The riddles of the Exeter Book form a mostly coherent generic group: grammatical, structural, and syntactic similarities across the collection enable scholars to think broadly about “the Exeter riddles” as a unit, as I have just done. Scholars have traditionally written with similar certainty about “the Exeter elegies,” another generic group within the manuscript that is usually taken to include Deor, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wife's Lament, The Husband’s Message, The Rhyming Poem, Resignation, The Seafarer, The Wanderer, and The Ruin. In her definitive edition, Anne Klinck writes that Old English elegies are united by their use of “a lyrical-reflective mode” and structural features such as “a monologue, personal introduction, gnomic or homiletic conclusion, and the ordered repetition of words and sounds, amounting occasionally to refrain or rhyme.” She argues that, above all else, “the concept of ‘elegy’ in an [early medieval English] context provides us with a convenient locus for particular themes: exile, loss of loved ones, scenes of desolation, the transience of worldly joys.”

Klinck does not explicitly state, perhaps because it seems obvious, that with the possible exception of the penultimate entry, this thematic definition centers human experience: exile from human society, loss of human life, and the reactions of emotional humans to understanding of their own transience.