An Outline
This essay is an attempt to gather some information about early Anglo-Saxon poetry, highlighting some present aspects also repeated in other texts produced at the same historical context. The Anglo-Saxon poem selected right here is “The Wanderer”. The elegiac mood in a warrior’s oral poetry; the strong presence of pain and sorrow on the narratives; the idea of suffering and loneliness of the speaker, right here repetitively represented by the loss of his lord and dearest ones and also this sense of nostalgia and reminiscing of them, because he is a warrior and had to leave for exile after the their death; and the meaninglessness of war, all these elements form the narrative voice’s background from which he constructs the poem.
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The Wanderer looks for relief and his fate has been set. Even though melancholic in his spirit, he believes that his exile is a manifestation of God’s mercy paving his way, applying that kind of weird and antagonistic manner to human senses pedagogy on leading him through the cold seas, obliging him to trust in that kind of mercy, guiding him to the unknown. Also, nature’s phenomena and its movements symbolize these temporal circles of sorrow, because even though the ocean’s currents may shift, they only have one specific and definitive purpose, which is: to guide him to the exile.
The lone-dweller expresses his anguish over the loss of his family and his lord. Now, since they are dead, it is the time of the disappearance of the joy and a present sense of nostalgia, because his lord is not right there to help him to feast anymore. The element of nostalgia may be observed in his dreams, while he is longing for his lord, but when wakes up, the burden of reality comes back again. The earth-trader developed a routine of early-morning mourns and weeps, with no possibility of having someone to whom he could open up his soul and share his burden anymore. He became rather unrooted and vague in his identity. Those emotional conflicts are also marked, in one hand, by his unmet need to open up the sorrows of his heart and, in the other hand, by the cosmovision understood by the warriors, who need to protect their interiority as a manifestation of their bravura and excellence in the battle and in life. He needed to share, but did not have anybody to, at the same time, even if he would have had someone to, he could not be able to, because he should not express that sort of vulnerability to nobody. For him, those ideas of destiny and sustenance could not coexist in a weak and emotional heart, so it would be a failure then, to be bereft and wretched about his own loss. His dearest ones could be historically dead, but in his memory they were vivid, and in his subjectivity, he would greet them. In the text, there is some justification of the sorrow, when he asks why his woeful heart should not wax dark in this world, when he looks at the life of this brave people after they left their homeland and community to go to war. And it also says that, after left the warriors homeland, the middle-earth falls, like they were losing their building stones. The poetic sense of the ebb and flow of the sorrow, represented by the nature movements, in the middle of the sea, also expresses his internal movement of the memories of his beloved ones, in the come and go, as parallel to the wave’s flow on the sea. To and fro.
One can notice some inherent burdensomeness in the process of constructing a wise man for him, since that there is no such way to be a sage without going through struggles. That interpretation may be connected with the drawing of the wise man spirit and character made by him in line sixty-five, paying much more attention to how he should not be than in what he really is: “ (…) he must be patient, but not hot of heart, not hasty of speech, not reluctant to fight, not too reckless, not too timid and nor too glad, not too greedy, and never eager to commit until he can be sure (…)”.The wise man, for him, must also be able to diagnose his time with all its misery. All these attributions must qualify this warrior to the battle of life, even when it is necessary to do unpleasant and painful things, like to bury another eorl in an earthen pit. Later, he will again associate the ideas of wisdom and pain, in line eighty-eight, when talking about of the wise man that considers on the darkness of life and remembers the bloody battlegrounds.
The Wanderer is also an earth-trader of his own being, sealed in his inside world, oppressed by the shadows of his own’s and of his dearest one’s history. The lines one hundred twelve and thirteen may represent the redigesting process of his interiority: “(…) So said the wise man as he sat in meditation. A good man holds his words back, tells his woes not too soon, baring his inner heart before knowing the best bay, and eorl who acts with courage (…)”. He finishes evoking hope in faith in God as fortress, which is some kind of demonstration that the oral poetry also may be seen as the true home place and arrival point in his historical and existential journey, in all that period. The poetry also meets and shelters him, in his search to encounter a home and moving toward different directions and unknown paths. And, at home, he found companion and opportunity for unburden himself by the act of expressing his confessions through art.