The Wanderer, The Wife’s Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer

 Faith, religion and exile

 The theme of exile important to these secular poems (secular in their approach)
 All found in codex
 Compiled in late 10th century
o One of four main manuscripts
 Exodus book
o Donated to ‘exeter cathedral’
 Most diverse = wisdom poetry
o Ideas of wisdom coming through
 Large number of elegies
o E.g., The Seaferer
o Another one about being disenfranchised by his lord the pain that follows
 The female lament poems = The Wife’s Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer

 The theme of loneliness, separation, being cut of physically from land and
community and human beings and also emotionally distanced from
o Juxtaposition between past happiness and present experience
 The idea of ‘genre’
o Difficult to pin down

‘Elegies’
 How accurate is it to refer these poems?
o Themes of magnificence, the idea of mourning (a specific person or thing
etc.)
 Reflect a lot about the consciousness, the journey of the soul and mind
 Treating similar ideas including loss and lament in heroic context
 Physical and mental hardship

The Wanderer
 Introspective inward-looking journey
o Creation of a mental landscape reflects idea of solitude and exile
 Sense that the “sea” is troubling empty nothingness
o At mercy of fate and providence when at sea
 The change between first and third person
o “so spoke…”
 Idea of it being a coping mechanism
o By transforming it into human problem it is shared and contextualised with
others
o Way of feeling better
 Central question = is it a Christian poem about consolation and salvation or isit a
somber meditation on heroic values and the morality and transience of them
o Shift from personal to universal reflects

Parallels to other texts

  Both conclude that one should live moderately? Less loving, in order to avoid exile
live life in shallow way
 Dangerous suppression of emotional
o Beowulf = “lock up his feelings”
o Elocutions on faith
 Heroic, Germanic stance on emotion

Wisdom
 Idea of gaining wisdom through experience
 More broadly speaking it is deeply rooted in Germanic tradition
o ‘Sayings in the …’ = poem spoken by God of Oden, and war, acquires wisdom
through war and other ways e.g., sacrificing eyes or hanging on tree
 Gandalf = the idea of the wandering wizard/ acquires wisdom through wandering
and experience
 Wisdom in terms of his personal development
 Spiritual elaboration vs. rooted in secular heroic mode
o Is an exception in its turn to the spiritual which is alluded to at the start ]
o “blessed be he…”
 Turns to God as one stable constant, the permanent tangible thing
 Beouthius’ Consolation of Philosophy
o Emotional happiness can only be achieved through God
o Idea of being
 Less self-indulgence in reminiscence
 Search for consolation

Technical aspects of poem

 The beasts of battle motif = prelude of bloodshed
o Line 85
 Reflective tear stained warrior
o Some critics suggest that it is the Wanderer himself reflecting on his past
o The literature is fascinated with exiles and outlaws that enter the peripheral
landscape
o Become monstrous as a result
 Line 92
o Rhetorical questions
o Sense of time passing and its ephemeral quality
o Vs. elegiac elocutions in Beowulf
o Device is called the ubi sunt device
o Sombre meditation on world passing, apocalyptic content
 Lamenting loss of community and the hall, its warmth, the communal relationships
 Why he turns to God in the end, as an ultimate consolation
Wulf And Eadwacer
 Sense of separation and isolation
 Brought out by caesura
 Separation is by force?
 Who is the Wulf?
 Generally assumed to be four characters involved
o The female speaker
o Wulf
o Eadwacer = husband or lover
o The welp = the child, wolf imagery, conjures up imagery of outlaws
 Idea of wolf carrying the welp into the woods
o Unusual as the wolf is usually associated with the outlaws
o ‘vagar’
o Evocation/association of wild landscape with exile
 The oak tree

The Wife’s Lament

 Idea of feuding here?
 “the fitting man whose hiding heart…”
o Criminal exile
 “my husband’s kin had hatched a plot, conspiring secretly to separate us”
o Kinsman relationships as particularly important…
o Allusive in terms of its meaning
 Rare in their treatment of romantic love
o Later associated with the romance
o The root of the pain is the loss of her beloved
 Sense of pain deriving from loss of that relationship and how it is intimately bond
with kinship and the breaking of those
 One critique saying she is speaking from the dead “from her earthy barrow”, the
theme of the revenant that haunts Iceland
 Female figures brought back to life in order to give odin wisdom that is ultimately
beyond him
 What is her revelation?
o Idea of moderation
o She is displacing herself
o Similar to third person to distance from pain
o Distancing when she talks about how a young man should react rather than
how a woman would cope with what’s going on
o Imagines herself giving advice to him not being
 The lord = cast of being “storm-beaten cliff”

 The extreme distancing from personal experience as well as being too personal in its
representation creates an effect where we can’t interpret what’s going on
o Fascination between family and lovers
o Heroic values in the Wanderer are susceptible to time and fate and loss