The Wanderer

Today, the signature works of Old English poetry read much like contemporary superhero movies. The poetry often recounts epic showdowns that bring together larger-than-life figures representing forces of light and darkness, the grand theatrics of good versus evil. The Wanderer is a striking exception. The battle is long over. The conflict is not expressed by forces clashing on the battlefield but rather by forces within the survivor’s complex psychology. He is conflicted, haunted by dreams and memories, and at a loss to explain why it all happened. As such, the poem moves not toward some grand, if bloody, victory but toward insight, the quiet detonation of an epiphany. The Wanderer earns the dark reward of awareness: The world does not, cannot, make sense.

With its complex framing structure, however, the poem actually tracks another narrative journey toward insight. The poem is dominated by the journey of the Wanderer himself. He is an exile. His is a physical journey as he struggles about the frozen wasteland of an unfamiliar world far from his homeland, realizing that the world is joyless, empty, and cold. Framing that narrative of despair, however, is the story of an unnamed speaker whose journey is more metaphoric, more symbolic, elevated by his Christian perspective (Huppé 1943) (See: Further Reading & Resources). That epiphany offers hope and uses the example of the exiled Wanderer to argue the viability of a Creator God who animates the cosmos and offers the consolation and reward of Paradise for those who, unlike the pagan Wanderer, embrace God’s love. The Wanderer becomes a teaching exercise.

That frame in turn makes urgent the role of the implied reader, an inhabitant of Britain in the Middle Ages. The reader is given a choice of two life journeys. On the one hand, the reader can consent to the Wanderer’s perception of a cheerless world driven by the careless kinetics of chance and fate, or the reader can consent to the speaker’s gospel of enduring such travails guided by the assurance of God’s loving direction. That choice is never resolved, of course. After all, the journey of the implied reader is ongoing. However, that journey, in the end, gives The Wanderer its urgency and timeless relevance.

Stanzas 2-6, the majority of the poem, recount the defeated warrior’s emotional spiral into stoic acceptance of a world that does not reward virtue and cannot sustain hope. There is no narrative action; the Wanderer speaks. He speaks, however, only to his heart as he wanders desolate along the frigid edges of a vast sea. He is alone in a world that becomes vaster than the physical world of his exile. The particulars of the military defeat are never offered, giving the Wanderer’s fate wider, broader implications. He is locked within the prison house of his thoughts: “Exile guards him” (Line 31). His comrades have fallen gloriously, heroically in battle. His lord, who has provided him purpose and security, is dead and his homeland in ruins: “Joy has perished” (Line 35).

More important, the Wanderer, who knows how it is to “suffer long” (Line 36), has lost his very identity. Without a lord to serve, without a homeland to defend, he struggles to understand who he is—the poem underscores that psychological dilemma by refusing to give a name to the “worn lonely warrior” (Line 39). Everything he knows is lost. After “many winters / in the kingdom of the world” (Lines 63-64), he now lives most vitally in memories of the glories of the battlefield, his comrades in arms, and the loving support of the lord he served so nobly. Yet those memories themselves cause further sorrow: “Sorrow is renewed / When the mind ponders the memory of kinsmen” (Lines 49-50). The life journey of the Wanderer—and he hints at how many winters he has lived—has left him in existential despair: He can be only what he no longer can be.  

Stanzas 5 and 6 express the Wanderer’s sense of this “dark life” (Line 89), his psychological lostness and his stoic understanding that he is to endure a joyless world without complaint, without expectation of hope. The forbidding chill of his claustrophobic winter-world symbolizes his existential despair: “Winter is moaning” (Line 103). Line 110—“All of the earth will be empty”—marks the climax of the Wanderer’s life journey, the summary insight available to a person, even a great warrior, who must live within the spiritual constraints of a pagan world defined entirely by the rule of chance and the absolute reality of the physical world. He is left now to die.

The poem’s argument shifts with the frame: The first and last stanzas introduce a speaker, and the speaker distances the poem from the Wanderer’s despair. The speaker, not the Wanderer, becomes the focus of the poem’s analysis, as the Wanderer becomes not a character but a lesson to be learned. Grief, the speaker intones, is the inescapable fate of a heart unavailable to any energy greater, more expansive than those offered by this world. Keep the faith, the speaker urges, in “the heavenly Father” (Line 115), whose love and mercy stand forever. It is not that the Wanderer has rejected God. Within the poem’s Christian framing, his pagan reality represents the highest and noblest expression of the dark world before the enlightened wisdom of Christianity.

That the Wanderer never chooses makes urgent the role—and the ongoing life narrative—of the implied reader. Unlike the Wanderer, the reader can and must choose: Live in the grim world as an expression of blind chance that inevitably closes in absolute death, or live as an expression of a Creator’s loving, if unsearchable, might that rewards faith with the tantalizing promise of eternal glory. Learn from the Wanderer, the speaker urges, or be doomed to become the Wanderer.