The Wanderer is an Old English poem preserved only in an anthology known as the Exeter Book, a manuscript dating from the late 10th century. It counts 115 lines of alliterative verse. As often the case in Anglo Saxon verse, the composer and compiler are anonymous, and within the manuscript the poem is left innominate.
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The poem may predate the manuscript by hundreds of years. Some scholars believe that the poem was composed around the time the Anglo-Saxons were making the conversion to Christianity, sometime around 597, though some would date it as much as several centuries later. The inclusion of a number of Norse-influenced words, such as the compound hrimceald (ice-cold, from the Old Norse word hrimkaldr), and some unusual spelling forms, has encouraged others to date the poem to the late 9th or early 10th century[1].
The metre of the poem is of four-stress lines, divided between the second and third stresses by a caesura. Each caesura is indicated in the manuscript by a subtle increase in character spacing and with full stops, but modern print editions render them in a more obvious fashion. Like most Old English poetry, it is written in alliterative metre.
The Wanderer conveys the meditations of a solitary exile on his past glories as a warrior in his lord's band of retainers, his present hardships and the values of forbearance and faith in the heavenly Lord. The warrior is identified as eardstapa (line 6a), usually translated as "wanderer", who roams the cold seas and walks "paths of exile" (wræclastas). He remembers the days when he served his lord, feasted together with comrades, and received precious gifts from the lord. Yet fate (wyrd) turned against him when he lost his lord, kinsmen and comrades in battle and was driven into exile.
However, the speaker reflects 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.
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 by some scholars that this admonition is a later addition, as it lies at the end of a poem that some would say is otherwise entirely secular in its concerns; but inasmuch as many of the words in the poem have both secular and spiritual or religious meanings, the foundation of this argument is not on firm ground.
The psychological or spiritual progress of the wanderer has been described as an "act of courage of one sitting alone in meditation", who through embracing the values of Christianity seeks "a meaning beyond the temporary and transitory meaning of earthly values".[2]
The Wanderer is possibly the most debated Old English poem in terms of its meaning, origin, and even the translation of various ambiguous words.
The development of critical approaches to The Wanderer corresponds closely to changing historical trends in European and Anglo-American philology, literary theory and historiography as a whole[3].
Like other works in Old English, the rapid changes in the English language after the Norman Conquest meant that it simply would not have been understood between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries[4]. Until the early nineteenth century, the existence of the poem was largely unknown outside of Exeter Cathedral library. In John Josias Conybeare's 1826 compilation of Anglo Saxon poetry, The Wanderer was erroneously treated as part of the preceding poem Juliana[5]. It was not until 1842 that it was identified as a separate work, in its first print edition, by the pioneering Anglo-Saxonist Benjamin Thorpe. Thorpe considered it to bear "considerable evidence of originality", but regretted an absence of information on its historical and mythological context[6]. His decision to name it The Wanderer has not always been met with approval. J.R.R. Tolkien, who adopted elements of the poem into The Lord of the Rings, is typical of such dissatisfaction. By 1926-7 Tolkien was considering the alternative titles 'An Exile', or 'Alone the Banished Man', and by 1964-5 was arguing for 'The Exile's Lament'[7]. Despite such pressure, the poem is generally referred to under Thorpe's original title.
A number of formal elements of the poem have been identified by critics, including the use of the "beasts of battle" motif,[8], the ubi sunt formula[9], the exile theme [10], the ruin theme [11], and the siþ-motif.
The "beasts of battle" motif, often found in Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry, 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.
A plurality of scholarly opinion holds that the main body of the poem is spoken as monologue, bound between a prologue and epilogue voiced by the poet. For example, lines 1-5, or 1-7, and 111-115 can be considered the words of the poet as they refer to the wanderer in the third person, and lines 8-110 as those of a singular individual[12] in the first-person. Alternatively, the entire piece can be seen as a soliloquy spoken by a single speaker[13]. Due to the disparity between the anxiety of the 'wanderer' (anhaga) in the first half and the contentment of the 'wise-man' (snottor) in the second half, others have interpreted it as a dialogue between two distinct personas, framed within the first person prologue and epilogue. An alternative approach grounded in post-structuralist literary theory identifies a polyphonic series of different speaking positions determined by the subject that the speaker will address [14].
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