Along with The Wife's Lament (Text 40), Wulf and Eadwacer is a rarity in the OE poetic corpus: a secular lyric in a female voice. It is also one of the most enigmatic of poems and has generated intense but largely unresolved argument about its interpretation, for at the simple narrative level it is full of undeveloped allusions and unexplained ambiguities – not least the question of who ‘Wulf’ is and what his relationship with the speaker is, and who ‘Eadwacer’ is and whether he is a separate person at all. In the Exeter Book, the poem immediately precedes a long section of riddles, and some readers have found it useful to see it in the same light, as a deliberate enigma. Only at the more abstract level of theme and tone does the poem become more or less coherent, as a bitter personal reflection on separation and longing, an expression of intense feeling, apparently addressed by the female speaker (her gender confirmed by the feminine form of the adjective reotugu in line 10) to an absent ‘Wulf’. This has led to a plausible, but not particularly helpful, association of Wulf and Eadwacer with the genre of poems in Germanic literature known as Frauenlieder (‘women's songs’).

In the structure of the poem, there is a sense of both economy and completeness. What is striking, especially in view of the complexity (to us) of its literal meaning, is the comparative simplicity of its syntax.