The Wanderer

The role of empathy in reading pre-modern literature

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If you’d prefer, you can listen to this article below

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The Wanderer was the first piece of Old English literature that really grabbed me. Sure, Beowulf had all the stuff I expected from an early medieval epic—lofty halls, monster battles, the glint of the gold hoard—but The Wanderer appealed to the sort of melancholy young man who, as a cringe millennial, had memorised The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Often termed an elegy in scholarship, I prefer Kathleen Davis’s argument that The Wanderer is more properly a lyric, emphasising as it does emotional expression and a keen sense of the natural world.

You can listen to a recording of my own translation of the poem below, which was originally published in Ancient Exchanges (now only on Wayback).

The poem is found in the tenth-century Exeter Book,¹ a collection of Old English poetry from the period prior to the Norman Conquest in 1066, and recounts the experiences of an eardstapa, an ‘earth-stepper’, or ‘wanderer’, who has been separated from his lord and community, and whose train of thought meanders from the present to the past and back again, as he grapples with the transience of earthly friendships and possessions. Its imagery is bleakly beautiful, and it is ultimately about the importance of hope and resilience in the face of events out of our control.

The main speaker in The Wanderer is a warrior, so his relationship with his hlāford (‘lord’)² and comrades—the former dead, the latter slaughtered or scattered—would have been central to his sense of self. Extravagant, ritual exchanges of gifts and oaths would have bound them together whether they were warring, tending to their land, or sharing a drink by the hearth. Being outcast from society is of course painful no matter the time period, but in medieval times it would have been a sort of death.

As someone with chronic anxiety, this is a poem I will always return to. The descriptions that Old English writers used to describe emotional distress resonate a thousand years later: the idea that a wērig mōd (‘weary mind’) struggles to withstand events or that a hrēo hyge (‘turbulent heart’) can’t help itself will be immediately recognisable to anyone who has been in the midst of a depressive episode or panic attack. The speaker even mourns about being unable to share their sorrows with others, even as he alludes to how masculine warrior culture valued locking up one’s ferðloca (‘soul chest’).³

This more reflective section eventually turns to consider the fleetingness of existence, couched in apocalyptic language. The wanderer imagines wolves prowling frost-crusted landscapes and barren ruins, while carrion carries off the dead above roiling winter seas. This is a world emptied of transient pleasures and given wholly over to time and nature. There is section here that Lord of the Rings fans might recognise in the form of an ubi sunt (Latin for ‘where are they’) motif, in which the speaker calls to memories of things long past:

J.R.R. Tolkien drew direct inspiration for this in Chapter 6 of The Two Towers and the Lament for the Rohirrim: ‘Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing/ Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?’ You can watch the late Bernard Hill’s brilliant recitation of this in the cinematic version here.

It’s hard not to go all mawkishly History Boys when studying this stuff, and we should remember that, even where we glimpse familiar emotions, medieval texts are a product of very different societies and worldviews. When we look at other texts, we’ll see this in abundance. But I do think that studying history through literature makes the people who populated the past real. It reminds us that empathy should be a central part of our critical toolkits.

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Footnotes:

1. You can look at the poem in its original manuscript here. Note that Old English scribes wrote out poetry in full blocks that look like prose, rather than poetry. ↩︎
2. Hlāford is ultimately derived from the words hlāf (modern English loaf, but in Old English simply meaning ‘bread’) and weard (modern English ward, or in Old English ‘one who guards’). So a hlāford was the guardian of the bread, or in other words protected ↩︎
3. It was common in Old English poetry to talk about the body as a sort of enclosure for spirit, thought, and emotion, and this occurs elsewhere in The Wanderer too. Interestingly, though, being bound or restricted was also conversely a metaphor for emotional distress—no doubt the author of the poem was alive to the potential of setting these images against one another. ↩︎