Anonymous Anglo-Saxon Scop's The Wanderer

“The Wanderer,” by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon scop, focuses on the themes of personal exile and societal change. The elegy, which came from The Exeter Book, reveals the frustration, isolation, and helplessness a speaker feels in the face of Wyrd, or Fate. He is powerless as his warrior way of life is disappearing on a personal level as well as on a societal level. The times are changing, and he is struggling to adapt. Though he feels painfully alienated and is suffering from survivor’s guilt, he reminisces about the former days. The first section is a prologue by the scop that introduces the speaker’s words of uncertainty about his present life. He “longs” (1) for mercy and is “troubled” (2) about exile. Unhappily, he acknowledges the

Labeling himself as a “friendless man” (45), he feels bereft of “counsel” (38) in this “wretched exile” (40). To escape his lonely reality, he fantasizes about the stable way his life used to be and dreams of “the earlier days [of] the gift-throne” (44). Yet he must face reality and the memories that torment him - memories of lost kinsmen and their “clasps,” “kisses” (41), and “voices” (55). The tactile and auditory imagery is vivid in the dreams; unfortunately, he must awake to a stark, depressing reality.

The fourth section is primarily a brief interpolation that damages the elegy. The Wanderer briefly expands his personal loss to bewail the loss of a way of life: “Thus this middle-earth/ droops and decays every single day” (62-63). Unfortunately, then the scribe wanders off into a repetitive, priestly homily about what a man “must be” (65). The brief, trite interpolation distracts from the grandeur of the

“Where has the horse gone? Where is the rider? Where is the giver of gold?/ Where are the seats of the feast? Where are the joys of the hall? (92-93). He is confused and alone, lamenting the changes that he cannot control: “time has . . . slipped into nightfall” (95-96). Attributing his powerlessness to Wyrd, the mighty” (100), he is resigned to the fact that “the working of wyrd changes the world” (107). The parallelism of these final lines (108-109) and the repetition of “fleeting” (108) indicates the helplessness of the individual before impersonal forces that control his life. His last word “empty” (110) summarizes his emotional state and bleak outlook on the