Questions about elegy and lyric prior to Beowulf

Hi everyone-
Arwen and I thought it would be agood idea to post some questions about the reading for next week in order to focus the discussion. She is going to ask about Beowulf, and I will ask about the other poems I passed out in class (with an eye to Beowulf as well). Here goes:

Scribe in the Woods
What is the speaker's relationship to the woods he writes in? Does he think of his writing as an outgrowth of these woods?
How can we think about singing? Is the song of birds different from the song of the poet?

Aber Cuawg Illness
This elegy was supposedly written after all of the poet's sons were killed in battle against the Anglo-Saxon invaders. How does the memory of the sons haunt the poem's landscape?
Why is the speaker so interested in the voice of the cuckoo? Does it help to know that the cuckoo was thought of as the herald of spring at this period (much like the robin for us)?
How do wilderness and civilization relate to each other in this poem? Are they opposed, or do they blend together?
How is the speaker placed? Why is the "illness" (malaise is perhaps a better translation) centered at Cuawg? Why does the poem begin on top of a hill?

The Wanderer
Chances are the Welsh elegiac tradition heavily influenced the Anglo-Saxon. Compared to the previous elegy, which elements are retained, and which are lost? Do these poems differ from what we might usually call an elegy?
How and when is the natural world decribed in this poem? Is nature an agent?
How does nature (birds, storms, wolves, the sea) relate to ruin and death, or the passage of time?
Why does the poem contain so much "wisdom" discourse, and why does it end with an exhortation to the monastic life? Is the natural world opposed to the spiritual world in the same way that we might think of this opposition today?

Looking forward to Beowulf
J.R.R. Tolkien (one of the pre-eminent scholars of Anglo-Saxon in the 20th Century, among other things) argued that Beowulf was not an epic, but an elegy. What kinds of motifs are common between Beowulf and poems like the Wanderer or Aber Cuawg?

As a side question, not necessarily related specifically to medieval insular elegy, but this may be our only chance to broach this subject: can we parse out how translation is related to ecocriticism? How can we speak for something which doesn't speak our language? Or which doesn't speak in words? Can mimetic art be a translation of the natural world? Or does translation imply human action on both sides?