lament. The plot of Kudrun shares similarities with the legends of banished wives mentioned in the poem, and reading The Wife's Lament in the context of Kudrun can help make sense of its puzzling aspects. The article encourages scholars to consider Middle High German poetry as a comparative perspective for understanding Old English poetry. [Extracted from the article]