Anonymous pre-10th c. Anglo-Saxon Feminist

What we know of the poet who composed the Anglo-Saxon text commonly referred to as Wulf ond Eadwacer is very limited. Though unnamed in the poem, we can discern from the feminine inflection on the words "rēotugu" and "sēoce" that the speaker is a woman. It is possible, though perhaps implausible, that the poet is male, but even so, because the poem describes and laments a forbidding set of circumstances foisted onto the female speaker by a patriarchal Anglo-Saxon culture, the poet – who may have been Scandinavian or Anglo-Saxon and lived some time before the 10th – was undoubtedly a feminist, an outsider, and a radical poet, who mixed forms from both Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian, subverting the literary conventions of each language culture in sophisticated and surprising ways.