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. An elegy is a form of poetry that mourns the loss of someone. Anne L. Klinck classifies this poem as optimistic, focusing on love and lamentation, but still places it among the elegies in the Exeter Book. 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. Niles also states the 50 riddles in the Exeter Book resembles the first person speaker, just like The Husband's Message. This is significant because within all the riddles and this poem, the reader has to discover who the speaker is. Identity of the speaker Another prominent issue with this work is the speaker question: who is, in fact, the speaker of the poem? While some argue that the speaker is of a human nature, meaning that the speaker is the husband himself, using personification of the wood's voice as a literary device, others hold that the wood itself is the husband's messenger. Those who adhere to the wood-messenger theory are supported by the evidence provided by the riddles in the Exeter Book, which use similar personifications. 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," which, if taken literally, may indicate that the wood is the messenger. But, John D. Niles believes there is no clear speech developed, and no clear introduction of the actual speaker. Another group of scholars contends that the speaker switches throughout the poem, meaning that at times the husband is recounting a story while at other times the wood itself speaks. 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. Runes One last puzzling feature of "The Husband's Message" is that of the runes, or special characters. Toward the end of the poem, there are special characters inscribed on the wood the messenger is carrying. 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. The