Deor

For the character of J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, see Déor.

"Deor" (or "The Lament of Deor") is an Old English poem, perhaps from the 10th century, preserved in the Exeter Book. It consists of 42 alliterative lines.

The poem, like all other Old English poems, is untitled in the manuscript, but a poet named Deor is cited within the poem as its author, so his name has commonly been used as the title.

All attempts at placing this poem within a genre are difficult. Some commentators attempting to characterise the work have called it an ubi sunt ("where are they?") poem because of its meditations on transience. It can also be considered a traditional lament and poem of consolation. Christian consolation poems, however, usually attempt to subsume personal miseries in a historical or explicitly metaphysical context (e.g., Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy), and such perspectives are somewhat remote from the tradition of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Medievalist scholars who have viewed the poem within the Anglo-Saxon tradition have therefore seen it primarily as a begging poem—a poem written by a travelling and begging poet who is without a place at a noble court—although because few other begging poems survive, assigning it to such a genre is somewhat speculative. Others have related "Deor" to other melancholy poems in the Exeter Book, such as "The Seafarer" and "The Wanderer".

In addition to a blurring of meaning rooted in the language barrier, John Miles Foley has hypothesized that the apparent murkiness of "Deor" is also in no small part attributable to the obscurity of the poet's references. As he puts it, "Cut off from its traditional background, 'Deor' makes little sense".

The language in the poetry is highly nuanced, and it is difficult for any translation into Modern English to capture the tensions present in the highly dense and parsimonious wording. The poem runs through a list of legendary figures, asks what happened to them, and then responds with a refrain of "Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg!" ("that was overcome [with respect to it], this may also be [with respect to it]"). Among the miseries and dismal fates that Deor runs through are those of Theodoric the Great, Ermanaric of the Goths, and the mythological smith Weyland. Each had an undeserved end, and in each case "that passed away with respect to it, and so may this." It is only in the last stanza that we learn what the "this" is.

At the poem's conclusion, Deor reveals that he was once a great poet among the Heodenings, until he was displaced and sent wandering by Heorrenda, a more skillful poet. According to Norse mythology, the Heodenings (Hjaðningar) were involved in the never-ending "battle of the Heodenings", the Hjaðningavíg. Heorrenda (Hjarrandi) was one of the names of Odin, the god of war and poetic inspiration.

See also

• Beowulf
• The Seafarer
• The Wanderer
• Widsith

External links

• Deor
• Deor, modern English translation