Ear, the Poem's Closing Stanza

Ear's stanza closes the entire Old English Rune Poem on its darkest and most direct note: the grave is horrible to every warrior, when the corpse quickly begins to cool and is laid in the bosom of the dark earth, its prosperity declining and its happiness passing away, a closing image of mortality stated with even less consolation than Mann's own earlier acknowledgement of death, no explicit Christian framing softening the physical, bodily fact the stanza names. This unflinching close gives the whole twenty nine stanza sequence a genuine arc, Feoh's opening blessing of wealth freely given answered at the very end by the one gift no one escapes, the grave that receives every man regardless of the fortune, courage or generosity the poem's other stanzas have praised along the way.

Halsall's critical edition treats Ear's placement as the poem's deliberate final word, whether by the original compiler's own design or by the accumulated tradition that fixed the row's order before the poem was composed, and reads the pairing of Mann and Ear as together bracketing the poem's later stanzas with two direct confrontations of death, framing the more varied material, trees, animals, weather and craft, that runs between them.