The Wanderer (poem)

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The Wanderer is an Old English poem preserved in an anthology known as the Exeter Book, a manuscript dating from the late 10th century. The poem may predate the manuscript by hundreds of years. This is the only extant manuscript that contains the poem. Some scholars believe that the poem was composed around the time the Anglo-Saxons were making the conversion to Christianity, sometime around 597, though others would date it as much as several centuries later.

Contents

[edit] Overview

The Wanderer is a poem about great sorrow and suffering. When the speaker was a young man, his kin and comrades were all killed in a battle, and his life was turned upside down. However, the speaker has had time to reflect upon life while spending years in exile, and to some extent has gone beyond his personal sorrow. In this respect, the poem is a "wisdom poem." The degeneration of “earthly glory” is presented as inevitable in the poem, contrasting with the theme of salvation through faith in God, which is introduced halfway through the poem.

Three notable elements of the poem are the use of the "Beasts of Battle" motif,[1], the "ubi sunt" formula and the siþ-motif.

The "Beasts of Battle" motif is here modified to include not only the standard eagle, raven and wolf, but also a "sad-faced man". It has been suggested that this is the poem's protagonist.

The "ubi sunt" or "where is" formula is here in the form "hwær cwom", the Old English phrase "where has gone". The use of this emphasises the sense of loss that pervades the poem.

The preoccupation with the siþ-motif in Anglo-Saxon literature is matched in many post-conquest texts where journeying is central to the text. A necessarily brief survey of the corpus might include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and William Golding's Rites of Passage. Not only do we find physical journeying within The Wanderer and those later texts, but a sense in which the journey is responsible for a visible transformation in the mind of the character making the journey.

The wanderer vividly describes his loneliness and yearning for the bright days past, and concludes with an admonition to put faith in God, "in whom all stability dwells". It has been argued that this admonition is a later addition, as it lies at the end of a poem that is otherwise solely secular in its concerns.

The structure of the poem is of four-stress lines, divided between the second and third stresses by a caesura. Like most Old English Poetry, it is written in alliterative meter.

The Wanderer is possibly the most debated Old English Poem in terms of its meaning, origin, and even the translation of various ambiguous words. Any reading of the poem will be speculative and theoretical, as is the case with any piece of literature.

[edit] Reference in Tolkien

In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Two Towers (the second volume of The Lord of the Rings), Aragorn sings a song about the kingdom of Rohan:

Where now the horse and the rider? where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harp-string, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning?
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?[2]

The poem is clearly based on this section of The Wanderer:

Where is the horse gone? Where is the rider?
Where is the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?
Alas for the bright cup!
Alas for the mailed warrior!
Alas for the splendour of the prince!
How that time has passed away,
dark under the cover of night,
as if it had never been!

In the 2002 film version of The Two Towers, Peter Jackson takes liberties so that Tolkien's prose has been somewhat abridged, and they are instead uttered by King Théoden (whose name is Anglo-Saxon for "chief") before the Battle of Helm's Deep.

The poem Lay of the Passing Ages, probably authored/translated by Tolkien,[3] is also derived from The Wanderer.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Article: The Beasts of Battle: Wolf, Eagle, and Raven In Germanic Poetry
  2. ^ Tolkien, J. R. R. (1954), The Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings, Boston: Houghton Mifflin (published 1987), ISBN 0-395-08254-4  The comparison is repeatedly noted in the Tolkien literature; recently by John Grigsby, Beowulf & Grendel (London:Watkins) 2005:3f.
  3. ^ Jacketquote used to decorate A Hobbit's Journal by Michael Green

[edit] References

  • Anglo-Saxon poetry: an anthology of Old English poems tr. S. A. J. Bradley. London: Dent, 1982 (translation into English prose).

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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