Anglo-Saxon period

• The Wanderer• The Wife’s Lament• Beowulf

• reconstructed helm from Sutton Hoo Burial Mound

The Wanderer in Manuscript

• Exeter Book, folio 76v• Late tenth-century

anthology of poems• Only manuscript

devoted to Old English poetry

The WandererExeter Book, ff. 76v-78r

“He who is alone often lives to find favor, mildness of the Lord, even though he has long had to stir with his arms the frost-cold sea, troubled in heart over the water-way had to tread the tracks of exile. Fully-fixed is his fate.” (translation of ll. 1-5)

Lines 6-7

So spoke the earth-walker, remembering hardships, fierce war-slaughters– the fall of dear kinsmen.

Swa cwæþ eard-stapa earfoþa gemyndig

Wraðra wæl-sleahta, wine-maga hryres

Is the poem an elegy?

• S.B. Greenfield defined OE elegy as “a relatively short reflective or dramatic poem embodying a contrasting pattern of loss and consolation, ostensibly based upon a specific personal experience or observation, and expressing an attitude towards that experience.”

A poem of consolation?

• The poet intersperses elements of lament with philosophic reflection in order to alleviate personal grief with an acknowledgement of the transitory mortal world and the necessity of seeking stability in another world.

An example of wisdom poetry?

• With analogues in Old Icelandic, wisdom poetry contains proverbs and maxims of cultural ideals, ethics, morals.

• Wisdom poetry contains aphorisms, which are pithy (concise and forcefully expressed) observations that contain a general truth.

The Gnomes of Wisdom Poetry

• Wisdom poetry also contains gnomes or gnomic utterances which are short statements encapsulating a general truth

Augustine and The Wanderer

• Augustine writes in The City of God “…only with great effort does a mind which has contemplated both the material and spiritual creation of the universe and discovered the mutability of all things soar to the unchangeable substance of God.” (BK XI, ch. 2)

Themes in The Wanderer

• Ubi sunt?• Ring-giver• Remembering the past• Human isolation• Intense loneliness• Intense suffering

• Equating dreams with lives of humans

• Transitory human life vs. stability of God

• Wandering on earth as a metaphor for spiritual search