"The Husband's Message" is an anonymous Old English poem, 53 lines long[1] and found only on folio 123 of the Exeter Book.
"[4] Conversely, other scholars contest that the sense of "loss," especially that of time due to unfortunate circumstances and "happiness," make The Husband's Message seem more like an elegy.
Anne L. Klinck classifies this poem as optimistic, focusing on love and lamentation, but still places it among the elegies in the Exeter Book.
[6] Niles groups The Seafarer, The Wife's Lament, Wulf and Eadwacer and The Husband's Message together as being all the elegies found in the Exeter Book.
[8] Also, the poem opens with the lines, roughly translated from a damaged manuscript, "Now I will tell you especially / what kind of tree I, as offspring, grew from,"[9] which, if taken literally, may indicate that the wood is the messenger.
[10] Another school of thought contends that the messenger is a human that has been sent by the exiled man, but that the message he brings is somehow scrawled into a piece of wood.
In line 49-50, the reader is introduced to the messenger carrying a rune stave, which is a stick with a runic message on it, including the special characters.
"[11] This makes sense in light of the fact that the husband had been exiled in the past, and it would be to his and his wife's advantage to refrain from disclosing his new location.
In John D. Niles essay on The Husband's Message, his translation was composed of two groups: the standard Anglo Saxon futhorc, which is the Runic alphabet with extra letters added to it to write the old English Alphabet, and Standard Insular Script, which is a medieval script developed in Ireland and was greatly influenced by Celtic Christianity in England.
Due to the connection of personification of a tree or plant, have argued that Riddle 60 is the beginning of The Husband’s Message,[13] but the consensus view is that they are separate texts.