example, and the protagonist of the Wife's Lament have led other critics to argue, even more radically, that the protagonist of the poem (to which the attribution of the title "the wife's lament" is wholly apocryphal and fairly recent) may in fact be male. This interpretation, however, faces the almost insurmountable problem that adjectives and personal nouns occurring within the poem (geomorre, minre, sylfre) are feminine in grammatical gender. This interpretation is at the very least dependent therefore on a contention that perhaps a later Anglo-Saxon copyist has wrongly imposed feminine gender on the protagonist where this was not the original authorial intent, and such contentions almost wholly relegate discussion to the realm of the hypothetical. It is also thought by some that The Wife's Lament and The Husband's Message may be part of a larger work. The poem is also considered by some to be a riddle poem. A riddle poem contains a lesson told in cultural context which would be understandable or relates to the reader, and was a very popular genre of poetry of the time period. Gnomic wisdom is also a characteristic of a riddle poem, and is present in the poem's closing sentiment (lines 52-53). Also, it cannot be ignored that contained within the Exeter Book are 92 other riddle poems. According to Faye Walker-Pelkey, "The Lament's placement in the Exeter Book, its mysterious content, its fragmented structure, its similarities to riddles, and its inclusion of gnomic wisdom suggest that the "elegy"...is a riddle." Narrative content and interpretation Interpreting the text of the poem as a woman's lament, many of the text's central controversies bear a similarity to those around Wulf and Eadwacer. Although it is unclear whether the protagonist's tribulations proceed from relationships with multiple lovers or a single man, Stanley B. Greenfield, in his paper "The Wife's Lament Reconsidered," discredits the claim that the poem involves multiple lovers. He suggests that lines 42-47 use an optative voice as a curse against the husband, not a second lover. The impersonal expressions with which the poem concludes, according to Greenfield, do not represent gnomic wisdom or even a curse upon young men in general; rather this impersonal voice is used to convey the complex emotions of the wife toward her husband. Virtually all of the facts integral to the poem beyond the matter of genre are widely open to dispute. The obscurity of the narrative