The Wanderer

This poem is one of the finest of the Old English poems that critics call ‘elegies’—laments for the loss of relationships and worldly goods. Most of the poem is in the voice of a man who, following the death of his lord (and also, it seems, of most or all of the lord’s warband), has been wandering the earth in search of another. This man is kin to such romantic figures of Old English poetry as the wræċċa ‘exile’ (found, for example, in The Battle of Finnesburh ll. 24–6) and the last survivor (in Beowulf ll. 2233–70). Some critics have found in the poems’ theme of exile an allegory of earthly existence as an exile from what The Dream of the Rood (l. 148) calls the ‘heavenly home’. The explicitly Christian moralizing of the opening and concluding lines certainly seems to point in this direction. But the brevity of the hopeful message in these few lines seems insufficient to balance the overwhelming sorrow attending the loss of the things and people of the meadhall. The sermon writers of late ancient and early medieval Europe condemned excessive attachment to such worldly goods (see n. 21), but this poet seems unable to view them as evils that endanger the soul.

The Wanderer is preserved in the Exeter Book (see textual note for reading 10). It has been edited separately by Dunning and Bliss 1969; see also Klinck 1992.