WANDERER, THE

(10th century)

The OLD ENGLISH poemThe Wanderer, likeTHE SEAFARERwith which it is often linked, is one of the best-known examples of ELEGAIC POETRY, poetry in which the speaker laments some great loss. The poem survives only in The EXETER BOOK, a manuscript from about 975 that contains the largest surviving collection of poetry in Old English. The poem is divided into two main sections. According to an unnamed Narrator, the first part of the poem is spoken by an “Earth walker” (eardstapa), or Wanderer, who, for 57 lines, laments his state of exile. He has lost his lord, and with him his companions and place in society, and now wanders in hope of finding some new lord to take him in.In particularly poignant lines, he describes dreaming of the old days and the gifts of his lord in the mead hall, only to wake and find himself still wandering on the sea.

The second partof the poem, lines 58–110, expand the theme of loss and isolation from the specific case of the Wanderer himself to the world in general. The speaker, here called the Wise Man, asserts that all things on earth are transient, and will be lost to violence and the ravages of time.Where are the horse, the young warrior, the gold-giving lord, the mead hall? All will vanish, the Wise Man concludes. The poem ends with a very Christian exhortation to put one’s faith in heaven, the only place where joy is not transitory. Critical issues inThe Wandererhave revolved around the relationship of the two parts of the poem, and questions about the number of speakers involved. At one time it was suggested that the poem was actually an amalgam of two or more separate poems. It has also been suggested that the final lines, urging the reader to focus on heaven, were added later by a monastic scribe to an otherwise completely pagan poem. But most scholars today consider the poem a unified whole. Still scholars do not necessarily agree on who is speaking in each part of the poem. If the Wise Man is in fact the Wanderer whose exile has made him philosophical, then one can see a growth in the Wanderer’s outlook. If the second speech, or even the final five lines of the poem, are attributed instead to the Narrator, then we learn something from the Wanderer’s example, but the Wanderer himself is left in his bleak and melancholy existence.

■ Alexander,Michael, trans.The Earliest English Poems. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1966.

■ Green,Martin, ed.The Old English Elegies: New Essays in Criticism and Research. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983.

■ Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds.The Exeter Book. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3. New York: Columbia University Press, 1936.